Barrymore had more idiosyncrasy, but Armstrong has a soft-edged scowl - she knows how to cry through her embers. Ryan Kiera Armstrong, the star of the new one, is 12. Hence a new “Firestarter,” updated to the present day.īarrymore, fresh off “E.T.,” was only eight years old when the first film was shot. There’s also the desire to remake the duds - to do it better, to make good where they went wrong. But as studios strip-mine the last half century of pop culture in search of IP that can hit chords of nostalgia, it isn’t only beloved shows and movies that are ripe for remakes. The original movie version of “Firestarter,” starring the ironically cuddly Drew Barrymore, came out in 1984, and it was probably the worst King adaptation to date - King himself was on record as hating it. There’s not a lot of psychodrama to her flames of hell. She and her telepathic father are being pursued by an ominous government agency, and her incendiary gift will flare up in response, but she has had this talent since birth. Yet unlike Carrie or Jack Torrance or the other protagonists of King’s best novels, Charlene “Charlie” McGee doesn’t have something grandly deep and meaningful to be angry about. And then there’s “ Firestarter.” It was a novel about a girl with the power - and the anger - of pyrokinesis.

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