If you were wondering how Warner Bros. and director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) were planning on fitting Stephen King’s apocaltyptic epic The Stand into one single film, it seems we now have the answer… they aren’t. Speaking to Kevin Smith on the Hollywood Babble-On podcast, Boone has revealed that he has convinced the studio to give the go-ahead to a four part adaptation!
“I didn’t believe they could do it as a single movie,” said Boone. “I didn’t want to go in. They had asked, ‘are you interested in this?’ and I was like ‘nope’. My agent, they way he got me to go in was he sent me a couple of previous drafts they had gone through the system with and they were just like not what I thought where they should be going with it. It was much more like a big summer blockbuster and when I thought about The Stand it’s so much about the kind of vast network of characters and all their problems. It’s kind of like a morality play set in post-apocalyptic America. It’s much less the battle between good and evil as the battle for these peoples’ souls and over the course of this book they make choices that dictate the course of humanity. So what I wanted to do was an A-list actor, really grounded, credible version and I went in and sold them on that and they hired me.”
“What I did was I sold them on a single three-hour movie, I went and got King sold on it, everybody was really excited,” he continued. “I told the story non-linear and that’s the way I was able to compress that book and get everything into that script. So you open with Mother Abigail dying on her death bed sending the guys off on the stand and then you jump back in time and you’re kind of moving through all these different things. So what happened is the script gets finished, I write it in like five months, everybody loves it, King loves it… I think it was 167 pages, maybe 210 and I kept squeezing and getting it tidier. It was $87 million budgeted, which is really expensive for a horror drama that doesn’t have big set pieces, it’s so much more a character driven piece… so we just said let’s take a beat and think about what we could do to get this tonally like we would want but get it in a budget range that we feel like isn’t a huge risk, we want to be able to do this right, so they came back and they said ‘would you do it as multiple films’ and I said ‘fuck yes’. I loved my script and I was willing to drop it in an instant because we can do an even truer version that way, so I think we’re going to do like four movies, but how we are gonna do them, or what’s gonna be in each movie, I’ll just say like we’re gonna do four movies and do The Stand kind of like at the highest level you can do it at with like 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.”
Be sure to listen to the podcast for more from Josh Boone on his plans for The Stand.
Are you excited at the prospect of a four-part adaptation of The Stand? Let us know your thoughts…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=04xXFwCEzkk&list=PL18yMRIfoszH_jfuJoo8HCG1-lGjvfH2F
Originally published November 20, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
