Warner Bros. Pictures continues to work hard on adapting Stephen King’s 1978 “The Stand,” and while it goes through its development hell, plan continue to be shared with fans.
It’s been rumored to be a television series, a three-hour long epic, and even a two-parter. Now, writer/director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) stated on Kevin Smith’s Hollywood Babble-On Podcast that the plan is to turn “The Stand” into FOUR feature films.
“I really wanted to do an A-list actor, really grounded, credible version of the movie,” says Boone. “…I sold [Warner Bros.] on a single, three hour movie… So what happened is the script gets finished, I write it in like five months. Everybody loves it. [Stephen] King loves it. $87 million is what it was budgeted at. Really expensive for a horror drama that doesn’t have set pieces… They came back and said ‘Would you do it as multiple films?’ and I said ‘F–k yes!’…So I think we are going to do like four movies.”
“The Stand” is a story of good versus evil after a virus wipes out most of the American population. It features dozens of characters (including such memorable ones as the Trashcan Man and Mother Abigail) and overlapping storylines running over many years as it tells of a group of survivors fighting the Antichrist-like Randall Flagg.
“I loved my script,” Boone continues, “but I was willing to drop it in an instant because you’re able to do an even truer version this way… I can’t tell you anything about how we’re going to do them or what’s going to be in which movie. I’ll just say we are going to do four movies, and we’re going to do ‘The Stand’ at the highest level you can do it at with a cast that’s going to blow people’s minds. We’ve already been talking to lots of people, and have people on board in certain roles that people don’t know about. We’re looking to go into production next year, maybe in the spring.”
Rumors already have Matthew McConaughey pegged for the role of Randall Flag, the personification of evil, a demonic figure who wreaks havoc after a plague kills most of the population.