Mike Flanagan has provided an update about his Mike Flanagan has provided some more details regarding his remake of Carrie, and now I am a lot more optimistic about the Stephen King series.

Carrie is one of the most popular Stephen King stories, with it following the titular high school girl as she uses her supernatural powers to seek revenge on her abs and high school bullies. Carrie was most famously adapted into one of my favorite horror movies, Brian De Palma's 1976 film Carrie, with this also being one of the best movies based on a Stephen King story. Carrie later got a sequel in 1999, a TV movie in 2002, and a theatrical feature-length remake in 2013, with Mike Flanagan's Carrie being the latest in a line of remakes and sequels.

I Think Mike Flanagan Is Right About Updating Carrie, After Initial Doubts

He Made A Good Point About Its Setting

Potentially due to the online backlash that surrounded the announcement of the Carrie TV show, Mike Flanagan commented on how Stephen King responded to his Carrie ideas. According to Flanagan, he was initially hesitant to make Carrie, wondering if it needed to be made again. However, he ended up making "some pretty substantial changes" upon realizing that he can use Carrie to explore issues that high schoolers are facing today. For example, Flanagan was interested in how phones would change Carrie's story. Here are his full comments regarding the changes:

And I can't spoil the changes that we made in order to kind of find a story that felt like it needed to be told. But we made some pretty substantial changes. When I brought it to Stephen King — because that's the other side of this, if Steve says no, he doesn't want to see it happen, we're not going to do it; I'm not about to do that in that relationship. And so when I mentioned it to him and said, “What do you think about Carrie for TV?” He said, “Well, why? Leave her alone. She's good, she's done. I'd rather we focus on other things.” But when I sent him kind of the layout of how I saw it could work, he really liked it. And he came back and said, “Actually, yes, I think this is interesting, and I think this could be really relevant and could be really exciting.” And so that was when I said yeah, we should do this. I can't talk more about it, other than we're in the writers' room. We're having a great time, and I think we're going to tell a story that will be surprising and impactful, very relevant to our modern society and to issues in our country. My oldest son is 14 years old, and I look at him as I'm working on this story, and think it's important for his generation. I think there'll be something in there that I hope will be useful to them in this world. But yeah, I'm really glad we're doing it. I'm having a blast.

While I was initially worried about Flanagan's Carrie remake, I can't deny that he is right about its potential for a modern-day retelling. The original Carrie couldn't take into things like cyberbullying and the fact that every kid has a phone, meaning that the torment that Carrie goes through could be even more inescapable in a remake. This would also give Carrie enough room to expand its story across multiple episodes, explaining why the series needs to be a TV show rather than a movie.

Mike Flanagan Has Long Proved He Can Update Stephen King Stories

He Has Made Success After Success

While I would be more worried if someone else was doing the TV show, if anyone is going to make Carrie great, it is Mike Flanagan. Mike Flanagan has long proved that he can take Stephen King stories and update them in fantastic ways, with many of his most popular projects doing just that. Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep are both movies that Flanagan has directed that are based on Stephen King stories, with Flanagan making major updates to their events and turning them into incredibly critically successful films.

Flanagan's movie The Life of Chuck is already proving that Flanagan can still do this, with the film being one of the most acclaimed movies of 2024. Flanagan has made major updates to non-Stephen King stories that are so classic that they are nearly considered sacred. Flanagan's Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House added a lot of new elements and set the story in the modern day, and despite these changes, it is one of his most beloved projects.

What's Mike Flanagan's Most Exciting Stephen King Project?

He Has Multiple In The Works

The Carrie miniseries is an exciting project from Mike Flanagan, but it isn't his most exciting one. The Life of Chuck is considered to be one of the director's best movies, and its performance at film festivals has made it his most exciting King project for me.

However, the other incredibly exciting project from Mike Flanagan is his The Dark Tower TV series. After The Dark Tower movie's failure, Mike Flanagan's decision to take it on as a TV show is incredibly exciting, with it potentially doing justice to the Stephen King books. I can't wait to see The Dark Tower get adapted once again, with this being even more exciting for me than Carrie.