The Stand Adaptation On Standby

While The Dark Tower moves forward, the big screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand doesn't seem like it's going anywhere anytime soon, despite having a director still attached to it. The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone is still officially onboard to helm the project, but two barriers have emerged.

After a long delay in getting the movie off the ground, Boone has decided to move on to direct another one of King's novels, Revival, and the rights, which were at Warner Bros., have reverted to CBS Films.

The studio has not yet revealed their plans for the movie, but either they wait for Boone, who also penned the adaptation, or proceed with a new director.

Speaking to Collider, producer Roy Lee talked about why it has taken so long to bring The Dark Tower to the big screen. He revealed that it has gone through several plans, including one where it was going to be accompanied by an 8-part miniseries.

"There was definitely talk about doing that but the logistics made it very difficult to try to do a worldwide launch of a movie when the TV component would not necessarily be released at the same time worldwide. So it became a logistic nightmare to try to figure that out, so that plan was abandoned."

Even so, Lee isn't completely against the TV/Theater combo, however…

"That’s why there was this discussion about going to HBO or Netflix to try to do a series that launched before a movie, but we’ve been opened to everything just to make it work. I think TV would be great but Stephen King believes that his version—the miniseries that was done before is a very good interpretation of the novel."

One of the issues in trying to adapt one of King's novels to the big screen is length. They often are too big to condense, as a matter of fact, Boone previously said that his adaptation of The Stand would mean making four movies, however, Lee says they have seriously considered doing it all in one, which is crazy since the novel as over one-thousand pages.

"That’s why we’ve been experimenting with trying to see what the one movie would look like. If you do the one movie, you obviously have to take out a big portion of the book, so trying to balance what to keep and what to cut out was a long process because there’s so much to go through. So that’s why it’s been a long process. Right now it’s written as two movies."

For now we have to wait to see what comes of The Stand, if a four-part movie franchise or two, but it's worth pointing out that besides Revival, Boone is also attached to direct The New Mutants, a X-Men spinoff movie, which he also wrote.

Source - Collider

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