My opinion on The Mist may change in the future but for now, my initial reaction was of disappointment. Mostly of how the FX looked. Spielberg and Winston set the bar pretty high with their work on Jurassic Park and it's been downhill ever since for CGI.
My favorite King adaptation is The Shawshank Redemption. That film is pristine. Frank took a perfect novella and made an even better movie. Couldn't have believed that was possible. When I first read Different Seasons back in 1982 I put that story on my short list (along with The Mist ironically) as stories I wanted to adapt to film if I got the chance one day.
I also love Misery and Stand By Me. Mick Garris deserves a lot of credit for what he did for his work on The Stand and The Shining. Kubrick's version is a great horror movie but as an adaptation, it basically fails. The TV movie follows the book and has a lot of great moments and fantastic music. The Stand is amazing but suffers from bad FX.
Love The Dead Zone, Cujo and Pet Sematary too.
I don't know where the Dark Tower series is in negotiations but I would love to see it show up as an HBO series where they don't have to worry about the MPAA or individual film length. They could probably do all 7 books in a couple seasons (10 episodes x 2 = 24 hours - 1st/last 2 hours each). Then, as King writes more, they can add seasons. This would be better than multiple features over probably a decade and 100's of millions of dollars in budgets.
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