Mike Flanagan’s Underrated Stephen King Epic Is Officially The Biggest Movie In The World

Published Oct 31, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Brennan Klein (he/him) is a senior news writer at Screen Rant, host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast, and contributor at Alternate Ending and Horror Press. He has been writing and podcasting about pop culture (especially horror movies) for over a decade at platforms including Blumhouse, Fangoria, Dread Central, The Backlot, and Arrow in the Head.

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Mike Flanagan is once again the king of Halloween. The filmmaker, who is behind horror movies such as Hush and Oculus as well as prestige Netflix miniseries including Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House, first adapted prolific horror author Stephen King when he helmed the 2017 psychological shocker Gerald's Game. Since then, he has become a go-to King adapter, mounting projects including the 2024 movie The Life of Chuck and Prime Video's new Carrie miniseries, which debuted at No. 1 on the Nielsen streaming chart with nearly 1.3 billion minutes viewed in its first five days.

One of his most underrated Stephen King projects is 2019's Doctor Sleep, which adapted the 2013 novel of the same name, which was a sequel to The Shining. While Stanley Kubrick's iconic 1980 film adaptation of The Shining was loosely adapted to the point that King has publicly disowned it, Flanagan managed to thread the needle between telling the story of the book, which follows a grown-up Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor), and including the iconography and continuity of the Kubrick movie. While it earned 79% from critics and 89% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, it underperformed at the box office.

Flanagan's Doctor Sleep Has Reawakened On HBO Max's Top 10

Choose the movie with the higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

In spite of its theatrical underperformance, Doctor Sleep is proving to be a streaming titan. As of October 30, it has climbed to become the most-watched movie on HBO Max worldwide. While the proximity of Halloween (which takes place on Saturday, October 31) has been helping horror movies climb the chart in general, Doctor Sleep managed to chart above much more recent genre titles, including 2024's The Beast Within (No. 6) and 2026's Evil Dead Burn (No. 4) and Mother Mary (No. 2), as well as the 2006 classic Silent Hill (No. 5).

Doctor Sleep has also surpassed the 2010 action-horror sequel Resident Evil: Afterlife (No. 8), which is most likely getting a bump thanks to the fact that Zach Cregger's Resident Evil recently made a splash in theaters. In fact, it has charted simultaneously on the Top 10 charts in two dozen territories across the globe, peaking at No. 1 in 16 of them, including Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru. It has done so in spite of the fact that it's not even streaming on HBO Max in the United States (where it is available on Paramount+).

The Film Nearly Launched A Whole King Franchise

If it weren't for its disappointing box office performance, Doctor Sleep might have kicked off an entire franchise of Stephen King adaptations. Originally, there were plans for the character of Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly in Doctor Sleep, Scatman Crothers in The Shining) to get a prequel movie, though these were scrapped. Flanagan had also expressed interest in a follow-up centering on the character Abra (Kyliegh Curran), a new kid with the shining who Danny fights to save from the villain Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson).

While these projects may never come to fruition (though Hallorann did appear in HBO Max's It: Welcome to Derry season 1 as played by Chris Chalk), it seems highly likely that the success of Mike Flanagan's Carrie is what helped Doctor Sleep dominate the chart in the first place. Given that the show is setting up its own version of a Stephen King universe that will most likely be explored in the upcoming Carrie season 2, the legacy of Doctor Sleep still lives on.