Stephen King’s Billy Summers is headed to the big screen, Deadline reports.
King’s novel, published in 2021 by Scribner, follows a hitman who only takes jobs if he thinks the victims deserve to be killed. He decides to retire from a life of crime but agrees to take a final job, which doesn’t turn out the way he planned. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the novel as “murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining” and “another worthy page-turner from a protean master.”
Producing the adaptation will be actor Leonardo DiCaprio, through his production company, Appian Way, and producer J.J. Abrams, via his company, Bad Robot.
The screenplay for the film is being written by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, who have previopusly collaborated on screenplays for the movies The Last Samurai and Love & Other Drugs.
Abrams is no stranger to King’s work; he served as an executive producer on adaptations of the novelist’s 11/22/63 and Lisey’s Story.
Billy Summers is one of several screen adaptations of King’s fiction that are in the works. The film The Boogeyman, based on a short story by King, is scheduled for a June release, while a new movie based on the novel ’Salem’s Lot has finished production, though it doesn’t yet have a release date.
Other films that are coming but don’t yet have scheduled premiere dates include movies based on Christine, Fairy Tale, and From a Buick 8.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
