Stephen King by the Box Office

Sky Movies has an interesting slide slow titled "Stephen King By The Box Office."  It looks at 34 of King's movies, and tells us how it did at the box office.  Each movie not only lists what it took in at the box office, but tries to adjust for inflation.

The site notes, "Box office figures from BoxOfficeMojo.com. Inflation calculated with the USInflationCalculator.com."

Here's the breakdown:

• $134,711 , Riding The Bullet. The article notes, "The film bombed at the box office after receiving a deserved critical panning and holds the unenviable record of the lowest grossing Stephen King adaptation to date"
• $125,397 , The Night Flier.  (Sky Movies adjusts for inflation, giving it $182,467)
• $1,781,383 , The Mangler
•  $8,863,193 , Apt Pupil
• $7,433,663 , Maximum Overdrive.  I like this from the article, "Picking up two Razzie nominations for King and the film’s star, Emilio Estevez, the film was universally panned. However, despite even King writing it off as “the worst adaptation of his work”, it managed to reclaim $7,433,663 of its $9 million budget- just under $16 million in today’s money."
• $10,611,160 , The Dark Half
• $11,582,891, Graveyard Shift
• $15,315,484, Thinner.  WAIT. . . Thinner made it this far up on the list?  "Thinner performed reasonably upon release, helped by the fact that it was attached to Michael Jackson’s short film, Ghosts, also co-written by King."  Oh, that explains it.
• $15,185,672, Needful Things
• $12,361,866, Silver Bullet "Silver Bullet divided opinion at the time but has slowly gained something of a cult following over the years."  count me in the cult.
• $13,086,297, Cats Eyes
• $14,568,989, Children of the Corn.  Don't we wish that had been the last dollar that franchise would make?
• $24,361,867, Dolores Claiborne.
• $17,080,167, Fire Starter
• $30,919,415, Hearts in Atlantis
• $28,341,469, The Shawhank Redemption
• $20,766,616, The Dead Zone
• $21,017,849, Christine
• £30,524,763, Sleepwalkers (say it ain't so!)
• $21,156,152, Cujo
• $21,028,755, Creepshow
• $32,100,816, The Lawnmower Man  "This sci-fi horror baffled audiences and divided critics at the time, but it still opened at number two in the box office behind Wayne’s World and spawned a sequel in the form of 1996’s Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace."  For the record, I really hated  this film.  I feel good about that.
• $38,122,105, The Running Man
• $59,006,619, Carrie 2013 "the film has already done decent business in the US and looks set to easily clear the $60 million mark."
• $57,293,715, The Mist
• $75, 715,436, Dreamcatcher.  No, I can't explain that.  "Even with a cast of names including Morgan Freeman, Damian Lewis and Jason Lee, the film dive-bombed at the American box office, although it did break even upon worldwide release."
• $57,469,467, Pet Sematary.
• $33,800,000, Carrie 1979
•  £61,276,872, Misery.
• $52,287,414, Stand By Me
• $92,913,171, Secret Window
• $44,017,374, The Shining
• $131,998,242, 1408.  This surprised me, since it's a film I really didn't think was very strong.  However,  it sure did make  strong showing at the box officer.
• $286,801,374, The Green Mile.

The full article is at skymovies.sky.com

That's Not A Good End!

Ending a novel can gave a reader the euphoria of crossing the finish line after a hard run race.  Or it can be like running out of gas in the middle of no where.

Stephen King endings -- the thought alone can cause constant readers a little trauma.  It seems pretty well known that while Stephen King has given us some great stories, the endings sometimes leave the reader a little frustrated.

Sometimes King nails it!  He drives the story home with unusual skill.  He allows the characters and  plot to work together to bring about a breathtaking end.  Dolores Claiborne, The Shining and Salem's Lot all had what I considered  to be pretty satisfying endings.

There have also been times that King declined to really end a story.  The Mist is such an example.  King left the character driving into the mist, for the reader to choose their own adventure from there.  Also, the Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was a bit unclear at the end. I also liked the endings to the very dark stories in Full Dark No Stars.  The Green Mile played out nicely from beginning to end.  I think the pressure of having to write in serial was good for King.

Did Insomnia have an end?  I never got there.

Here are some endings I found weak:

Needful Things.  It ends with a video that Allan has to decide if he will watch or not.  The battle really isn't as big as we would think.  Polly takes on a pretty awesome spider, but it really doesn't pack the punch the rest of the novel did.  I liked it right up to the very end, it had played out so well, and then it just dropped off.

