We can almost hear both the cheers and groans from fans of Stephen King’s The Stand at the news a big-budget movie version is on the way. It’s long been one of King’s most-acclaimed book, and its influence is hard to underestimate, having filtered into just about every apocalyptic film and book since its publication.
For years there’s been talk of a movie version, but it’s never happened, partly because the 1,100 page book is so massive in scope and contains so many different characters and stories, that condensing it has always been problematic, especially as chopping it down too much would risk a very vocal backlash from fans of the novel. While there was a four-part mini-series version in 1994, a TV budget wasn’t really enough to do justice to the story. In fact there’s probably is no way to adapt it without cutting out a lot of the book.
However now THR reports that CBS Films, which holds the rights to the book, has signed a deal with Warner Bros to develop a big-budget, tenpole flick based on the book – indeed it could end up being several movies, as it hasn’t been decided yet whether to try and squeeze it all into one movie, or spread it out into multiple pics. With Universal planning an ambitious multi-movie and TV take on King’s The Dark Tower, that may be the direction they head The Stand. Stephen King himself will apparently be involved in some capacity.
Although impossible to boil down to a simple plot, The Stand’s over-arcing premise sees a plague known as Captain Trips wiping out pretty much everyone in the world. The survivors then begin sharing a dream of a strange, evil figure, and slowly come together to try and defeat the anti-Christ like Randall Flaggs. It’s basically good vs. evil told on a massive, apocalytic scale.
However while this development deal is all well and good, don’t hold your breath just yet for the film. So many attempts, including one that George Romero worked on for years in the 80s, have been stymied by the difficulty of the material – both its multi-arc, ensemble nature and the worry its grim vision of the future would limit its box office potential – and as yet Warner haven’t found a way around that, they just said they’d like to. However for years they’ve said The Dark Tower was unadaptable, and Universal is currently going ahead with that, so maybe Warner can find a way to make The Stand work.