Stephen King’s THE INSTITUTE Will Become A Limited Series

Stephen King's The Institute hits stores today, and you know what that means: Hollywood's already greenlit an adaptation. According to a new report over at Deadline, Jack Bender and David E. Kelley, the creative team behind DirecTV's successful Mr. Mercedes series, are on board to direct and write the show, respectively. 

A quick refresher on The Institute, for those of you who've not read it yet (which must be almost literally all of you, given that - once again - it just arrived in stores today): it's basically Stephen King's take on The New Mutants: 

"In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”

In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute."

It is unknown at this time where The Institute may end up, but - given Bender and Kelley's established relationship with the platform - DirecTV doesn't seem out of the question. Guess we'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, I suppose we should all read The Insititute, which (despite its somewhat familiar setup) has been raking in rave reviews from those who've read it.

Stay tuned for more on this one as further updates roll in.