Steven Spielberg taps Stranger Things team to adapt Stephen King's The Talisman for TV

Published back in 1984, Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman found the two horror authors indulging in their more Tolkienian sides—elements King would continue to develop through his then-nascent Dark Tower books, which eventually absorbed his and Straub’s collaboration into itself. Sprawling, imaginative, and featuring one of King’s more dynamic tween heroes, The Talisman has been a fixation for potential adaptors for years—most notably in the hands of Steven Spielberg, who bought the rights to the book before it was even published back in the 1980s, and who’s spent decades trying to put the pieces in place for his Amblin Entertainment to get it on the screen.

That project appears—not for the first time—to be one step closer to fruition, as Deadline reports that Matt and Ross Duffer, they of Netflix’s relentlessly King-and-Spielberg-cribbing Stranger Things—have signed on to adapt the book for TV. The Duffer Bros. will produce along with Spielberg, although it’ll be Stranger Things’ Curtis Gwinn who’ll be handling the actual showrunning duties on the series.

And, again: We’ll believe it when we see it. The Talisman is a big book, sending young Jack Sawyer across the entirety of America and its shadow self, The Territories, in search of the titular artifact, which might have the power to cure his ailing mother. (And also the queen of the mystical Territories; it’s a whole “parallel universe twins” sort of thing.) There’s a reason this particular property has defied adaptors for years, although the post-Game Of Thrones landscape seems like as good a time to get a book with this epic sort of scope off the ground at last.