Long-delayed ‘Salem’s Lot movie might get dumped on Max, but supposedly not because it’s bad
The movie was supposed to be in theaters last summer, and now it might not be in theaters at all
Aux News Max
Director Gary Dauberman’s new feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s iconic vampire book ‘Salems Lot has been through a lot already: In July of 2022, it was delayed from September of that year to April of this year (ostensibly because of “COVID-related delays in the post-production realm”), and then shortly after that it was removed from Warner Bros.’ calendar entirely—explaining why you might not remember seeing it back in April. That means it’s been sitting on a shelf for at least a whole extra year, and that’s after being shot all the way back in 2021.
And now there’s a curious new development in the ‘Salem’s Lot saga, with Variety suggesting that it might be losing its theatrical release date altogether in favor of Warner Bros. Discovery dumping it straight to Max instead. That hasn’t been confirmed by anyone, but a “source with knowledge of the back-and-forth” told Variety that this has nothing to do with “the film’s quality,” but that WBD is simply desperate for new things to put on Max because of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.
That seems like an exceedingly difficult concept for WBD to try and sell to anyone, considering how weird the company has been about putting things on Max over the years, but on the other hand, something that doesn’t seem to make any sense is exactly what WBD tends to do in any given situation. This is (sort of) the same company that released all of its 2021 movies on streaming, only to eventually denounce that plan after people got mad about it. This is also the same company that decided it would rather throw Batgirl in the garbage rather than release it on Max. So does WBD need things to put on Max? Or does it not want to put things on Max? And wouldn’t the strikes have impacted theatrical releases more than streaming, since Max has a big library of older shows and movies that are already available? Oh right, WBD keeps deleting that stuff.
So, again, does Warner Bros. Discovery want stuff on Max, or does it not want stuff on Max?
38 Comments
There’s got to be a story about how perverse tax incentives and other perverse financial incentives and setups are costing society in so many different ways as the megawealthy play with the system.
I’m sure there is; it’s all just symptoms of “assholes with a disproportionately huge amount of power continually abuse that power.”
Some More News touched on it a bit in their video “Why Are Modern Blokcbusters So.. Not Very Good?”
Gotta make sure the chief investors are happy and low-risk makes them happy.
Did they make it a period piece set back in the 1970s? Because it kind of doesn’t work as well in modern times – harder to believe that a town could get taken over by vampires and effectively disappear without it attracting a ton of attention from outside.
There was another Salem’s Lot movie back in 2004 with Rob Lowe. Based on the Wikipedia, it took place in the “2000’s” which could mean cell phones/internet weren’t available to everyone.I agree with you a modern day adaptation wouldn’t work.
“Early 2000s” definitely feels like the absolute latest you could do that.
True of many plots that depended on mystery (no internet), inability to communicate (cell phones) and lack of proof (digital photography). Which is to say, most of them.
Yeah, it (2004 one) actually wasn’t awful but to cut a whole town off now it would have to be like a 30 days of night thing where you are in the artic.
See, I think it could work, if the people making these adaptations understood what Salem’s Lot is about. Every adaptation has sought to make a movie about vampires. That’s not what Salem’s Lot is about. It’s about how the places you grew up in change and die. I always imagined Salem’s Lot as being a stand in for those towns we’ve all passed through while driving through rural parts, where there isn’t even a stoplight or a gas station, just a few decaying houses and a VFW that doubles as a post office, where the only source of revenue are speeding tickets because the limit in town is 25 or 30 mph.It’s about the vampiric qualities inherent in the small town mindset. The people of Salem’s Lot are already rather soulless and vile, living unclean lives full of gossip and innuendo, and when the populace does eventually turn, the change isn’t all that stark, except that they all suck blood now. A scene in the book that never makes it into the adaptations, that I think carries this point in a wonderful, terrifying way, is how after various townspeople are turned, they don’t even have to use trickery to invade people’s houses. They just invite some unwitting friend over, and attack them as they walk in the door. So it’s not so much that the town of Salem’s Lot disappears, but that it changes. It becomes a desolate place that you drive through during the day, and avoid at night…
King himself is quite explicit that this is what ‘Salem’s Lot was about for him – small towns in the middle of nowhere dying out. Perhaps part of the problem of setting it in a more recent milieu is that this is only exacerbated in the modern world; I can’t imagine Ben and Susan “meeting cute” in the way they do in the novel any long, not just because the age gap is creepy but because these sorts of towns aren’t welcoming places to be at all any more even before vampiric invasion.
