8 Stephen King Books Without Movie or TV Adaptations (Yet) (original) (raw)

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Published Apr 3, 2025, 6:20 PM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2500 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.

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If you haven’t heard of Stephen King before, you should get in touch with the people at Guinness World Records, since the rock you're living under might well be the largest in the history of the world. He’s been one of the most popular and prolific authors of the past 50 years, having published too many stories to count, be they novels, novellas, or short stories. Of those, many have been adapted into movies (like It, Carrie, and Misery), and some have been adapted for TV, usually as a miniseries (like the early 1990s version of It and The Stand… twice).

On the other end of things, there aren’t actually too many Stephen King books that haven’t received an adaptation of some sort. The following are perhaps the most noteworthy at the time of writing, though time could well be very unkind to the following words, given there’s not (usually) anything stopping adaptations of the following Stephen King novels coming out at some point. Those yet-to-be-adapted works, as of early 2025, are outlined before, including novels King wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. To keep things more interesting, only works from 2007 or earlier are considered here, seeing as the more recent King books are automatically less likely to have adaptations. It’s more unusual if something has been around for a couple of decades (or more) without an adaptation, rather than a couple of years.

1 'Rage'

First published: September 13, 1977

Image via Signet Books

While Rage wouldn’t be difficult to adapt because of its length (it’s a very condensed 211 pages, which is very short by King’s standards), it would be difficult to adapt because of its subject matter. Essentially, Rage is about a troubled high school student who lashes out, killing one of his teachers with a gun and then going on to hold a classroom full of students hostage.

Stephen King himself has expressed a dislike of the book, especially in the wake of an increase in mass shootings at schools during the 1990s. The book has gone out of print, and though it’s not impossible to read or listen to, it’s not officially still in circulation the way just about every other work by Stephen King is. That being said, some movies have dealt with comparably difficult stories to the one told in Rage, like Elephant (2003) and Polytechnique (2009), so while it would be surprising for this one to get a film adaptation, such a thing happening isn’t literally impossible.

2 'The Long Walk'

First published: July 3, 1979

Image via Signet Books

There is a film adaptation of The Long Walk set to come out on September 12, 2025, so time is running out for it to be considered a Stephen King story without an adaptation. But, for now, it’s one of the few in that camp, though admittedly, it is another Bachman story, like Rage. These ones have generally been adapted to film less often than the stories King wrote under his proper name, with only Thinner and The Running Man (sort of) getting movie adaptations, out of the seven Bachman novels.

Anyway, The Long Walk would be a difficult story to adapt into a movie, but it would be intriguing to see if they can make it work. It should be grueling, intense, and maybe even difficult to finish, given the story centers on a dystopian society that has an annual competition involving 100 teenage boys who are made to walk for, well, a long time. The last one standing wins, while the other 99 are destined to die. As a grim psychological thriller of sorts, it still packs a punch, and proves to be more horrifying than many of Stephen King’s better-known works of horror.

3 'Roadwork'

First published: March 3, 1981

Image via Signet Books

Feeling comparable to something like Taxi Driver in its depiction of the life of a man who’s given up and wants to rage against society, Roadwork is grim and a little clunky, but not without merit. It lines up pretty neatly with Rage, and is handled a bit better, seeing as there’s more complexity here with a story about an adult man, instead of a teenager, feeling despondent about his standing in life and lashing out.

Here, it’s because of a proposed interstate highway extension that will involve the demolishing of his house, which accentuates the feelings of despair he has regarding his personal and professional life. Roadwork is a slow burn that does kind of work, even if it gets a bit repetitive at a point. A film adaptation was planned at one stage (and would certainly be doable), but as of 2025, it’s yet to make the jump to either the big or small screen.

4 'The Eyes of the Dragon'

First published: Fall 1984

Image via Viking

Out of all these examples, The Eyes of the Dragon is probably the most surprising Stephen King book that’s yet to receive some sort of screen adaption. This could be condensed into a movie, or could be expanded into a miniseries kind of length, given the story spans many years (thanks to some unique narration) and centers on a kingdom thrown into chaos when an aging king is murdered by his magician, and his eldest son is framed, with his younger son made king and also manipulated by the same magician.

It would scratch the same itch as something like Game of Thrones, if made into a TV show of some kind, but it’s also different enough that it would work as a movie, if the people adapting it were so inclined. The Eyes of the Dragon is an underrated Stephen King book, and one that’s been considered for adaptation as early as 2000, but such a film or show has yet to come to fruition.

5 'The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three'

First published: May 1987

Image via Donald M. Grant, Publisher

When it comes to The Dark Tower series and adaptations, things get interesting, since the books comprising said series rank among King’s most impressive works to date, and because the series kind of got an adaptation in 2017. But 2017’s The Dark Tower was also pretty different from any of the books in the actual series, having some broad similarities to book #1, The Gunslinger, but also proving unafraid to do its own thing, for better or worse.

If it had been more successful, maybe it could’ve got a sequel that would’ve worked as an adaptation of sorts for the second book in the series, The Drawing of the Three, but that was not to be. If Mike Flanagan does adapt the whole series, then this book will see the light of day on screen, but until then, it remains something you can only really experience on page (or as an audiobook).

6 'Insomnia'

First published: October 10, 1994

Image via Viking

Not to be mixed up with the 2002 Christopher Nolan film of the same name (starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams!), Stephen King’s Insomnia is a 1994 novel and one of the author’s longest, too. It’s most easily definable as a work of both fantasy and horror, with a premise that involves a man who can’t sleep, but finds that his condition also allows him to see things that other people can’t.

From there, things balloon until there’s a battle of sorts between good and evil, and not for the first time in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, given Insomnia shares its main setting with It. The novel is dense and a bit unwieldy, and not one of King’s strongest works overall, which might go some way to explaining why it does not currently have a movie or TV adaptation.

7 'The Regulators'

First published: September 24, 1996

Image via Dutton

The Regulators is a real oddity within Stephen King’s bibliography, though technically, this is another one of his Richard Bachman books. It’s a companion novel to Desperation, which was published at the same time and was credited to King, rather than Bachman. Both have characters who share names, but they occupy different realities, and the plots of both novels are rather different.

Desperation did receive a flawed adaptation in the mid-2000s, but it’s also a somewhat flawed novel, and the movie did the best it could on a budget. The Regulators, on the other hand, is probably more out-there and would prove harder to adapt, even though it’s shorter than Desperation. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of demand for The Regulators to make the jump to the big or small screen but, you know, never say never.

8 'Blaze'

First published: June 12, 2007

Image via Scribner

Though it’s not terrible, Blaze, as a novel, does feel a little like someone trying to replicate Stephen King more than it does an actual Stephen King story. This might be partially justified by the fact that it’s (to date) the final Richard Bachman book, and one that was apparently written, at least in the format of a draft, about three decades before it was actually published.

The novel itself focuses on a man who goes by Blaze, and the way he endeavors to kidnap the infant child of a wealthy couple because he was planning to do so with a conman friend, only that friend is dead, but still exists as a ghost of sorts. Parts of it work pretty well, but other stretches are a bit messy and clunky. It’s not great, but you could do worse. If a talented filmmaker tried to make it into a movie, it would probably be just fine, if a little forgettable.

NEXT: Stephen King-Like Movies That Aren’t Based on His Stories