Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game Trailer & Release Date

It’s been quite the year for Stephen King movies. The Dark Tower and IT have already bowed. Next up is Gerald’s Game from Netflix. Mike Flanagan (Oculus) is directing from a script he wrote with writing partner Jeff Howard. You can read more about the film below…

Gerald’s Game Trailer

Here’s the first trailer for Gerald’s Game!

Gerald’s Game Release Date

Gerald’s Game arrive on Netflix on September 29, 2017.

Gerald’s Game Cast

Netflix’s Gerald’s Game movie has found its cast. Deadline reports that Carla Gugino (Watchmen) and Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek) have been cast as main characters Jessie and Gerald, respectively. Henry Thomas, Carel Struycken, Kate Siegel, and Chiara Aurelia round out the cast. 

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Gerald’s Game Director

Oculus director Mike Flanagan is quickly becoming a major staple of the contemporary horror movie scene. This year, he’s got two movies out: the critically-acclaimed psychological horror Hush, about a deaf mute who’s being stalked by a masked man, and Ouija: Origin of Evil, a prequel to the 2014 film by Stiles White. Another film originally scheduled for 2016, Before I Wake, the story of a boy whose dreams and nightmares become a deadly reality, was pulled from its release date earlier this year and is currently hanging in limbo. 

You’d think Flanagan would like a break after all of these projects, but the director has already set his sights on his next film: an adaptation of the Stephen King novel Gerald’s Game, which he’s directing for Netflix. 

Flanagan told Rue Morgue:

Stephen King has been my hero since I was a child, and one of the things about being a fan of his is that I’m used to the familiar heartbreak of seeing his film adaptations and feeling like something’s gone off, and that the source material I love so much has not translated properly—with obvious exceptions. It’s just that for every Shawshank or Green Mile or Stand By Me, you’ve got…the others, that really hurt! It’s very important for me, as a fan, not to end up in that pile. I loved Gerald’s Game from the minute I put it down; I had gooseflesh all over my arms and my neck when I finished it, and I remember just exhaling and saying, ‘I want to make this into a movie—and it’s unfilmable!’ [laughs] and shaking my head, thinking, ‘If I could crack this, this could be one of the greatest King adaptations of them all.’ 

The novel tells the story of a woman named Jessie who finds herself handcuffed to a bed in a secluded cabin in the woods after she accidentally kills her husband during a kinky game that’s gone too far. Isolation and no hope of rescue slowly start to drive Jessie mad.

Gerald’s Game does seem like a difficult movie to make, especially since it stars a character who can’t move for pretty much the entire length of the story. Flanagan’s past work has proved that he has the directing chops for it, though, and Netflix seems more than happy to take on the project.

“If you know the source material,” Flanagan said, “you’ll know there are a lot of challenges inherent in that story. Not so much the narrative challenges of how to adapt it; it took me 10 years of constantly thinking about the book to crack the cinematic version. But it’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do.”

According to Flanagan, Netflix is more than happy to let him make this movie his way, which is probably for the best when it comes to a story like Gerald’s Game and most other Stephen King novels. Too often, big screen adaptations of King’s work have suffered due to tampering from the studios. 

Speaking of King, Flanagan commented that he’d love to have the writer involved in the adaptation: “That’s going to be entirely up to [King]. From what I’ve heard, sometimes he’s very involved when it comes to approvals and things like that, and sometimes he can be more hands-off. So I guess that remains to be seen. I would personally want him to be as involved as he possibly wants to be. And I think the more Stephen is involved, the more he’ll see the reverence that I have for this book. I would love for him to be part of this, and I hope he will be.”

We’ll keep you updated on Gerald’s Game as we learn more!

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