Want to know the best Stephen King movies? How about the worst Stephen King movies? Curious about Stephen King ’s box office grosses or which Stephen King movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Stephen King movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Stephen King (1947-) has sold over 350 million copies of his books. It all got started in 1973 when Carrie was first published. Hollywood has been making movies based on his books since 1976…when Carrie starring John Travolta hit theaters. King has written over 50 more books and Hollywood has been producing almost two King theatrical movies or television movies every year since!
This page will rank Stephen King theatrical movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Normally we are snobs when it comes to movies made for television. However for this page we have included a second table of King television adaptations. They are ranked by how critics and audiences rated them. We have to admit that some of the King mini-series are actually very entertaining and worth watching. Storm of the Century, The Stand and 1979’s Salem’s Lot….being our favorites.
…the highest rated movie on IMDb.com
Stephen King Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Stephen King Movies Can Be Ranked 7 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Stephen King movies by co-stars of his movies
- Sort Stephen King movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
- Sort Stephen King by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Stephen King movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Stephen King movie received.
- Sort Stephen King movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
- Lawnmower 2 was titled after a Stephen King short story of the same title, but the stories are unrelated and was NOT written by King.
Stephen King Made For Television Movies
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Stephen King television movies by year it was made
- Sort Stephen King television movies by the stars of the movie
- Sort Stephen King television movies by trivia for the movie
- Sort Stephen King television movies how they were received by audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie
| Rank | Movie (Year) | Year | Stars | Trivia | Opinion |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storm of the Century | 1999 | Tim Daly | Won 1 Emmy | 74.0% | |
| The Stand | 1994 | Gary Sinise & Rob Lowe | Won Two Emmys | 73.0% | |
| Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King | 2006 | Robert Mammone | Won 2 Emmys | 71.0% | |
| It | 1990 | John Ritter & Tim Curry | Won 1 Emmy | 69.0% | |
| Salem's Lot | 1979 | James Mason | 3 Emmy nominations | 68.0% | |
| Rose Red | 2002 | Nancy Travis | Nominated for 1 Emmy | 67.0% | |
| Salem's Lot | 2004 | Rob Lowe | Nominate for 1 Emmy | 62.0% | |
| The Langoliers | 1995 | Dean Stockwell | Nominated for 1 Emmy | 61.0% | |
| The Shining | 1997 | Steven Weber & Rebecca De Mornay | Won 2 Emmys | 61.0% | |
| Bag of Bones | 2011 | Pierce Brosnan | 2nd King project for Brosnan | 58.0% | |
| Big Driver | 2014 | Maria Bello | 2nd King project for Bello | 57.0% | |
| Sometimes They Come Back | 1991 | Tim Matheson | Filmed in 30 days | 57.0% | |
| Carrie | 2002 | Patricia Clarkson | 2nd of 3 Carrie adaptations | 55.0% | |
| The Tommyknockers | 1993 | Jimmy Smiths & Marg Helgenberger | Nominated for 1 Emmy | 54.0% | |
| Desperation | 2006 | Tom Skerrit & Steven Weber | Nominated for 2 Emmys | 53.0% | |
| Childred of the Corn | 2009 | David Anders | One of 9 Children of the Corn adapatations | 39.0% | |
| Trucks | 1997 | Timothy Busfield | TV version of Maximum Overdrive | 38.0% |
Possibly Interesting Facts About Stephen King Movies
1. Two Stephen King movies have been nominated for Best Picture Oscars®….1994’s The Shawshank Redemption and 1999’s The Green Mile.
2. Five actors have been nominated for an acting Oscar® while performing in a Stephen King movie: Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie in 1976’s Carrie, Kathy Bates in 1990’s Misery, Morgan Freeman in 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption and Michael Clarke Duncan in 1999’s The Green Mile.
3. Kathy Bates won the Best Actress Oscar® for her role as Annie Wilkes in King’s Misery (1990).
4. Stephen King starred in 1982’s Creepshow and directed 1986’s Maximum Overdrive.
5. Stephen King was very disappointed in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). He has described the film as “A fancy car without an engine.”
6. Jeffrey DeMunn has appeared in four Stephen King screen adaptions: 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, 1999’s The Green Mile, 1999’s Storm of the Century and 2007’s The Mist. DeMunn played Dale Horvath on The Walking Dead from 2010 to 2012.
7. In our database we have 25,314 movies ranked. King’s The Green Mile is the 154th highest rated movie….on the other of the spectrum….King’s Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace is the 25,301st highest rated movie….or 13th worst.
8. Check out Stephen King ‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Steve Lensman’s Stephen King You Tube Video
If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.
Boy does this page need an update….it looks pretty horrible…..tables don’t match….I am here to attach Steve’s King video….and I see I need to do some work. King video on page now….my comment found on his channel is below. Mental to note to self…fix this page.
