The Duffer Brothers are leaving Stranger Things' Upside Down for Talisman's Territories.
Deadline reports that Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer will develop a series adaptation of Stephen King and Peter Straub's 1984 novel The Talisman for Netflix. The series will be one of several new projects developed by the brothers under their new production company Upside Down Pictures, which will develop film and television series as part of the Duffers' overall deal with Netflix. The Talisman follows "a young man who moves between New Hampshire and an alternate world called ‘The Territories’ to obtain an artifact that will save his mother’s life."
The series will be a joint production between Upside Down Pictures, Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment and Paramount Television. Curtis Gwinn, who is a writer and co-executive producer on Stranger Things, will act as head writer and showrunner on the series. Matt Duffer previously revealed that although there are similarities between The Talisman and Stranger Things, the upcoming King/Straub adaptation has "much more fantasy. It has sci-fi. It has horror elements. It has a lot of heart. It has everything that we love. And it’s got the best werewolf character I think, ever."
An adaptation of The Talisman has been stuck in development since the 1980s. Spielberg was such a fan of King and Straub's novel that he acquired the screen rights two years before the novel was released, intending to turn the novel into a feature film. No major developments were announced on a film adaptation until 2017 when The New Mutants director Josh Boone was hired to write the screenplay. After Boone's screenplay failed to get off the ground, another crack at adapting The Talisman was taken in 2019, with Mike Barker (The Handmaid's Tale) announced as director, but to no avail. The adaptation was then redeveloped as a television series, which was first reported back in March 2021.
Should the project come to fruition, The Talisman will be the fifth King adaptation to exclusively premiere on Netflix. The streaming service previously released Gerard's Game and 1922, based on the respective King novels of the same name, in 2017 and a film adaptation of King's novella In the Tall Grass, which he co-authored with his son Joe Hill, in 2019. A feature-length adaptation of Mr. Harrigan's Phone is expected to hit the streaming service before the end of 2022.
No release date has been announced at this time for The Talisman.
Source: Deadline