Why We Want It: It's been frequently called the finest science fiction novel ever written. Stranger follows an orphan human left to fend for himself on Mars and raised by the strange, native race that inhabits the red planet. He returns to Earth as a full-grown man with powers no one has ever seen, and proceeds to bring a new breed of love and religion to a populace too scared to accept the magnanimity of his gifts. It's part Gospel of Matthew, part The Man Who Fell to Earth and all in all one of the best books ever written on the miracle that is humanity.
Why It's a Bad Idea: The thing about blasphemy and heresy in art? People tend to accept it better when it's presented as a willful evil. Like the time that artist Andres Serrano sold a picture of a crucifix drowned in a jar full of his urine. Everyone knew he was trying to piss off the faithful, and on one level we accept that. Stranger presents a free-love society as superhuman and vastly superior to conventional worship, and deftly co-opts God himself into what most people would consider a cult.
The utopia that Heinlein paints with his Martian protagonist would anger every single halfway religious person in the country, while its heavy Christian symbolism would alienate the rest. Plus, in retrospect the book is a pretty sexist work that would make Don Draper wince. Like Atlas Shrugged, Stranger is a novel that deep readers can appreciate for its merits, but that the rest of the world tends to view as a dangerous book.
Oh, and we're pretty sure all the sex would make it NC-17 anyway.
How About Instead We Film: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Actually, instead of making a movie out of Heinlein's ode to moon independence and the birth of artificial intelligence, we'd love to see BioWare take a stab at adapting it into a video game series along the line of Mass Effect. The ending is already kind of disappointing anyway, so they have experience.
Why We Want It: Well, it's Stephen King, and most of his books make pretty damn good adaptations. The Shining, Carrie, Shawshank Redemption, Misery and a host of lesser but still excellent movies. Rage was the first book that King published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, and follows a deranged high school student that holds his class hostage at gunpoint while forcing them to endure a round of psychological discussions that seriously unhinges them all. It's a violent look at the pressures of youth that so often lead people to brutal violence.
Why It's a Bad Idea: Rage is one of the only Stephen King books that remains out of print at the request of King himself. Why? No less than four school shootings or hostage situations involving students were at least partially inspired by the novel. The connection became so disturbing that King no longer felt comfortable with it being widely available. As violent shootings at school are still an unfortunate part of current America, a film with an armed protagonist would likely be seen as too offensive for release, even if King allowed the rights to be sold in the first place.
How About Instead We Film: The Eyes of the Dragon. Call it Game of Thrones light, with Flagg as the villain and plenty of executions. Seriously, someone should take the book and treat it like a 90-minute Game of Thrones episode, and nothing but magic would happen.
