Stephen King and Joe Hill's jointly written novella Throttle is being turned into a feature film, and here's what we know about it so far. While there are many advantages to having a rich and famous father, there are also issues. If one doesn't become as rich and famous as their dad, they can be seen as a disappointment, and if that same person decides to enter the same field as their father, the comparisons will begin immediately. Thankfully for Joe Hill, he's managed to carve out a very respectable career of his own, despite having Stephen King to measure up to.
King is of course the "master of horror," and one of the most popular authors in the history of book sales being tracked. While best known for horror, King has also excelled when delving into drama, crime, sci-fi, fantasy, and comedy, and it sometimes feels like there isn't a type of story he can't successfully write. Since Hill has mostly worked in horror, that only increased the comparisons to his father.
Would Hill be as successful as he is without King to provide him a springboard into the publishing world? That's debatable, but for the first several years of his career, Hill tried his best to distance his work from his legendary dad. In more recent times, they've written a couple stories together, including Throttle, which is set to become a movie soon. Here's everything we know.
Throttle Release Date
It was first announced that the 2009 Stephen King/Joe Hill novella Throttle would become a movie in March 2017. However, things went quiet afterward, until May 2020, when it was confirmed that the project was now in development at the new HBO Max streaming service. Leigh Dana Jackson, a writer/producer for the Netflix series Raising Dion is penning the script for Throttle, with David Goyer's Phase Four Films producing. With things still in the early stages - the project has changed creative hands since the original 2017 report - it's impossible to guess when the Throttle movie will arrive on HBO Max. That all depends on when filming starts.
Throttle Story Details
Directly inspired by the Richard Matheson story Duel - which itself was adapted into a terrific early film by Steven Spielberg - Throttle focuses on a traveling war between a mysterious trucker and an outlaw biker gang on the most barren roads of the Nevada desert. It's unclear how close Jackson's script will stick to Hill and King's prose, but considering how well Duel lent itself to the film format, one assumes Throttle will be readily adaptable as well. Interestingly, Duel first aired as a TV movie of the week, so Throttle should be right at home on the small screen.