I agree, you’d have to change the setup a bit. Perhaps rather than Susan being someone who never left town, she is someone who is more or less dragged back, to look after an aging parent perhaps. I might make Ben a documentary filmmaker, who has returned to document the town he left behind (I always rather liked the idea of the parallels between the creative person, and the vampire, as both draw vitality from a certain parasitism of life).Another issue with the portrayal of the town, which makes it difficult to have in a modern setting, is that it’s too large of a town. Previous movies showed Salem’s Lot as being large enough to have its own hospital, schools, etc. It doesn’t work, as you and others have noted, to have such a town die.It needs to be smaller. A town visibly dying even before Barlow comes to town. The kind of town he WOULD be drawn to. I always imagined his antique shop being a rather creepy one, one of those dire antique shops you see on the road, that is full of junk and piles of old, unidentified family photos.
Thank you, you nailed it. I grew up in rural Maine, actually not too far off from King’s real life stomping grounds, and I very much related to the book in that way. When I was younger, it was a pretty well-off mill town. Then, the mills closing combined with the beginning of the opioid epidemic – it almost did feel like vampires were taking over the town.
I went to college at Truman State University, in Kirksville, Missouri. It’s a smallish city, large enough to have a regional medical center and a wal-mart, but small enough that the campus really does dominate life, and when school is out for break, the town became kind of desolate. But the real creep factor, was driving there, you went through some of the most desolate countryside. I passed through towns where the population was less than a 100 people. There was no gas station, and all the houses were in decay and the front lawns littered. It was an area that I was deeply afraid of traveling through at night, and I always imagined these towns being what Salem’s Lot becomes.
I’ve spent time in Youngstown OH, which once upon a time was a bigger industry town than Pittsburgh. Today you can drive past abandoned boarded-up mansions and Victorian homes.And Florida might be the opposite end of the US from Maine, but there are a lot of depressed small agriculture towns in the middle of the state that few ever drive through. The heat in the Summer can keep people inside just as much as a cold nor’east winter.
There are plenty of ghost towns out there, it’s just, well, no one bothers going there unless they have to. Interstates and highways allow you to blow right by them without even knowing you did.
Well said.
The parts of the book where King does scenes like the one you describe – “The Lot” – are the best part of that book. Good stuff.
I rather liked that short story King wrote, “One for the Road” which delves into the aftermath of the events of the main novel, and it really drives home this creep factor, of Salem’s Lot being this desolate town, that locals from neighboring towns just avoid after dark…
I got to go read Night Shift. I’ve only read a couple of the stories from it, and that wasn’t one of them.
They literally just did it in Midnight Mass, albeit over 1 night instead of several (a week? my memory says the book is less than a week but its been at least a decade).
The overt vampirism in Midnight Mass happens over 1 night, and on a remote island town – and the vampires there are still conscious people capable of behaving like human beings. Whereas with Salem’s Lot, the town gets taken over even if the head vampire is killed and a bunch of them die when Mark and Ben start a fire to burn it down, and nobody really notices except the neighboring towns people – it just becomes a creepy abandoned exit off the highway, like in Pet Sematary.
I really need to re-read Lot, the audiobook has been loaded on my phone for a couple years as a backup.
I think ‘Salem’s Lot takes place over a couple of months – Ben arrives in early September, and the finale takes place in November.
