Re: Selected programming for July 7-13, 2025

On Jul 11, 2025 at 11:22:02 PM PDT, "Robin Miller"
<robin.miller@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Brick        (movie)          (3:01 am, Netflix)
 
When a mysterious brick wall encloses their apartment building
overnight, Tim and Olivia must unite with their wary neighbors to get
out alive. German film; 1h 39m.

This sounds an awful lot like Stephen King's story THE CANNIBALS, which was a
novel King wrote half of just after he graduated college and then abandoned
before reworking and finishing it years later as UNDER THE DOME.

In King's story about 100 residents of a large high-rise apartment building
wake up one morning to find they can't exit the building. The doors seem to
all be impenetrable, as if they're welded shut, and the window glass won't
break. Nothing will penetrate them or the walls. One resident even fires a gun
at one of the windows and it doesn't even leave a scratch. No phones will work
and people passing by outside don't seem to notice the resident in the windows
banging on them and calling for help.

The rest of the story follows everyone in the building as they come to terms
with their new prison and how they break off into factions and become more and
more feral and violent as time goes on. Unfortunately it abruptly ends about
100 pages in where King got bored with it and threw it in a drawer for 25
years.

The Institute        [new]        (9 and 10 pm, two episodes, MGM+)
 
Adapted from Stephen King's novel of the same name by former Justified
writer Benjamin Cavell, this thriller centers on a teen genius who is
kidnapped and taken to a mysterious facility filled with other children
with unusual abilities. Joe Freeman, Mary-Louise Parker, and Ben Barnes
star. Eight episodes running through August 24. Regular time is 9 pm only.

I was wondering what happened to this. When the book was first announced, it
was mentioned that the film rights had already been sold before it was even
published.