(Image credit: Cargo Entertainment) How Tod Williams’ Cell Differs From Stephen King’s Novelīeyond the de facto expectations that come with an author adapting their own work, Stephen King has a track record for staying faithful to the source material when bringing his stories to new mediums – his screenplays prior to 2016 including Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, Silver Bullet, Pet Sematary and A Good Marriage. The trio meets other survivors along the way, but also witnesses behavioral patterns among the zombies, as they not only start to get more intelligent, but start showing evidence of creating a hive mind. Everyone actively using a cell phone becomes violently insane, and those who don’t start killing everyone around them start looking for ways to kill themselves.Īfter meeting a couple of fellow non-phoners – a middle-aged man named Tom McCourt and a young woman named Alice Maxwell – Clay heads north to Kent Pond so that he can learn if Johnny and his estranged wife Sharon are still alive. He goes to Boston Common with the intention of getting a gift for his son Johnny before traveling back home to Kent Pond, New Hampshire, and it’s while he waits in line at an ice cream truck that everything goes to hell. What would happen if the “phoners” went from being mindless, feral animals to being reprogrammed with new software, and what would happen to all of those who avoided the reprogramming at the start? These are the questions answered by the plot of Cell.Ĭlay Riddell is introduced as a cell phone-phobic artist who finally gets his big break at the start of the Stephen King novel, having traveled to Boston to successfully sell his original comic book, Dark Wanderer. It was the incongruity of a person who may not be in touch with reality, but dressed in a business suit that sparked the idea for Cell.Īt the time, there were already hundreds of millions of cell phones in use around the world, and the writer pondered what would happen if all of those in use started broadcasting a “pulse” that essentially hit the reboot button on the human brain. King immediately assumed that the individual was mentally unwell, but he was delivered a fascinating shock when the stranger came closer and his wired headset became visible: As noted in the “Inspiration” section of the book’s page on, the author was on a stroll in New York one day and became “apprehensive” when he spotted a man down the sidewalk in a business suit who seemed to be talking to himself. On that holiday, it was reported that 1408 and Stand By Me’s John Cusack had signed on to star, with Cargo Entertainment financing the movie, and in the subsequent months it was reported that Paranormal Activity 2’s Tod Williams was hired to direct.įor instance, it might no longer seem strange to see someone walking down the street, ranting and raving to no one in sight – and it was actually witnessing an example of this that led Stephen King to get the idea for Cell. Time continued to pass by for the project even with the author directly attached (and Last House On The Left’s Adam Alleca credited as a co-writer), but gears finally started to turn in earnest on Halloween 2012.
28 days later cast crack#
Unfortunately, the project fell apart over the course of three years, with Roth telling Shock Till You Drop in 2009 that creative differences led him to walk away.Ĭell found new life as an adaptation that same year, as Stephen King himself took a crack at developing the screenplay – wasting no time informing Constant Readers that he was making plans to change the ending.
As reported by Variety, Dimension Films first picked up the rights to the book just three months after it was released (a move made concurrently with the studio’s development of Mikael Håfström’s 1408) and Eli Roth was attached to direct the adaptation as his follow-up to Hostel 2. Stephen King had his own contribution to the hot trend in 2006 with the publication of the novel Cell, but in a strange twist of fate, the film industry was late to capitalize.
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