There’s another Stephen King adaptation in the works. This one involves King’s 1981 novel, Cujo, a thriller about a friendly Saint Bernard in Castle Rock, Maine who gets rabies from a sick bat and goes on a murderous rampage.
According to Deadline, Netflix has picked up the rights to adapt Cujo into a feature film. The project is still in its early days—there’s no one attached yet, for example, to write the script—but we do know that it will be produced by Roy Lee, whose previous credits include Companion, the recent adaptation of King’s Salem’s Lot, and the animated adaptation for the graphic novel Nimona.
Netflix and Roy won’t be the first to back a film adaptation of Cujo, of course. Back in 1983, a movie of the same name came out starring Dee Wallace, Daniel Hugh Kelly, Christopher Stone, Danny Pintauro, and Ed Lauter. In it, Wallace played a mom who finds herself trapped in a car with her young son, facing death inside the boiling car via heat stroke—while the rabid Cujo is waiting to rip them apart if they venture outside.
Good times!
Cujo is arguably also best known as the novel King has little memory of writing. He authored it during the peak of his drinking days, and as he wrote in his book, On Writing: “At the end of my adventures I was drinking a case of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night, and there’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all… I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.”
No news yet on if/when Netflix’s adaptation will go into production, much less if/when it will make its way to the small screen.
