Steven Spielberg has owned the 1984 bestseller rights for over 35 years. Now the story has to be remade into a series.

Steven Spielberg is working on an adaptation of the fantasy novel “The Talisman” by Stephen King and Peter Strobe. The director wants to film the story for Netflix, along with producers “Strangers” Matt and Ross Duffer.

The novel revolves around 12-year-old Jack, who seeks out a powerful Taliban to save his ailing mother. Jack walks between two worlds: the real America and a parallel world, in which each person has a rival.

After the book was published in 1984, it became a bestseller and topped the New York Times bestseller list in twelve weeks. In total, it sold over 880,000 copies a year. In 2001, Steven King and Peter Strobe published a sequel to The Black House.

Spielberg had been planning to implement it since 1982

Steven Spielberg recognized the potential of the story early on. In 1982, before the book was published, he acquired the rights to the “Talisman”. He originally planned to make the story into a film first. Recently, director Mike Barker (“Der Maids Report”) was in conversation for a project in 2019. The fact that it is now being implemented as a series makes perfect sense: the German translation of the book is 960 pages, so it provides enough information for a series description.

It is not yet known when “Talisman” will appear as a series. However, as the project is still in its infancy, publication is not expected in the first phase until 2022.

March 8, 2021