The Dark Tower.  I've gotten so therapeutic resolution over this from Bev  Vincnt, but the ending still troubles me.  My feelings run pretty deep on this not only because the books were so long -- and there were so many of them -- but they were so long in coming.  A little portion of my life was spent  thinking, "now when is the next Dark Tower book coming out?"  Then for it to end without the deep resolution I was hoping for left me disenchanted with the entire series for a while.  But there were  episodes I really loved!  I thinks some of King's best, and worst, writing appeared  in The Dark Tower  books.  The Wolves of the Calla was particularly delightful.

11/22/63.  Once again, loved the novel, hated the end.  We go a long ways with King waiting for the alternate history to play out -- but it never really does.  By the time King gives us a glimpse of what would have happened if Kennedy had lived, the events are marred by science fiction.  That is, we don't really get to see  the "what if" played out.  We have to put up with a strange world ripped apart by an overdose of time travel.  The giant earthquake changed everything, thus creating major events different from the timeline we are on now.  So the changes in political history really don't matter much, since nothing jives with our own timeline anyway.  Might as well be the history of Mars.

Cujo.  I liked the novel, but I liked the movie better because they changed the end.

Dreamcatcher.  I was really engaged with the first half of the novel, but when we began chasing aliens from point A to point B, I really got weary.

Thinner.  I don't think I should have to say more than that.

Firestarter.  Great book, but a troublesome ending.  I found it, as with others,  hollow  and even a little forced.  It did not have the tension I think King was looking for.

And in regard to the Talisman. . . that was a crazy way to end a book.

What is your favorite and least favorite endings to a Stephen King book?

Four Past Midnight Journal #1

Midnight Journal, part 1

I love the three stories from Four Past Midnight that I've read.  The one I have not finished is The Library Policeman, and I started that the other night.  I loved the Langoliers! -- until I saw the miniseries.  What was tight, intense and one great story became absolutely terrible on screen.  It was more  than bad special effects, it was long and drawn out.

As a teen, when I read the first three stories, the title "Four Past Midnight" intrigued me.  What was four past midnight?  Was that four int he morning?  I read the stories, expecting some late night tale of terror.  At some point I realized, with grim disillusion that "Four Past Midnight" was nothing more than a title.  It might as well have been named "Blades of Grass."

For me, the Langoliers was harmed by the television adaption.  It was so bad, it makes me not want to return to the novel -- which I loved.  The opposite is true of Secret Window, Secret Garden.  The movie made the book better, improving on King's ideas and plot and making me more willing to return to the source material.  Though. . . this story also confused me.  I bought it on audio tape and was "sick" the next day.  I stayed home, ate crackers and listened all day to this story, wondering when they would discover a secret garden.

The Sun Dog left  me absolutely breathless.  I loved it.  I later read revers from people who did not like the novel, complaining it was overly edited.  I'm glad I only read all that later, because I was oblivious!  It thought it was creepy and belonged with the Twilight Zone.

In fact, so far all of these stories would have made great Twilight Zone episodes.  That's what the Langoliers should have been --and hour long TZ!  That season when they tried the hour format for Twilight Zone totally bombed!  They stories just didn't work.  And, Langoliers was just too long.  If only. . . Mr. Serling had written the script for an hour long episode of Twilight Zone based on King's story.

The Library Policeman

I started reading The Library Policeman the other night.  I went out running and decided it was time to jump into this short novel --as I enjoyed all the others from Four Past Midnight.  I'm not sure where King is going with this, so he's got my attention.

I've started this one several times, but quit.  I can never remember why I quit, until I start reading again.  This time I'm listening thanks to audible.  And, a good story makes running hurt less.  That's totally not true, but I tell myself that so I won't dread it so much.

It takes a while to get this story off the ground.  What seems like pretty straight forward stuff takes forever to just get moving.

I feels like I know what the early turns in this book are going to be.  Sam writes a speech.  The speech is bad.

He needs a book from the library.  He borrows a book.  He meets a strange Librarian.  He has a sense after seeing the Library Policeman display that he's been here before, as a child.  

