The film adaptation of the famed Stephen King short story “The Boogeyman” is set to get a theatrical release on June 2nd this year via 20th Century Studios after initially being made as a direct-to-Hulu effort.
Rob Savage (“Dashcam”) directs and “Stranger Things” producer Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps produces the film, which had a “surprisingly muscular” test screening result in December according to THR.
As a result, the studio opted to reconsider its release strategy, not an unprecedented move as a similar thing happened to “Smile” last year, which went on to become a massive hit – generating $216 million worldwide off a $17 million budget.
They reportedly showed “The Boogeyman” to King, who gave his thumbs up to the change of release strategy.
The short was one of twenty in King’s most famous 1973 short story collection “Night Shift” with multiple films having adapted stories from it, including “Children of the Corn,” “Graveyard Shift,” “Maximum Overdrive,” “The Mangler,” “Sometimes They Come Back,” “The Lawnmower Man,” and both “Chapelwaite” (adapting “Jerusalem’s Lot”), and “Cat’s Eye” (adapting “Quitters, Inc.” and “The Ledge”).
“The Boogeyman” was arguably the scariest work in the collection and follows a man who visits a psychiatrist and recounts how each of his three toddler children over the years was killed in their cribs by a sadistic presence that has been following him.
The film’s official synopsis, however, sounds quite different and follows a sixteen-year-old (Sophie Thatcher) and her younger sister, still reeling from the death of their mother, as they are targeted by a supernatural boogeyman after their psychologist father (Chris Messina) has an encounter with a desperate patient in their house.
Vivien Lyra Blair, David Dastmalchian, Marin Ireland and Madison Hu also star. Mark Heyman (“Black Swan”) has been writing recent drafts with Scott Beck & Bryan Woods (“A Quiet Place”) and Akela Cooper (“Malignant”) penning earlier versions.