I like the new beginning music. Good new page….especially as people recover from Halloween. King’s material has been well used by television and movie makers for many years. Heck….it is getting close to 45 years since Carrie hit theaters. Of the 40 you list…I have seen 31 of them….much higher than I would have guessed…because I am not a horror fan at all. Favorites include#4 The Green Mile, #3 Stand By Me, #7 The Dead Zone and #30 Needful Things. I liked It, and want to see It 2, but not as much as my other 4 favorites. I wonder how far Doctor Sleep will move up or down in the future? Voted up and shared
Hi Bruce, yeah your Stephen King page needs an update, plus I had 55 movies marked down on my master list for the video so you could expand it a bit. I was lucky with Doctor Sleep as it had just opened in the UK and I could find ratings for it at Rotten Tomatoes, how will the ratings change over the next few weeks? We’ll see.
Being a horror fan did help my tally here, but considering you’re not you did really well. Your tally 31 of the 40 on the video, mine 32 and Flora 4.
Thanks for the comment, vote and share, always appreciated.
Time for a video break but I’ll be back, as Arnie says.
Hey Steve…..well the first two tables show his 44 movies released in theaters while the second one shows 17 more movies that only reached television sets…so we have a total of 61. The last table is a different type of table and it is causes the tables to look different. Maybe I will figure out something before I add Doctor Sleep next weekend. Hope you enjoy your mini-break. I see I just got edged by you in the tally count…congrats.
Best POSTERS/BOOK COVERS [I presume in some cases?] 1/Night Shift 2/2nd for Dreamcatcher 3/2nd for Dark Tower 4/Pet Cemetery 5/2nd for Dark Half 6/3rd for Needful Things 7/Silver Bullet 8/two for Cujo 9/2nd for Cat’s Eye10/set for Creepshow 11/Racy one for Gerald’s Game 12/ 2nd one for The Stand 13/two for The Mist 14/1st one for The Shining 15/2nd one for Shawshank Redemption 16/1408 17/two for Tommyknockers 18/two for Bag od Bones 19/set for The Dead Zone, possibly my favourite King story/film.***
My pick of the STILLS 1/Sleepwalkers 2/Dreamcatcher 3/1408 4/Salem’s Lot 5/Misery 6/The Shining/7 Shawshank Redemption 8/Green Mile – awful film in my opinion; I switched off the TV after half- an- hour. ***
***Plus MOST material for IT, Carrie and Pet Cemetery, the standard being fairly even throughout I enjoyed 1990’s IT but the later version bored me and I switched off the TV set about half-way through. This must have been quite a complex video for you to compile, requiring close research, given the diverse elements of King’s careers. Anyway it earned a 98.5% satisfactory rating from me and in fact I have now watched it 3 times.
You and WH agree on, in slightly different order ,4 of King’s Top 5 for Review. Bruce includes Misery in his 5 instead of your choice of The Green Mile. From what I have said above it won’t be hard for you to deduce that I back his choice. I see from the post immediately below my Part One of this post that 3 years ago on Halloween you were trying to scare WH with a “Boo”!
Hi Bob, thanks for reviewing my ‘King of Horror’ video, the generous rating, info and trivia are much appreciated.
Happy you liked the posters, stills, lobby cards and book covers. I thought it’d be interesting if I included a few of King’s book covers along with the posters.
I left out a bunch of King’s lowest rated films including Maximum Overdrive which he directed. And I included a few TV Movies some of which are more fondly remembered than the movies.
You and Flora might enjoy Salem’s Lot (1979), which stars David Soul and has a great role for movie legend James Mason. It has scary moments but has very little gore, the rat-faced head vampire is played by Reggie Nalder, he played the assassin at the Albert Hall in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
I was lucky in that the latest King adaptation – Doctor Sleep – had just opened in the UK and I could find ratings for it at Rotten Tomatoes, so the video is up to date. Doctor Sleep is King’s sequel to The Shining.
Four Stephen King films scored 10 out of 10 from my sources – Stand By Me, The Shining, Carrie (1976) and The Shawshank Redemption.
There are no 9’s. Six more scored 8 out of 10 including Misery and The Dead Zone.
Shawshank tops all charts, I like it but it’s not my favorite King film.I prefer Carrie (1976) and Kubrick’s The Shining. I also have a soft spot for Salems Lot.
King on why he disliked Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980) – “Jack Torrance as written was someone who was a nice guy that then went over the edge, not someone who flew the cuckoo’s nest from the outset. There was no moral struggle at all.”
King on his fear of the number 13 – “The number 13 never fails to trace that old icy finger up and down my spine. When I’m writing, I’ll never stop work if the page number is 13 or a multiple of 13; I’ll just keep on typing till I get to a safe number. I always take the last two steps on my back stairs as one, making 13 into 12. There were after all 13 steps on the English gallows up until 1900 or so. When I’m reading, I won’t stop on page 94, 193, or 382, since the sums of these numbers add up to 13.”
Btw this is my last video for now. I’ll have a little break and hopefully be back in 10 days with more classic director videos.
Enjoy your weekend. Has Brexit happened yet? eh? [who laughed?] 😉
HI STEVE
Thanks for the very comprehensive feedback.
I must look out for Salem’s Lot. I had actually Doctor Sleep down in my notes for listing among my pick of your posters, but must have overlooked it while transcribing from the notes to the post. Anyway now you know I admired that material too.
I hope you enjoy your break. Brexit if it comes at all is still like the man and his wheelbarrow: it’s all ahead of us!