And you thought The Hobbit was excessive...Stephen King's The Stand will be adapted into a four film series.
Josh Boone has confirmed that his film adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand will consist of four films. He revealed this on Kevin Smith's Babble-On podcast, and also had plenty of other things to say.
The guys at SlashFilm did a bit of transcribing, so we have a couple of other tidbits Boone was nice enough to share about the upcoming (now) film series:
On changing the adaption from one film to four parts, Boone said that,
[WB] came back and 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 you’re able to do an even truer version that way. So I think we are going to do like four movies. 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.
Boone originally pitched one film and scripted an early treatment that compressed the massive novel. He said,
I really wanted to do an A-list actor, really grounded, credible version of the movie. I sold them on that 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 that book and get everything into that script. You open with Mother Abigail dying and sending the guys off, and then you jump back in time… So what happened is the script gets finished, I write it in like five months, everybody loves it, King loves it, $87 million is what it was budgeted at, really expensive for a horror drama that doesn’t have set pieces.
Boone must've packed a lot of muscle in his treatment of the film if King approved and WB loved it so much that they decided to turn it into a big franchise (they're desperate for one, aren't they?). The truth is that The Stand probably needs more than one film to really get at the meat of King's magnum opus, but at what point does the expanded size of the project allow the director to get a little bit sloppy? I'd say that the one film treatment was probably a lot tighter and got to what King was getting at a bit quicker and efficiently.
But then again, what do I know? I'm just happy they're making it.
Below is the podcast, in case you're interested in hearing Kevin Smith learn about things before you do:
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