Stephen King‘s THE STAND is a big ass book. The uncut edition comes in at over a thousand pages and has already spawned a six hour mini-series and a thirty-one issue comic book. Obviously, whittling down such a story into a two hour film was never going to happen, but now it looks like it may need more than two films to tell the entire tale.
In an appearance on Kevin Smith‘s podcast Hollywood Babble-On, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS director Josh Boone discussed his upcoming adaptation of the novel and just how big he expects it to be. Mentioning that he planned to adapt Stephen King‘s novel LISEY’S STORY, the opportunity arose to work on THE STAND.
Boone tells Kevin Smith he originally turned down the project saying he couldn’t see it being made as a single film. He envisioned a morality play versus a summer blockbuster.
“I really wanted to do an A-list actor, really grounded, credible version of the movie and they hired me…I sold them on a single, three hour movie. I went and got [Stephen] King sold on it, everybody’s really excited…I told the story non-linear and that was the way I was able to compress the book and get everything into that movie script…So what happened is the script gets finished, I write it in like five months, everybody loves it, King loves it, it was budgeted at $87 million.”
Boone says the studio denied that budget because of how difficult it would have been to market and sell the film internationally without any major visual setpieces and truly being a character driven drama. After thinking over their options as to how to make this work, the studio offered Boone the option of making THE STAND as multiple films. He immediately dropped his condensed version.
“I loved my script, but you are able to do an even truer version that way. I will just say we are going to do four movies and we are going to do THE STAND in a way that is going to blow people’s minds.”
Four movies? Wow. That is a big investment, but if Boone says Stephen King is on board, I trust him. He went on to say that they have already been speaking with major stars to take on roles in the movie with the hope of going into production in Spring 2015.
After years of hearing about THE STAND, it is exciting to think that we may finally be getting the sprawling, epic film that we only saw a glimmer of in the ABC mini-series. This also means that if THE STAND works on the big screen, we can expect to see someone finally tackle THE DARK TOWER after that. If you can make such a dense novel as this work, anything is possible. Now, my only remaining concern is whether the film will be PG-13 or R.
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