Director Lewis Teague’s Cujo is a great movie. It develops as a slow burn, giving the audience time to get to understand the relationships and conflicts in the Trenton family, and then it unleashes extreme terror as a mother and her child find themselves trapped in a broken down car during a heat wave and under siege by a rabid St. Bernard. It’s a classic Stephen King adaptation that I think has aged incredibly well – but today there’s news that a remake is in development at Netflix, and the one big thing that excites me about the project is the potential for it to properly adapt the extremely dark ending from the novel.
Deadline has the scoop on the new streaming project, noting that the film is being produced by Roy Lee, who has become a major player in modern Stephen King adaptations. His run with the author’s material began back in 2017 when he was a producer on IT, and he has since been a major player behind IT: Chapter Two, Doctor Sleep, the miniseries remake of The Stand, last year’s Salem’s Lot, and the upcoming movie based on The Long Walk. Per the trade report, the search is now on for a Cujo screenwriter.
The aforementioned original version of Cujo, released in 1983, is exceptionally faithful to the source material, but the biggest deviation comes in the final scenes: while the movie ends with Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) and her son Tad (Danny Pintauro) both surviving their encounter with the titular mad dog, Stephen King’s book ends with young Tad dying of heatstroke. This development was deemed too hardcore to include in the first adaptation, but if a remake is going to happen, I feel like it would best be able to stand apart from its predecessor if it unleashes what could be the biggest gut-punch ending since Frank Darabont’s The Mist.
More to come…
