Published in 2021, Stephen King‘s novel Billy Summers is the next King tale to get a film adaptation, with Deadline reporting that J.J. Abrams will produce the feature for Warner Bros.
The original plan was for Billy Summers to be adapted as a limited series, you may recall, but Deadline confirms that the project is now taking shape as a feature film.
J.J. Abrams will produce for Bad Robot, while Leonardo DiCaprio will also produce for Appian Way. The adaptation is being written by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz.
Deadline notes, “If this comes out great, it could be a project for Abrams to direct with DiCaprio playing the title character.” Stay tuned for more on the Billy Summers movie as we learn it.
“Billy Summers is a hitman who is looking to retire, and takes one last highly lucrative job to feather his nest. The job requires him to embed himself in a quiet town, where he pretends to be an aspiring writer (he actually pours himself into the prose).
“He sets up in an office with a direct view of where hitman Joel Allen will be delivered to face trial for shooting two men during a poker game. Allen has also committed enough murders for some high level mobsters to be scared the gunman will incriminate his former employers to lessen his sentence. Summers, a meticulous craftsman, becomes more and more cynical about the mobsters who’ve hired him, and his skepticism is well warranted as things go awry following completion of the job.”
Michael Roffman wrote in his review for BD, “When Stephen King is not running and gunning with bullets and brawn, he’s delectably building out his world — even when he’s exploring familiar locales. (Hint, hint, Constant Readers.) Again, it’s all muscle memory to him, which is why Billy Summers reads like a sum of all his strengths. Who we meet, where we go, and how we get there is all vintage King through and through. Sure, some of it’s cheesy, some of it even on-the-nose, but none of it ever comes across like a cover for him.”
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