Stephen King’s ‘The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon’ Movie Finally Steps Up to the Plate

After years of false starts and vanished announcements, Stephen King’s quiet survival chiller The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is finally back on the adaptation scoreboard — with Lionsgate officially moving ahead on a feature film written and directed by JT Mollner.

First published in 1999 by Scribner, the novel follows nine-year-old Trisha McFarland, who wanders off a hiking trail and ends up lost in the Maine woods with nothing but her Walkman, her Red Sox cap, and an imaginary version of her pitching idol Tom Gordon to keep her company. It’s one of King’s most stripped-down, psychological stories — and one fans have been begging to see on screen for more than two decades.*

From stalled projects to a greenlit vision

A film version of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon has been floating around Hollywood since at least 2019, when the adaptation was first announced and later briefly linked to director Lynne Ramsay. Rights shifted again over the next few years before Lionsgate came in with a fresh option and tapped filmmaker JT Mollner to both write and direct the new movie.*

King himself sounds relieved that the project has finally found a home. “I’m thrilled that my book is being brought to the screen,” he said in an earlier interview about the adaptation, adding his support as Lionsgate touted Mollner’s knack for crafting complex, emotionally rich young characters. That focus should fit a story that spends most of its time inside the mind of a terrified child, where the real horror is isolation, hunger, and the sense that something unseen is stalking just out of sight.

For readers who love King’s more claustrophobic work, Trisha’s ordeal sits comfortably beside the likes of King’s most intense tales of isolated terror, trading killer clowns and haunted hotels for mud, mosquitoes, and the oppressive silence of the forest.

A new wave of Stephen King on screen

The timing of Tom Gordon’s renewed momentum is no accident. The film will join a crowded slate of King adaptations hitting screens between 2024 and 2026, from Mike Flanagan’s new Carrie series at Amazon* to big-screen takes on The Long Walk, The Life of Chuck, and a new version of The Running Man already dated for 2025.**

It also deepens a mini-boom around King’s more offbeat projects. Recent years have seen everything from Hulu’s time-twisting 11.22.63 finding new life on streaming to niche favorites like Mr. Mercedes and Castle Rock building cult followings. In that landscape, a small-scale survival thriller about a lost girl and the imaginary ballplayer who keeps her going feels perfectly poised to become King’s next sleeper hit.

For longtime Constant Readers, the movie is an excuse to revisit one of King’s most quietly devastating novels. For newcomers, it might be proof that some of his scariest stories don’t need monsters at all — just a child, a darkening forest, and the thin crackle of a radio broadcast drifting in and out of range.

Part of our full guide: Stephen King Adaptations in 2026: What Is Filming, What Was Cancelled and What Is Next