Salem’s Lot remake has risen from its grave, but now it’ll get buried on Max instead

Everyone maintains that the movie is good and that its half-hearted release is not because it's bad

By Sam Barsanti  |  March 13, 2024 | 12:11am
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Salem’s Lot remake has risen from its grave, but now it’ll get buried on Max instead
Salem’s Lot (1979) Screenshot: YouTube

Despite the fact that it has been sitting on a shelf for years, director Gary Dauberman’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot is apparently not bad—with King himself saying just last month that it’s “quite good” and that he had no idea why Warner Bros. Discovery has spent the last two or three years refusing to release it. Well, soon we’ll all get to find out for ourselves whether or not it’s bad, because the movie finally (finally) has a release plan in place. Unfortunately, there are precisely two catches: We still don’t know exactly when that release will happen, and it’s going to happen on Max instead of in theaters.

Not great news overall, but there has been worse news about Warner Bros. Discovery movies, so let’s take what we can get. Plus, this move had been predicted by insiders, so it’s not wholly surprising.

Anyway, King’s original novel is about a writer who moves to a small town in Maine to finish his next novel (where does King come up with this crazy stuff??), only to discover that the townspeople are being turned into vampires. There were two TV miniseries adaptations in the past, one in 1979 from the great Tobe Hooper and one in 2004 starring Rob Lowe (a decade after he was in the first TV adaptation of The Stand).

Dauberman’s adaptation, which was produced by horror maestro James Wan and written by Dauberman himself, stars Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, and Alfre Woodard. In a classic bit of Hollywood trickery, nobody has been officially announced/credited as Kurt Barlow, the head vampire. What does that mean? Probably nothing. It might just be a fun surprise, or it’ll be a stunt performer/puppeteer under complicated prosthetics. There’ll be a vampire either way, they can’t do a vampire story without the main vampire.

 
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