JT Mollner received a ton of acclaim for last year’s thriller Strange Darling, including from us, and it has only led to bigger things. Mollner is the screenwriter of Francis Lawrence’s Stephen King adaptation, The Long Walk, that opens later this year. And now Mollner is sticking with King for another film, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
THR reports that Mollner will write and direct an adaptation of King’s 1999 horror novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. The story follows a nine-year-old girl who gets separated from her family in the deep woods and lost for days. Her only means of survival? A few items of food, a soda, her Walkman, and her love for Major League Baseball pitcher Tom Gordon, which manifests in critical ways.
“JT is a filmmaker we believe has a bright future,” said Lionsgate Motion Picture Group president Erin Westerman in a press statement. “Throughout his work, he creates characters, and especially young characters, that are so compelling, heartbreaking, and emotional that they pop off the screen. And of course, that’s what Stephen King does on the page as well. The story of survival and perseverance in “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” is timeless. We’ve loved this tale for a long time, and JT is the perfect choice to adapt and direct this King fan favorite.”
Mollner, who also wrote and directed the 2017 western Outlaws & Angels (review of that one here), is on a roll. More on The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon should be made available soon. There have been multiple attempts to bring King’s novel to the big screen. George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead) was attached to a version before his death, and Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) was announced as director in 2020, but that attempt fell apart.
