Steven Spielberg Wants to Adapt Stephen King’s Fantasy/Horror Novel ‘The Talisman’ ‘In the Next Couple of Years’

Despite their similar career arcs, Steven Spielberg and Stephen King have never actually worked together. That may finally change with “The Talisman,” a fantasy/horror novel King co-wrote with Peter Straub in 1984. The two Steves spoke to Entertainment Weekly about their would-be collaborations over the years, with Spielberg saying of the book, “I feel that in the very near future, that’s going to be our richest collaboration.”

“Several times he came very close to making it, and there were a lot of discussions about that,” King says of the novel, which Spielberg has owned before it was even published.

“Universal bought the book for me, so it wasn’t optioned,” Spielberg explains. “It was an outright sale of the book. I’ve owned the book since ’82, and I’m hoping to get this movie made in the next couple of years. I’m not committing to the project as a director, I’m just saying that it’s something that I’ve wanted to see come to theaters for the last 35 years.”

It almost happened once before, when Spielberg attempted to make the book into a six-hour miniseries for TNT. “At that time it was just too rich for TNT’s blood,” he says. “Then I pulled it back and decided to try to reconfigure it once again as a feature film.”