Streaming service Peacock has just dropped a new trailer for Firestarter, the second adaptation of Stephen King’s fiery story, after the 1984 version starring Drew Barrymore. Zac Efron (Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, The Greatest Showman) and Sydney Lemmon (Fear the Walking Dead, Succession) play parents whose daughter has uncanny pyrokinetic powers in this film.
Ryan Kiera Armstrong, from 2021s American Horror Story: Double Feature, plays the lead in this one. The trailer shows how her character, Charlie, struggles with her powers while being pursued by The Shop, a malicious government entity that wants to use her incendiary powers for military purposes. One scene sees her blow a cubical door off its hinges in a plume of fire. One of the characters claims that she might one day be as strong as a nuclear weapon.
Here’s the official synopsis for Firestarter:
For more than a decade, parents Andy and Vicky have been on the run, desperate to hide their daughter Charlie from a shadowy federal agency that wants to harness her unprecedented gift for creating fire into a weapon of mass destruction. Andy has taught Charlie how to defuse her power, which is triggered by anger or pain. But as Charlie turns 11, the fire becomes harder and harder to control. After an incident reveals the family’s location, a mysterious operative is deployed to hunt down the family and seize Charlie once and for all. Charlie has other plans.
You can check out the Firestarter trailer below:
The score, in particular, sounds electrifying. It would of course, because it was composed by horror music legend John Carpenter, along with fellow Halloween franchise composers Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. Firestarter is directed by Keith Thomas, based on a screenplay by Halloween Kills writer Scott Teems, and is produced by Jason Blum for Blumhouse. Akiva Goldsman produces for Weed Road Pictures.
Firestarter also stars Michael Greyeyes, Kurtwood Smith, John Beasley, Gloria Reuben, and will hit cinemas and Peacock on 13 May 2022.
We honestly don’t think any author had more of their works adapted for the big screen than Stephen King, save William Shakespeare. And this looks like it’ll be another one for the books, no pun intended.
