Spielberg & King to develop Under The Dome

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Stephen King's whopping new novel Under the Dome was only published a week ago, but plans are already afoot to develop it for the small screen.

Steven Spielberg will executive produce, along with Stacey Snyder, Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey of Dreamworks TV, and King himself.

The novel is a reworking of King's never-published "lost" work The Cannibals, in which the small Maine town of Chester's Mill is suddenly, inexplicably cut off by an invisible forcefield that doesn't allow exit or entry. As the place becomes cut off from the rest of the world, the locals must fight for their survival and warring factions start to cause problems for everyone.

Yes, it sounds like The Simpsons Movie, but it's been hailed in some quarters as a return to old-school King after a gradual shift of direction and focus in recent years, and has drawn favourable comparisons to his much earlier end-of-the-world tome The Stand.

King adaptations for TV have been a mixed bag. Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot and the 1990 It, starring Tim Curry as stuff-of-lifelong-phobias Pennywise the clown, are probably the high points. The Stand itself didn't fare so well, and the less said the better about The Tommyknockers and King's own version of The Shining.

So the Spielberg influence will be the key, and with Band of Brothers and the upcoming The Pacific on his TV CV, there's every reason to be optimistic. It actually isn't the first time the two Steves have worked together, having sporadically collaborated on an as-yet-unrealised version of The Talisman. Spielberg optioned King's novel The Talisman, which he's tried to make work as both a film and a TV series, but has yet to crack the budget issues. Let's hope this one doesn't similarly gather dust for twenty years.