Stand By Me premiered nationwide in the U.S. exactly 40 years ago today, on August 22, 1986, and the film’s three surviving stars are marking the milestone the same way they’ve spent much of this year: back together on stage.
Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell have been touring since December, revisiting the coming-of-age story in theaters across the country before sitting down for live, in-person conversations about making it. Feldman told the Associated Press he was “very grateful to be back with my bros.”
The reunion carries extra weight this year. Director Rob Reiner died in December 2025, just before the tour’s first stops, and the trio has said they were already thinking about the film and gathering for screenings the weekend before his passing. On tour, they’ve also kept an empty seat reserved for River Phoenix, who played Chris Chambers and died in 1993. Wheaton called Phoenix “incredibly special.”
The film almost had a very different name. It’s based on Stephen King‘s 1982 novella The Body, but Reiner and the studio dropped that title before release, instead naming the movie after the Ben E. King song that plays over the closing credits. That choice paid off: the song, already a hit in 1961, climbed back onto the Billboard Hot 100 in 1986 thanks to the movie’s exposure. It’s also been covered dozens of times over the decades, most famously by John Lennon in 1975, more than a decade before it became forever linked to the film.
Four decades later, Stand By Me keeps finding new audiences. It earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay back in 1987, and this year’s reissue and reunion tour suggest the story of four boys walking a set of train tracks in 1959 still resonates the same way it did when the credits first rolled in theaters back in 1986.
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