Critically-Panned Stephen King Remake Dominates Hulu Streaming Charts: “One of the worst movies ever made”

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Elena Kampouris, 2020. © RLJE Films /Courtesy Everett Collection

Growing up, my partner’s mom used to call him Malachai whenever he misbehaved. Such is the legacy of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn. The short story was first adapted in 1984 with Fritz Kiersch’s classic, and against all odds, the film proved to be a bountiful Horror harvest, yielding not just a sequel, but an entire franchise.

In 2022, Kurt Wimmer’s soft reboot was released after years in distributor limbo. Now, that Children of the Corn has cracked the Top 10 most streamed movies on Horror-movies-streaming-now-on-hulu/”>Hulu.

Check out a trailer and synopsis below.

Per Hulu: Possessed by a spirit in a dying cornfield, twelve-year-old Eden recruits the other children in her small town to rise up and take control. Tired of having to pay the price for their parents’ mistakes, Eden leads the kids on a bloody rampage…

Those ellipses are part of the formal Hulu synopsis, though it might as well end with a sigh. Look, I’m glad audiences are resonating with this new (old) take on King’s material, but when I reviewed the film last year, I really didn’t find much to love. At the time, I wrote, “Children of the Corn is not a good movie. It’s not a good reboot. In fact, at times, it barely even feels like a finished movie.”

It might sound harsh, but there was so little worth recommending, and I say that as someone without particularly strong feelings toward either the original or King’s short. Still, fans have been eager to gobble it up, and they’ve shared their thoughts online.