Back in 1982, two years prior to its publication, filmmaker Steven Spielberg acquired the rights to The Talisman, a fantasy novel from Stephen King and Peter Straub.
As King notes in a piece over at Entertainment Weekly, “several times [Spielberg] came very close to making it”, and it seems the filmmaker isn’t ready to give up yet, as he has revealed that he still has ambitions of bringing the tale to the big screen.
“I feel that in the very near future, that’s going to be our richest collaboration,” said Spielberg. “Universal bought the book for me, so it wasn’t optioned. It was an outright sale of the book. I’ve owned the book since ’82, and I’m hoping to get this movie made in the next couple of years. I’m not committing to the project as a director, I’m just saying that it’s something that I’ve wanted to see come to theaters for the last 35 years.”
The Talisman follows a young boy who embarks on a quest to save his dying mother, which takes him through the American heartland and ‘The Territories’, a strange parallel universe inhabited by ‘twinners’.
Despite their prolific bodies of work, Spielberg and King’s only previous collaboration came on the CBS TV adaptation of Under the Dome, which Spielberg executive produced through Amblin Television.
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