Stephen King adaptations are a dime a dozen, with at least a handful always floating around Hollywood at one point or another. It's gotten to the point where I no longer find them all that exciting, but one that caught my eye last year was 11/22/63, which had Jonathan Demme(Rachel Getting Married) attached to produce and direct. But in a recent chat with ThePlaylist, Demme revealed he's no longer taking the project on, leaving its status in some doubt.
Demme was at the Marrakech Film Festival(every place has a film festival now) when he broke the news of his departure. He also made it clear there was no ill will involved, and that the issue largely revolved around creative differences...
Demme: “This is a big book, with lots in it. And I loved certain parts of the book for the film more than Stephen did. We’re friends, and I had a lot of fun working on the script, but we were too apart on what we felt should be in and what should be out of the script.”
It's certainly an ambitious project, with the 850-page time travel story following an English teacher who makes the jump back and attempts to change the course of history by preventing Kennedy's murder. There's a lot more than that going on, as you might expect from a King novel, and the film would have made for an interesting mesh of sci-fi and historical genre elements. So 11/22/63 hits a holding pattern for now, but it probably won't be long until a new director is found.
