Warner Bros. Discovery has picked up the rights to adapt Stephen King’s 2021 bestseller Billy Summers. Also producing will be J.J. Abram’s Bad Robot and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way.
Last year, Bad Robot tried to adapt the novel into a miniseries with Ed Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz signed on as a writer, and Zwick to direct most, if not all, episodes. Now it is being reformatted for the big screen. It is unclear if Abrams will direct, but Zwick and Herskovitz have joined to pen the script.
The novel focuses on the eponymous Billy Summers, a middle-aged hitman looking to retire after one more job. Summers follows the target to a small town where he resumes residency, disguising himself as a novelist. Summers takes the persona he invents for himself seriously and begins actually to write a book based on his life. Unfortunately, after the job goes wrong, he is forced to go on the lam with a rape victim he rescued named Alice. The novel is one of the few King books that are not horror.
Abram and Bad Robot had worked with King before when they produced the Apple TV+ miniseries Lisey’s Story in 2021 and the series 11.22.63 and Castle Rock for Hulu in 2016 and 2018, respectively. However, this will be their first feature together.
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