And that's where I finally got home from my run.  So I'm pretty sure he'll fail to return the book, and some form of hell will be reigned upon him in retribution for his moral failure.  If it were another author, I'd quit because the story moves so slow.  But I do want to know WHO the Library Policeman is.  What will happen to Sam?  The strength of the other stories in this book make me keep coming back to this one.  Also Stephen King doesn't let down very often, so it's worth sticking with a novel  even when the magic isn't there at first.  I just can't let this be another Talisman!

It is especially cool that this is dedicated to the staff and patrons of the Pasadena Library.  I lived in Pasadena as a teenager and have spent a lot of time at that library.  Does anyone know why the dedication?

The Box At The Bottom Of The Closet

shhhh. . . quiet. . . my wife can't hear us talking about this.  See, we were discussing how full our bedroom closet is.  I might have said that none of the junk in the closet was mine, because I don't have a need to keep everything.   (EVERYTHING!)

So, when I came home from work yesterday,  there was a large  box sitting on the bed.  My beloved informed me it was MY  box.  Strange, I don't seem to remember owning a box.

"So what do you think was inside your box?" My wife asked.
I dunno.  Books?
"Well, you do have a box f duplicate Stephen King books.   But this box is full of Stephen King books on tape."
"CDs?"
"TAPES.  So you want me to throw them away,  or ebay them?"

I  didn't think much of it until I started going through the box.  Strange how things can cause of to  be sentimental, right?  I LOVE these tapes!  I've listened to them over and over and over!

So, here is what was in the box:

• 2 books on CD.  (HA!)  
• The Drawing of the Three, read by Stephen King.  My favorite of the Dark Tower covers is this one.  I almost bought this set on ebay recently, but didn't because I reasoned it would just end up at the bottom of a box somewhere.  
• Secret Window, Secret Garden, from Four Past Midnight.  I bought this in High School, then found myself incredibly "sick" the next day -- requiring I miss school and listen to my book while I played video games.   It was a tough life.  I didn't like the ending at all.  I was intrigued by the idea of two writers writing exactly the same book. But it seemed to easy for him to just be having a mental breakup.  Besides, wasn't that the Dark Half?  Also,  I couldn't figure out where the Window and Garden were?!  So there was no secret garden, no real duplicate book -- just a crazy writer.  But, it was a good day off school.
• The three volume edition of Needful Things on tape.  I got this for my 18th birthday.  (I think 18.)  Each time someone would give me birthday money, I'd go  to the store and buy the next volume. I absolutely fell in love with that book!  Loved King's reading, loved the story and even loved the boxes they came in.  I lined the boxes up neatly on my bookshelf, thinking how cool they looked.
• Dolores Claiborne.  Once again, this is a great book!  And, once  I've read many times. In particular, I remember listening to it on a rainy day at my Grandma's house when I was in college.  I was alone in the house, and there was serious storming going on.  I took the tape recorder from room to room with me to keep me company.  (That house was scary in thunder storms.  So, naturally -- the thing to do was listen to a Stephen King book.  So wise.)
• The Shining.  I listened to this a few years ago, right before tapes went bye-bye.  
• Some books I never finished.  From A Buick 8, which I still can't get through.  And Dreamcatcher, which my wife and I listened to together for a long time -- until it jumped characters and became about a Men In Black military general who's insane.  

So what will I do with the box of tapes?  I actually don't know.  Probably haul them down to the shed.  But then my wife will find them and tell me I can't say ALL the stuff down there is hers.  But it is.  Because the Christmas stuff counts at hers.

You Stole My Story

The opening line in Secret Window, Secret Garden is, "You stole my story." I'll bet King hears that a lot. But, now, seriously. . . somehow he stole my story! When I was in High School I wrote a novel, or started 300 pages of a novel, titled: "Silent Peremeter." It wasn't very good, but listen to the plot: It was about a city that was cut off from the world when a fog or mist settled over the city. The army gathered outside and inside war broke out.

All right, I'll knock it off. Actually, this is strange, but I'm really excited to see how he carried the idea out. Obviously I thought it was a good idea for a long book, but was unable to make it happen. What is also interesting is that long before I even put a word to paper, King had already tried his hand at this novel and stopped.

Truth is, I can't wait to read King's new book. If I ever find a copy of my book (I, uh, never printed it!), I'll at least give it a personal read through. I do remember the writing being particularly bad. It was like putting two King novels together (The Mist and The Stand).

But now seriously -- wasn't the plot for Under The Dome a lot like The Simpsons?!

And, by the way, where is the Secret Window OR the Secret Garden in that book?