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.
Also worth noting is that if the remake of Cujo were to go with the original Stephen King ending it would open the door for an adaptation of the sequel novella that King published last year in his collection You Like It Darker. Titled "Rattlesnakes," the story catches up with Vic Trenton – Donna's husband and Tad's father – decades later and finds him trapped in a horrific haunting that forces him to reflect on the trauma of his son's death and how it ended up changing his life.
Should it successfully move through development, Cujo will be the fifth Stephen King adaptation available exclusively to Netflix subscribers. The first was Gerald's Game in 2017, and that incredible Mike Flanagan film has been followed by 1922, In The Tall Grass, and Mr. Harrigan's Phone. The streamer is also actively developing a series based on the novel The Talisman with Steven Spielberg and Matt and Ross Duffer as producers.
This has been a huge year for Stephen King adaptations already, as Osgood Perkins' The Monkey is now in theaters and we recently got news about a movie based on "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream," but things are only just warming up in 2025. Following its award-winning premiere at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, Mike Flanagan's The Life Of Chuck is arriving in theaters this summer, and Edgar Wright's remake of The Running Man is getting prepped for a November release. On the small screen, HBO will be premiering the new prequel series IT: Welcome To Derry, and MGM+ will be airing The Institute, based on the novel of the same name.
Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more news about the new adaptation of Cujo, as we're always on top of the latest updates about upcoming Stephen King movies and TV shows.
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