Giving the thumbs up or seal of approval to an adaptation of your work is no guarantee of quality, even if the person in question happens to be Stephen King. Let’s not forget the iconic author detests Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but beyond that, he’s definitely among the minority to have enjoyed Pet Sematary: Bloodlines.
Initially pitched as a prequel to the remake that hit theaters and turned a profit while conspiring to disappoint back in 2019, director Lindsey Anderson Beer has since positioned her origin story as a precursor to King’s source material, not that it did anything to win over critics.
Bloodlines has been taking a pasting ever since it premiered, with wave upon wave of negative reviews slowly whittling its Rotten Tomatoes score down to a terrible 21 percent, which is hardly ideal considering it’s been blown out of the water by both the original Pet Sematary and the recent do-over, neither of which set the world alight with their own respective ratings of 51 and 56 percent.
Naturally, though, because we’re talking about a Stephen King movie being released in the spookiest month of the year, the underwhelming chiller has cast off the shackles of a drubbing to debut as the number one most-watched feature on the Paramount Plus global charts, per FlixPatrol.
Was there really going to be any other outcome? Not a chance, but it would be nice if the quality of King page-to-screen translations did a significantly better job of matching up to the rampant quantity.