19 Years Later, The Stephen King Adaptation That Rewrote the Book's Ending Is Still the Bleakest Film Ever
Stephen King gave The Mist a glimmer of hope; the 2007 film ripped it away, closing with a merciless twist that left audiences hollow. It’s the bleak reimagining that turned a hopeful ending into pure despair.
Stephen King wrote The Mist with a glimmer of hope. Frank Darabont filmed it like hope was a myth. And King, who usually hates what Hollywood does to his books, actually loved that choice. Same story, two wildly different vibes.
The book hedges its bets. The movie goes for the jugular.
King's novella sends its survivors, including dad David Drayton and his son, into the fog looking for a safe place that might or might not exist. It's unresolved but not hopeless.
Darabont's 2007 movie? No such kindness. After days of driving through a nightmare with no end in sight, David and the remaining survivors decide they're out of options. With their consent, he shoots everyone in the car, including his young son, to spare them what they think is coming. Then he steps out to meet his own end.
And that's when the universe plays its cruelest joke: the military rolls out of the mist, flamethrowers blazing, clearing the creatures. Rescue was literally minutes away. David screams, and the movie leaves him there, crushed under the weight of what he just did.
"It was so anti-Hollywood - anti-everything, really! It was nihilistic. I liked that."
That's Stephen King in 2017, telling Yahoo Entertainment that Darabont's bleak ending hit him in the best possible (worst possible) way.
Darabont almost explained the mist... then Andre Braugher talked him out of it
The finished film opens on a nasty storm, a thick bank of fog rolling in over the water, and the Draytons heading to the supermarket just as things start to get weird. Simple, ominous, effective.
But according to a Looper piece from November 2025, Darabont once planned a very different opening: a military lab accident that unleashes the mist. Over dinner, Andre Braugher (who plays Brent Norton) asked the obvious question: do we really need to see that? Darabont realized he would probably cut it in the edit anyway, so he pivoted and kept the cause offscreen. Good call. Mystery beats exposition nine times out of ten.
Remember the 2017 TV series? The ending you probably forgot is... something
The Mist got a second life as a TV show in 2017, and it did not stick the landing. The season finale brings in the military as a train stops, only for a bunch of inmates to spill out. The big reveal: the army isn't there to save anyone. They're part of a long-running experiment that is literally feeding the monster. No second season, no real closure, just a shrug and credits.
- 2007 film: devastating, unforgettable ending that King himself praised.
- 2017 series: military train, inmates, the army is feeding the thing... then canceled before it answered anything.
If you somehow missed the movie and want to ruin your day in a very specific way, The Mist is streaming on Plex. And if you did see both versions: which ending sticks with you, for better or worse?