Before it was even published back in 2017, Stephen King and Owen King's Sleeping Beauties was in development as a TV series at Anonymous Content, and while the news front for the adaptation has been quiet for quite some time, it's now being reported that AMC has ordered a pilot episode script for the potential series about a world where all of the women have fallen into a deep slumber... and become violent if awoken.
Deadline reports that AMC "made a pilot script commitment" for a potential Sleeping Beauties series, with Owen King writing the script and Michael Sugar and Ashley Zalta executive producing through Sugar23, a production banner with a first-look deal at Anonymous Content (Sugar and Zalta picked up the rights to adapt Sleeping Beauties when they were at Anonymous Content).
Here's what Stephen King had to say about the deal with AMC (via Deadline):
"I’m tremendously excited to see Sleeping Beauties brought to life in a format that will allow the story to be told as it was meant to be told, in all its mystery and drama."
We'll have to wait and see if AMC moves forward with filming a pilot episode, let alone a full Sleeping Beauty series (although an "open ended TV series" is reportedly the goal), but we'll keep Daily Dead readers updated as more details come in. For those unfamiliar with Sleeping Beauties, we have the official synopsis and cover art below:
"In this spectacular New York Times bestselling father/son collaboration that “barrels along like a freight train” (Publishers Weekly), Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men?
In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent. And while they sleep they go to another place, a better place, where harmony prevails and conflict is rare. One woman, the mysterious “Eve Black,” is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Eve a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain?
Abandoned, left to their increasingly primal urges, the men divide into warring factions, some wanted to kill Eve, some to save her. Others exploit the chaos to wreak their own vengeance on new enemies. All turn to violence in a suddenly all-male world. Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a woman’s prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today.
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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