Flanagan Now Writing New Mist Script

Mike Flanagan is writing the screenplay for a new film version of Stephen King’s The Mist, and he’s aiming to have a finished draft done around Halloween. He confirmed the update himself, and GamesRadar+ reported his comments this week. We here at MIW are FLANAFANS to an epic degree, so, bring it on!

Flanagan is writing the script for Warner Bros. and will also direct. He made clear this won’t be a repeat of Frank Darabont’s well-known 2007 film. “I love Darabont’s film, and there’s zero point in remaking it,” he said. “The differences start page 1.”

The project follows Flanagan’s Carrie reboot for Prime Video, keeping him on a steady run of Stephen King adaptations. Between Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, Carrie, and now The Mist, he’s become one of the go-to directors for bringing King’s work to screen.

No cast or release date has been set yet. We’ll have more once Flanagan turns in that script.

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About The Mist

The Mist started as a Stephen King novella back in 1980, tucked into the collection Dark Forces. It’s classic King: a small Maine town, a freak storm, and then a mist rolls in off the lake that isn’t just mist. People get trapped in a grocery store while something moves in the fog outside, and the real horror ends up being less about the tentacles and more about what the trapped townspeople do to each other once fear and religious hysteria take over.

Frank Darabont turned it into a film in 2007, and he’d already proven he could handle King’s material with The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. But The Mist is a different beast entirely. It’s grimier, meaner, and way more willing to let its characters be awful to each other. Thomas Jane plays the lead, and Marcia Gay Harden steals every scene she’s in as the fire-and-brimstone zealot who takes over the store.

The film is also famous for its ending, which King himself has said he loves more than his own. Darabont wrote a new final scene that’s bleaker than anything in the source material, and it’s one of those endings that people still argue about online. No spoilers here if you haven’t seen it, but it’s worth knowing going in that this isn’t a movie that lets you off easy.

There’s also a black-and-white version Darabont released, meant to evoke old creature-feature b-movies, and it genuinely changes the tone of the whole thing. Worth watching both if you have the time.