Stephen King overtakes Agatha Christie as most adapted author & reveals 10 favourite films

Horror icon Stephen King is having a big screen moment this year, what with the release of The Monkey, The Life of Chuck and the upcoming adaptations of The Long Walk coming out this week and The Running Man remake hitting theatres in November.

But then again, when does the prolific author not have a banner cinematic year? Plus, the ones just mentioned don’t include the small screen’s The Institute, It: Welcome To Derry and the Carrie miniseries, which are coming soon.

King's works have been transposed to both the big screen and the small screen for decades, with more than 55 book-to-feature adaptations since 1976’s Carrie. When also accounting for TV shows and miniseries, his stories have been brought to the screens well over 100 times.

By our count, that makes King, 77, the second author in history with the most cinematic adaptations – only behind William Shakespeare and just above Agatha Christie.

Not bad for a scribe with a dream from Portland, Maine.

But King isn’t just a master storyteller whose stories feel tailor-made for the big screen; he’s also a cinephile (as well as an outspoken Trump critic). He has delighted Film Twitter by revealing his 10 favourite movies of all time, “in no particular order”.

He excluded Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Stand By Me from contention given they were based on his work. 

His list consists of the 1977 action-thriller Sorcerer; The Godfather Part II; Steve McQueen thriller The Getaway; ‘90s comedy classic Groundhog Day; wartime epic Casablanca; the1948 Western The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre; Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets; Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and 1944 crime noir Double Indemnity. 

Any list with Sorcerer in it gets our vote of approval.

However, we’re a smidge surprised by the lack of horror (Jaws aside) and the fact that Ratatouille, The Exorcist and no David Lynch make the list.

No matter, we’ll save those for our favourite films list.

What do you make of his ‘70s-heavy list, and do you agree with King’s recent comments that the superhero genre features “pornographic” violence?  

Indeed, King told The Times that he insisted to The Long Walk screenwriter JT Mollner and director Francis Lawrence that the young characters in the film, who enter a walking contest in which all but the winner are executed, must be shown being brutally killed. 

“If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see… some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks but you never see any blood,” he explained. “And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic.” 

He added: “I said, if you’re not going to show it [in The Long Walk], don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie.”

We can't wait.

Set in a dystopian US, “The Long Walk” - published in 1979 under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman, depicts 100 young men entering an annual walking contest in which they must maintain a speed of at four miles per hour (6.4km/h) or they will be killed. The winner is the last remaining walker.

Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson and Charlie Plummer, the film hits theatres in the US, UK, Ireland, Italy and other territories on Friday, while the likes of France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden will have to wait until early October to get to see it on the biggest screen possible.