While it's generally agreed that Stephen King's early books are better than his later output, one of his early works that never really got a fair crack at the big screen is his 1980 tome, Firestarter. When you read it, the book seems pretty cinematic, but when a movie version was made in 1984, it just came across as dumb, with the only noteworthy thing being a miniature Drew Barrymore showing off her evil side as a pyrokinetic tot.
However now Variety reports that Universal is teaming up with the Dino De Laurentiis Co. to remake the movie, with the hope of turning into into an entire horror franchise. Mark L. Smith (Vacancy) has been set to write the script, loosely based on King's novel about a father and his young daughter who are on the run from a government agency known as 'The Shop'.
Drug experimentation in their youth gave the father and his wife minor supernatural mental powers (with great effort he can dominate people's minds, while she was a bit telepathic). However much stronger abiltiies have manifested in their daughter, Charlie, who can set things on fire at will. It seems though that in the reboot, they may up the age of the firestarting character to give her more edge - and presumably to try and aim the movie squarely at the teen horror market.
"We see this as a unique, character-driven thriller with a supernatural edge, based on a timeless concept and enhanced by recent visual effects advances," producer Martha De Laurentiis said. The hope is to shoot the movie sometime during 2011.