All 4 Stephen King Movies of 2025, Ranked

If you like Stephen King, and don’t mind seeing his work get adapted to the big screen, then you’ve probably been having a pretty good 2025. Hell, even if you like seeing his work on the small screen, the TV side of things has got you covered, with The Institute and It: Welcome to Derry both airing their first seasons in 2025. And then King himself is still writing, of course, with Never Flinch being published this year, and so even if “content” is a bit of a dirty word, it is accurate to say that there’s no lack of Stephen King content in the past 12 months. His body of work is far from perfect, and he’s got some good books that don’t exactly translate well to the big (or small) screen, but many of his stories still resonate and prove appealing, and in particular, some of his sci-fi/dystopian novels have actually aged fairly (and upsettingly) well.

Two such novels got adaptations in 2025, technically being adaptations of Richard Bachman books, as King wrote them under his pseudonym before it became public knowledge that King and Bachman were one and the same, not long after the publication of Thinner, as the story goes. But these movies do still count as Stephen King adaptations, and they were released alongside two other movies based on shorter works by King; namely, a novella and a short story. Tonally, it’s quite interesting how varied these four movies are, and it’s also fun to unpack how closely they line up with the source material, or what changes are made if they don’t so much. Also, all four of these movies range in quality from decent to very good, which is nice for anyone who remembers recent Stephen King adaptations that kind of missed the mark (looking at you, 2024’s Salem’s Lot and 2022’s Firestarter).

4

‘The Life of Chuck’

Tom Hiddleston as Charles Krantz sitting in a park in 'Life of Chuck' — Tom Hiddleston as Charles Krantz in ‘Life of Chuck’

Including this as a 2025 release could be cheating just a tiny bit, as The Life of Chuck was first screened in 2024, at the Toronto International Film Festival, but it wasn’t until June 2025 that it got a wider release in the U.S., at least. So, it’s being counted as a 2025 release here, with the acknowledgment that, by another definition, you could call it a 2024 film. Anyway, it’s the strangest of the Stephen King adaptations from either 2024 or 2025, since it leans well away from horror, and also can’t really be called a thriller or a sci-fi and/or fantasy movie, either. Some of it’s fantastical, or maybe a little sci-fi-related, but there would be spoilers in discussing how The Life of Chuck functions as more than just a drama. It is primarily a drama, though, and one that’s not afraid to be sentimental and a bit of a tearjerker, too.

Mike Flanagan doubling down on his more sentimental side for The Life of Chuck actually works pretty well, and it’s also a movie with an interesting structure.

It overdoes the saccharine stuff a little, or at times, but there are other emotional sequences here that do strike the right chord. It’s moving in a way that might be surprising for those who mostly know Stephen King for his works of horror, and the same can be said about how The Life of Chuck stands up against most of Mike Flanagan’s other films/TV shows. He tends to make horror movies, including two based on Stephen King books before The Life of Chuck (Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep), but his horror movies, for better or worse, do sometimes have a more sentimental side to them. So, him doubling down on that for The Life of Chuck actually works pretty well. It’s a movie with an interesting structure (elaborating on that too much would also be ruining things), and though it’s broad and comes dangerously close to being too cheesy at times, it is still worth your time if you’re in the mood for something simultaneously soul-crushing and weirdly uplifting.

3

‘The Monkey’

The Monkey toy looking menacing — The Monkey

Look, what follows isn’t going to be a passionate defense of The Monkey claiming it to be a misunderstood masterpiece or anything, but some people didn’t seem to get it entirely. Even if they did get it, they might not love it, because the movie is still a bit of a mess, but if you approach it as more of a comedy than a horror movie, it’s pretty entertaining. But, as is the case with a lot of movies that blend comedy and horror, if one goes into it expecting or wanting scares, it’s easy to understand that same person coming away a bit frustrated. This is a film based on a short story by Stephen King that involves a wind-up monkey seemingly causing a series of very violent deaths, each one coming about after it’s activated.

That anarchic tone also sets it apart from most other Stephen King movies, but there is still that attachment to the horror genre, making it feel a little less unexpected than The Life of Chuck might’ve been. It’s all about death, and lays bare how upsetting and absurd dying can be, but also does so without being too frightening or particularly deep. The Monkey has a decent hook, and the gimmicky violent deaths can be fun if you don’t mind over-the-top bloodshed, but there is a sense of fatigue that sets in, to some extent, before the film concludes. That might be as a result of the source material being short to begin with, but it’s a 98-minute movie that might’ve been a little better had it been, say, 88 minutes. But not the 88 Minutes with Al Pacino. That movie is actually, weirdly enough, probably more horrifying an experience to sit through.

2

‘The Running Man’

Don’t call it a remake, even if there was a movie with the same title from the 1980s that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead, 2025’s The Running Man is more easily identifiable as a more true-to-the-text adaptation of one of Stephen King’s Bachman books, though there are some very broad similarities between the 1987 and 2025 takes on the novel. The former was looser, having televised violent games but in a different sort of way, while the latter also has a televised and grisly event, but it’s got more actual running, with contestants on the run and hunted down, earning more money the longer they survive. The film does a good job at establishing the dystopian world and the stakes involved, and then once the event is underway, The Running Man rarely slows down, and proves pretty consistently entertaining.

That being said, The Running Man (2025) is a bit broad, and you do very much get what it’s trying to say early on, and then it keeps reinforcing that point in a way that’s a bit much. Also, it feels like the movie equivalent of really good fast food, in that it’s great while you’re chowing it down, but then you get to the end of it feeling, somehow, both a little empty and a tad overstuffed at the same time. That’s all to say that it’s not one of Edgar Wright’s finest films, by any means, but it is slick, generally well-paced, and has some solid action throughout. Also, Glen Powell’s lead performance is quite good, and the film also makes good use of many members of its fairly large cast, especially Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, and (temporarily) Michael Cera, reuniting with Wright 15 years on from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Just don’t think about that 2010 film or the Cornetto Trilogy movies too much before going into The Running Man. It is not as good as those, by any means, but it is enough, and some of the critics have been potentially just a touch too harsh on it.

1

‘The Long Walk’

David Jonsson, Cooper Hoffman, Ben Wang, and more continue to put one foot in front of the other in The Long Walk

The Long Walk was probably the most difficult Stephen King story to adapt that was brought to the screen in 2025, but it ultimately ends up being the best. An adaptation for this was a long time coming, since the original book (another Bachman one) was first published in 1979, and it stood for a long time, therefore, as one of those fairly rare King books without an adaptation. As for why the story was potentially difficult to imagine as a film? Well, the narrative here involves a group of teenage boys being made to walk for hours – and, eventually, days – on end, as part of a cruel game of endurance. They have to maintain a certain speed, and abide by some other rules, but the last one standing wins, essentially. The really cruel part comes about because anyone who’s eliminated gets shot dead, meaning the last one standing (well, walking, more accurately) is also, by default, the only one still living.

It’s easy to compare to The Running Man, then, with its dystopian world and desperate people doing dangerous things because they don’t feel there’s any other choice provided by the awful societies they live in. But The Running Man has a bit more fun with that kind of premise, while The Long Walk is effectively miserable and genuinely gruelling for most of its runtime. The closest thing you get to a nice atmosphere is everything that happens before the first inevitable death. Once that happens, it’s non-stop psychological horror, brutal violence, and consistent intensity. The book might be a little more powerful, but The Long Walk (2025) does a truly impressive job at capturing the most important stuff found in that source material. It’s not a fun movie, nor quite a masterpiece, by any means, but it is a very effective and impressive watch, and can also count itself among the better Stephen King movie adaptations released in the past decade or so.