I haven’t read the book, but the trailer looks interesting.
Has anybody read the book and if so, without spoiling the plot, does the book have the makings of a good film?
(I also never read The Shining, but I thought the film with Jack Nicholson was great!)
No.
But with enough creativity and disregard for the source material anything can make a good movie. The Shining is a good example for this. People around here will disagree but the movie is everything the book wasn’t.
And it’s not that I don’t like King, I do but The Shining and Dreamcatcher are among his worse books.
The dialogue speech patterns might have to be changed to make a good movie, and from what I’ve seen in the trailers it doesn’t look like they did. Hearing the word “Jonesy” spoken aloud, with a straight face, really chaps my caboose.
Seems like it’d be good other than that, though… at least as a vehicle for some cool special effects.
FWIW, I think The Shining is one of King’s best books, although I think the Kubrick movie is better (the mini-series was mediocre, at best).
As far as Dreamcatcher is concerned, I have severe doubts. The book was utter crap (literally, in some cases. See “shit weasels”). On the other had, there’s some pretty impressive talent on board: Lawrence Kasdan, William Goldman, Morgan Freeman. If they throw out 80% of the source material and then completely re-work the remaining 20% they may have enough wiggle room to make a decent movie. I’m not holding my breath, though.
Pretty much everyone I’ve seen has said that the book was crap crap crap. They said that it was almost a King parody, devoid of original ideas, most frustratingly using his standard (retarded person/black person) role (I wont say what role) to the worst effect ever. But then, I haven’t read it.
I like a lot of his books, especially It and The Stand.
On a tangent, I just saw a commercial advertising a CGI short film prequel to The Matrix: Reloaded that can be seen only in the opening trailers at showings of Dreamcatcher. That will surely help the opening weekend box office.
Dreamcatcher was indeed a terrible book. King’s worst since The Tommyknockers, and that’s saying something.
To make a good movie out of it, they’ll basically have to remove several main plot elements of the book and change (or remove) at least half the characters… in other words, it will have to be based on the book in name only.
The only hope for this movie is if they do a sort-of reverse of the “Lawnmower Man” situation – basically, they use the title as a springboard for a completely different story. In the case of “Lawnmower Man,” they took a good short story and made a crappy movie. Hopefully, this time around they could take a crappy book and make a good movie.
However, the commercials I’ve seen seem to track the storyline to the book fairly closely, so I have no hope whatsoever that the movie will be any good.
Everyone here is correct. Now, it’s been a little bit of a while since I read the book, but if I do remember it correctly, I said:
“They’re going to make a movie out of that?!!”
in complete incredulity when I saw trailers. Again, if I it remember correctly, the book’s okay, but simply not movie material. Really. Not.
Maybe I’ll have to re-read to refresh the memory, but no.
Snicks
I still hold to my theory that the “flashback” backstory section of “The Wastelands” has the potential to be a great movie, plus the added benefit of leading into the whole Gunslinger series.
Any producers listening out there???
Erm, I think that was “Wizard and Glass”, not “Wastelands”. Not sure, I haven’t read it in a long time, and they’re still in boxes. 
Dreamcatcher was so bad that I couldn’t even finish it, and I read both Cujo and The Tommyknockers so that’s saying something.
However, movies are not the same as books, and the success of the cinematic versions depends on its own elements and not its origin.
Plus there’s the Morgan Freeman corollary to the Gene Hackman rule, “No movie with Morgan Freeman in it is a complete waste of time.” His mere presence in a movie can make the worst crapfest watchable.