You can barely turn around these days without bumping into a Stephen King adaptation, with the legendary horror author proving to be one of the film and television industry’s most popular sources of content.
As a result, given the dozens upon dozens of his works to have been brought to screens both big and small over the course of almost half a century, there are some that either fall completely through the cracks or end up being lost in the shuffle. 1984’s Children of the Corn may have been a decent-sized box office success that swiftly gained cult classic status, but Redditors are demanding to know why it never gets held up as one of the most talked-about, widely-praised, or respected.
Not to try and point fingers, but the answer could lie with the fact the property has been well and truly run into the ground. While King-based franchises aren’t exactly a development that could be deemed out of the ordinary, few have been weaponized anywhere near as frequently as Children of the Corn.
After all, we’re talking about a short story – not even a full-fledged novel, remember – that ended up getting no less than eight sequels between 1993’s The Final Sacrifice and 2018’s Runaway, before being remade as a Syfy original film in 2009, prior to another remake spending years on the shelf, only to arrive earlier this year and wind up as one of the worst-reviewed King movies of all-time.
The first live-action stab at the source material isn’t exactly a unanimously beloved great, but perhaps people would hold it on a higher pedestal if it wasn’t then subjected to such a slew of subpar successors.