Has the day arrived when we can watch new Tom Hiddleston projects without joking about Loki variants?

Stephen King is large! He contains multitudes! Your elderly parents’ dismissal of him notwithstanding, he hasn’t been “just” The King of Horror since at least the mid-’80s, though it can be hard to keep in mind considering the King-based film majority. Whenever one of his 60,000 works are adapted into something other than a zero-budget splatterpunk B-movie or modestly funded “elevated horror” streamer-filler, the trailers will always caution, “No, hey, don’t make that face, it’s cool, we promise this isn’t the Stephen King of Sleepwalkers or Maximum Overdrive or The Lawnmower Man! This is the OTHER Stephen King! Y’know, the one who single-handedly kept the basic-cable industry alive with looping reruns of Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption!”

That Stephen King returns with a semi-fantasy of bittersweet lyricism in The Life of Chuck, whose box-office figures have been grim, yet might hopefully earn a home-video renaissance in its next medium, where it doesn’t have to compete against the bigger studios’ re-nuked kiddie leftovers. Alas, today’s theaters can only contain up to 1.5 multitudes at a time.

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