20th Century Studios seems to have a lot of confidence in their film adaptation of the famed Stephen King short story “The Boogeyman”.
This has resulted in the film being selected to screen in its entirety at this year’s CinemaCon event in Las Vegas on April 26th – more than a month ahead of the movie’s theatrical release on June 2nd.
The event is the largest gathering of movie theater owners from around the world and is open only to members of the entertainment industry and the press.
Though sizzle reels and new trailers are standard at the con, advanced showings of full films aren’t so common – only two others are confirmed thus far for this year, which will be “The Flash” which is also screening multiple weeks ahead of its theatrical release, along with the raunchy comedy “Joy Ride”.
Rob Savage (“Dashcam”) directs and “Stranger Things” producer Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps produces the film, which was initially made as a direct-to-Hulu effort. A test screening result in December however proved so good the studio opted to reconsider its release strategy.
The short story was one of twenty in King’s most famous 1973 short story collection, “Night Shift”, and was arguably the scariest work in the collection that included such stories as “Children of the Corn,” “Graveyard Shift,” “The Mangler” and “Sometimes They Come Back”.
The film boasts a quite different-sounding plot as it follows a sixteen-year-old (Sophie Thatcher) and her younger sister, still reeling from the death of their mother. They are targeted by a supernatural boogeyman after their psychologist father (Chris Messina) has an encounter with a desperate patient in their house.
Vivien Lyra Blair, David Dastmalchian, Marin Ireland, LisaGay Hamilton and Madison Hu also star. Mark Heyman (“Black Swan”), Scott Beck & Bryan Woods (“A Quiet Place”) and Akela Cooper (“Malignant”) all worked on the script.
Source: CinemaCon.com
