Stephen King adaptations are practically impossible to get right and always will be

polygon.com:

In 1996, Halloween and Big Trouble in Little China director John Carpenter told SFX Magazine that he’d only really made one film he didn’t love: 1983’s Christine. It was his only Stephen King adaptation. Universal Studios had hired Carpenter to direct an adaptation of King’s Firestarter, but after his movie The Thing underperformed, they fired him and brought on Mark L. Lester, and Carpenter directed Christine for Columbia Pictures instead.

“It just wasn’t very frightening,” he says in the interview. “But it was something I needed to do at that time for my career.”

Still, Carpenter can console himself: He’s in good company. Few directors have successfully translated Stephen King to the screen. As Carpenter put it to SFX, “Nope, no one has ever done it very well.”

He’s hardly alone in saying so. Everyone has their explanations as to why one of the world’s bestselling authors has inspired so many duds and disasters. But nearly everyone agrees that adapting Stephen King successfully is a herculean task. There are a couple of agreed-upon classic King movies, like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but even that film has its detractors, most notably King himself. And King’s handful of hit adaptations are the exception to the norm: His work has been turned into theatrical feature-length movies more than 50 times, and only a dozen of those movies got consensus good reviews.

Part of the problem with making a movie out of a King story is the level of detail and character-building he so often puts into his work. Of the 60-plus novels he’s written or co-authored, only 15 of them are less than 300 pages long. Most of them range from 600 pages to more than a thousand. His longest works and most enormous casts can’t be enunciated