Stephen King has written a bazillion books, and there have been a gazillion film and television adaptations of his stories.  Blastr.com reports on thirteen (yes, thirteen!) additional projects in development based on his works.  The spooky thirteen is the perfect number for anything related to the bestselling master of pop culture horror fiction.  One King novel not on the list that would be a great motion picture is The Eyes of the Dragon.

The thirteen projects that are being actively adapted are:

11/22/63
Bag of Bones
Carrie
Cell
Creepshow
The Dark Tower
Firestarter
It
Pet Sematary
The Stand
The Talisman
"The Ten O'Clock People" from Nightmares and Dreamscapes
Under the Dome

Most of those will be remakes of previously adapted King tales, but there are some new ones there that I'm excited about, such as The Talisman, which King co-wrote with Peter Straub (and hopefully the sequel, The Black House, will be adapted as well), and Under the Dome, which Steven Spielberg will help produce as a series on Showtime.  I've already written about the ambitious goal of bringing The Dark Tower to life --Ron Howard and his production company are still trying to work out a deal now that Universal Pictures backed out.  King's time-travel "save J.F.K." book 11/22/63 hasn't even been released by the publisher yet, but it has already been optioned by Hollywood and will be made into a movie by director Jonathan Demme.

The Stephen King brand is a moneymaker, even if sometimes the quality of the product is questionable (The Langoliers, anyone?), so it's not surprising that anything with King's name on it will eventually see its way to the big screen or the boob tube.  Filmmakers are practically lining up trying to cash in, even rebooting tales that were already adapted pretty well in the first place (Carrie, It, The Stand, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera).  Even Stanley Kubrick's classic The Shining was remade as a television mini-series.

It is, therefore, a great mystery to me why The Eyes of the Dragon, which Stephen King wrote back in the 1980s, hasn't been adapted yet.  It's a classic fantasty tale, very different from the usual horror content for which King is known.  There are gruesome and frightening scenes, to be sure, but overall it deals with a classic adventure of good versus evil, King Roland and his family versus the wicked Flagg.  On the surface level it's a simple sword and sorcery yarn with magic and intrigue, but fans of King (and there are many) will recognize the subtextual (and often rather obvious) connections to The Stand, The Dark Tower, and other stories in the King bibliography. 

There are many ways The Eyes of the Dragon can be brought to life -- as a major motion picture, as a sweeping mini-series, even as an full, epic television series.  Personally, I would love to see a company such as Pixar turn it into an amazing animated movie. 

There will no doubt be dozens of adaptations based on Stephen King material in the years and possibly decades to come, but I hope I live to see The Eyes of the Dragon.