Roy Lee and James Wan Want to Make ‘The Tommyknockers’ With Larry Sanitsky

Maybe you didn’t know (I didn’t) that The Tommyknockers is Stephen King‘s second best selling work in his career thus far. Considering how many mini series and films there have been of his lesser selling stories, this is surprising, because as it stands, we’ve only gotten one version of ‘Tommyknockers’ thus far.

That’s gonna change, as today veteran producer Larry Sanitsky (who was the EP on the 1993 television miniseries version of the story) started shopping a project package around.

The Hollywood Reporter says the package was sent to various studios (including Netflix) today, ahead of the holiday weekend.  They’ve even got a piece of the mission statement attached to the pitch, written by Sanitsky:

“It is an allegorical tale of addiction (Stephen was struggling with his own at the time), the threat of nuclear power, the danger of mass hysteria and the absurdity of technical evolution run amuck. All are as relevant today as the day the novel was written. It is also a tale about the eternal power of love and the grace of redemption.”

It’s unclear how much of the proposed project is already in motion, THR says that The Conjuring producer/director James Wan and IT producer Roy Lee are already part of the deal. This also includes their production companies Atomic Monster and Vertigo.

The story (stop me if you’ve heard this one) centers around a sleepy town in Maine, where supernatural (nee, alien) forces in the form of gas cause the denizens to become ultra smart- but also violent, crazed, and followers of some strange alien hive mind mentality.

King said in an interview with Rolling Stone back in 2014 that “The Tommyknockers” was an awful book, chalking it up to his previous badboy ways:

The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And I’ve thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, “There’s really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back.” The book is about 700 pages long, and I’m thinking, “There’s probably a good 350-page novel in there.”

We’ll let you know when/if the project gets picked up, and where it ends up landing.