Stephen King Shares His 2025 Movie Picks, From ‘Companion’ to ‘The Long Walk’

Stephen King isn’t just dominating screens with new adaptations of his own work — he’s also keeping a close eye on what everyone else is making. The horror icon has revealed his favorite movies of 2025 so far, a list that swings from intimate body horror to political apocalypse. Fittingly, it also includes two adaptations of his own stories, underscoring just how deeply King’s imagination is woven into today’s film landscape.

From Killer Robots to Occult Westerns

On the top of King’s radar is Companion, a twisty sci‑fi thriller about a group of friends at a lake house and a secretly robotic guest. The film’s smart riff on AI anxiety and a standout performance from Sophie Thatcher have made it one of the year’s most acclaimed genre titles. King’s enthusiasm for it lines up with a broader wave of smart, character-driven science fiction at the box office.

Horror looms large across his list. The Australian chiller Bring Her Back turns a demonic ritual into a raw story about grief and family, while New Zealand’s The Rule of Jenny Pen takes psychological horror into an elder-care home with chilling performances from Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow. King also singles out Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a mystery-horror hit about a classroom of vanished students that has already sparked talk of a prequel.

Genre mashups appeal to him too. Ned Crowley’s supernatural Western Killing Faith sends a formerly enslaved woman and her daughter across a brutal 1849 frontier in search of a faith healer, blending spiritual horror with classic Western imagery. Kathryn Bigelow’s apocalyptic thriller A House of Dynamite shifts from dusty plains to nuclear panic, following U.S. officials as they respond to a missile launched at Chicago.

King on King: ‘The Long Walk’ and a Year of Adaptations

For readers, the most tantalizing entries on King’s favorites list are the projects drawn from his own back catalogue. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk, adapted from the 1979 Richard Bachman novel, imagines a totalitarian America where 50 boys must keep walking in a deadly, televised marathon. Critics have praised the film as a timely, emotionally rich take on one of King’s bleakest dystopias, and it joins a crowded slate of recent and upcoming adaptations like The Monkey and The Institute already expanding King’s world on screen.

That momentum shows no sign of slowing. 2025 alone brings new takes on The Life of Chuck, The Running Man, and the prequel series It: Welcome to Derry, part of a long line of screen projects that keep older works — from the original It miniseries, now streaming for new fans — in constant circulation. A roundup of all confirmed 2025 King adaptations highlights just how active the pipeline has become across film and TV.

It’s not just King either. His son Joe Hill is pushing the family legacy forward with new screen projects of his own, ensuring that the King universe — in print and on screen — will continue to evolve. For book lovers, King’s 2025 watchlist doubles as a viewing guide and a reminder: the line between page and screen has never been thinner, and his stories remain at the center of that conversation.