I love how the angle of all these pieces is, “These chowderheads running streaming services don’t know what they’re doing lol!” Rather than the more probable explanation: “They aren’t being completely forthright with their customers, but this is almost certainly about money, and giant corporations run mainly by bean-counters are for the most part pretty good at making lots of it.”
In the case of Warner Brothers, it seems like it’s much more likely to be the former than the latter. Zaslav hasn’t shown himself to have any idea what he’s doing for some time, and that continues a fairly long streak of WB fucking up what hould have been chip shots (see also: Batman and Superman on screen together for the first time failing to clear 1B).
I think Batgirl was the unique intersection of a very expensive production, really bad movie, and the timing of the merger where they were able to throw its cost on the heap of other expenses that get excused by the market when deals like that happen.
It’s funny that whenever Batgirl is mentioned it’s always with the tone that it is some lost masterpiece that’s been cruelly denied to the audience, instead of your far more likely scenario.
From a purely financial standpoint, I can see burying Batgirl making sense. OTOH, has the PR from the decision worked out for them? Maybe that’s not as big a hit as the 70M or whatever their tax write-off was worth, but it certainly wasn’t nothing.
No argument there. I don’t know that the viewing public can really keep up with what movies and shows are being axed by all the different platforms, since they all seem to be doing it to some extent, but if you’re a producer or director considering a new project how do you not take this kind of risk into account?
It’s usually the latter, but in this case there could be a bit of both. WBD seems to have been in full reactionary mode since the merger. No doubt they’re doing this (if they do it) because they think it’s the most beneficial option for them financially. But it might also be the best option for them financially because they’ve been bungling their other decisions of the last few years.The Batgirl bit in this article is stupid though. We know why Batgirl got shelved: the bean counters decided they would make more money killing it and taking the tax rebate than by releasing it. It’s annoying for people who wanted to see the movie, and comical for everyone else, but that’s the reason and one would guess (from a financial point of view) the right one. It has nothing to do with this movie or whether they want content for Max. Of course they want content for Max. They also want the $85m or whatever they’ll be able to claw back off their taxes because they killed Batgirl. Everything has its price.
As with the Wicker Man, in what world is a remake ever going to be 10% as good as the original? And certainly not as scary. As I’ve mentioned on other related threads, after the 1979 Salem’s Lot was shown on UK television, it was the subject of a letter sent in to a show called Points of View which aired around 8pm. As a result they played this clip. I was 10 for chrissake.
“in what world is a remake ever going to be 10% as good as the original?”
In the same world that we have remakes of The Thing from Another World, Ringu, Ocean’s Eleven, The Fly, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Cape Fear, Yojimbo, War of the Worlds, It, Little Women, The Seven Samurai, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Crazies and Cheaper by the Dozen, all of which were at least 10% as good as the originals?
I was younger than that the first time I caught some of it and holy shit did it freak me out. I honestly don’t remember if the movie hangs together very well, but as a terror device is was sure effective.
The 2004 versions was okay but yeah the 1979 one is fucking amazing. And for a TV movie(mini-series, I can’t remember if it was 2 parts back in 79 as I was 6) it’s top tier.
I guess it’s some lingering fantasy that given how shitty The Flash was, that the stupid Batgirl movie simply HAD to be good, huh. Sheesh.
From the studio that brought you Batman v Superman! Suicide Squad! WW84! Shazam: Fury of the Gods! Black Adam! Batgirl was gonna be one for the ages!
There is an excellent audiobook tie-in with this (yet to be released) adaptation. The audiobook includes a new forward by King himself talking about his inspirations for the novel and just his life in general (childhood, early career, etc.). I listened to the introduction and book in its entirety during one long drive from Wisconsin to Maryland in August.Strong recommend.Oh, I had just listened to an excellent audiobook of Dracula earlier in the summer, and that was a great pairing so you could see all of the parallels.
“but supposedly not because it’s bad”Sorry, are we going with the storyline that Blue Beetle and The Flash were released in theatres because they’re good?
The Salem’s Lot-adjacent short One for the Road is so brilliant it deserves to be taught in English composition classes.