‘Throttle’: Stephen King and Joe Hill’s Short Story Is Getting an HBO Max Film!!

The streaming wars have been incredibly good to Stephen King. It feels like virtually every service has a piece of the King pie – Netflix handled Gerald’s Game and 1922, DirecTV got Mr. Mercedes, Apple TV+ is developing Lisey’s Story, Hulu has Castle Rock, and HBO just enjoyed a huge ratings hit with The Outsider. HBO’s parent company Warner Bros. is busily cranking out King adaptations for the multiplexes (whenever they open back up), including last year’s It: Chapter Two and Doctor Sleep and the recently announced Revival. Now, reports that HBO Max is throwing its hat into the streaming wars to adapt King’s short story Throttle into a film, as reported by Comingsoon. Luckily HBO is so familiar with the Game of Thrones. (Get it? Because they’re all fighting over the King? Ehhh, you get it.)

Appropriately, King wrote Throttle, a story about a father and son who lead a motorcycle gang being relentlessly pursued by a big rig, with his son Joe Hill. Hill is no stranger to the streaming wars either, having penned the graphic novel Locke & Key with artist Gabriel Rodríguez that was recently adapted into a series by Netflix. If Throttle sounds a little familiar, that’s intentional – it was originally included in a collection titled He Is Legend, a tribute to influential author Richard Matheson. King and Hill’s novella is a specific nod to Matheson’s story Duel, which was famously adapted into a film by a young Steven Spielberg.

The adaptation will be written by Leigh Dana Jackson (Sleepy Hollow, Raising Dion) and produced by David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight, Terminator: Dark Fate) with Keith Levine. Obviously, there’s no news of when production might begin just yet, as pretty much everything is still shut down. So it’s a safe bet that we won’t actually get to see the film for another or two at least. As a fan of King, Hill, Spielberg, and Matheson, I’m extremely curious to see how Throttle turns out, and how it compares to its classic inspiration Duel.