Firestarter began as a very different project from the film that reached theaters. While John Carpenter was working on The Thing, Universal offered him the chance to direct the Stephen King adaptation. Carpenter hired Bill Lancaster to write a screenplay that King approved, and later commissioned another version from Bill Phillips with Richard Dreyfuss considered for the role of Andy McGee. But The Thing performed poorly at the box office, and Universal removed Carpenter from Firestarter before production. Mark L. Lester was brought in instead and hired Stanley Mann to write a script that stayed closer to King’s novel than the abandoned Carpenter-era drafts. The change illustrates how quickly a studio’s confidence could shift after a single commercial disappointment: Carpenter went from being entrusted with a high-profile King property to being displaced before filming, while the eventual production became the first movie made at De Laurentiis’s new North Carolina studio complex. Firestarter’s shoot subsequently helped establish Wilmington as a major film-production center, but its original Carpenter connection survives mainly in the discarded screenplays and the studio’s reaction to The Thing’s underperformance.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1980s
Universal Replaced John Carpenter after The Thing Underperformed
Firestarter / 1980s
Firestarter began as a very different project from the film that reached theaters. While John Carpenter was working on The Thing, Universal offered him the chance to direct the Stephen King adaptation. Carpenter hired Bill Lancaster to write a screenplay that King approved, and later commissioned another version from Bill Phillips with Richard Dreyfuss considered for the role of Andy McGee. But The Thing performed poorly at the box office, and Universal removed Carpenter from Firestarter before production. Mark L. Lester was brought in instead and hired Stanley Mann to write a script that stayed closer to King’s novel than the abandoned Carpenter-era drafts. The change illustrates how quickly a studio’s confidence could shift after a single commercial disappointment: Carpenter went from being entrusted with a high-profile King property to being displaced before filming, while the eventual production became the first movie made at De Laurentiis’s new North Carolina studio complex. Firestarter’s shoot subsequently helped establish Wilmington as a major film-production center, but its original Carpenter connection survives mainly in the discarded screenplays and the studio’s reaction to The Thing’s underperformance.
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