Stephen King Box Office Bomb Finds New Life As Global Streaming Hit 4 Years Later

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Zac Efron with misty eyes in Firestarter (2022)

Felipe Rangel is a Superheroes Lead Writer and Reviewer at ScreenRant. He has been writing about movies and TV since 2021, with a focus on superhero projects. Felipe joined ScreenRant in 2022, working across different teams, covering everything from breaking news to features to reviews and more. Since the launch of the Superheroes vertical in 2023, he has focused his efforts on coming up with insightful analyses of Marvel and DC's projects.

Felipe is a writer who is an avid film and TV fan, with superhero movies and series being his biggest passion. He graduated from college in 2019, having studied Journalism. Before college, he spent a month studying at the Oxford English Centre. His superhero knowledge expands to the comics, with his undergraduate thesis being "Politics Reflected In American Comics."

A Stephen King adaptation has become a major streaming hit four years after its theatrical run ended in disappointment. Several adaptations of King's books have been released over the last few years, both in theaters and on streaming. One of them was IT: Welcome to Derry, which went on to become a major performer for HBO Max with its first season.

Other Stephen King movies and TV shows released in 2025 include The Life of Chuck, The Running Man, The Long Walk, The Monkey, and The Institute. While not all of them were hits, be it commercially or with critics, the adaptations still performed strongly on streaming. Now, HBO Max's lineup of projects for the year sees the arrival of a 2022 Stephen King movie, which finally resurges.

According to FlixPatrol, Firestarter is the 4th most-watched movie on HBO Max worldwide. The only three movies that stand above the supernatural thriller are Sleepless, the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, and, in first place, Leonardo DiCaprio's star-studded One Battle After Another. Firestarter was released on May 13, 2022.

Firestarter is currently trending in 20 countries. Out of those, the Stephen King movie ranks as the most-watched film on HBO Max in three countries: the Bahamas, Belize, and Haiti. In the United States, Firestarter is available on Netflix, not HBO Max. Instead, the latter's streaming charts are dominated by the Twilight franchise, with all five of the vampire movies trending nationwide.

On the Netflix charts, 2022's Firestarter does not find its way onto the streamer's top ten movies list in the United States. That chart is led by another book adaptation, the rom-com People We Meet on Vacation, based on Emily Henry's popular novel. The Stephen King adaptation has a low 10% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Firestarter 2022 Cast and Character Guide

The remake of Steven King's Firestarter boasts an exceptionally diverse cast. Here is a guide to who is in the film and what characters they portray.

When it comes to its audience score, Firestarter does not rank much higher, having a 47% score from viewers at the time of writing. The Stephen King book adaptation grossed $15 million worldwide in its theatrical run. Based on the film's reported budget of $12 million, Firestarter needed to land between $24 million and $30 million just to break even. The film lost the studio millions.

Firestarter stars Zac Efron as Andy McGee, a telepath who is concerned about the destructive power of his young daughter, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who is a powerful pyrokinetic who can lose control of her powers in angry outbursts.

A previous movie adaptation starring Drew Barrymore was released in 1984, with a two-part sequel miniseries, Firestarter: Rekindled, released in 2002. Now, the latest version of Firestarter resurges as a global streaming hit.