Stephen King adaptations are a hit and miss sub-genre all of their own. For every Carrie or Shawshank, there’s a Maximum Overdrive or Thinner. With King’s prolific back catalogue providing a seemingly endless reservoir of established material, it comes as no surprise that his magnum opus, The Stand, is getting a remake. And from none other than The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone.
Attached for some time now, Boone is the last in a long line of names linked to the adaptation. Ben Affleck, George A. Romero and David Yates were all in the running at one point to bring the second iteration of his mammoth tome to the big screen. Set in a post-apocalyptic Earth, the novel follows a series of characters who deal with life after the events of a virus ravages the planet. 1994’s miniseries version, starring Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald, while a suitably faithful adaptation, is twenty years old is starting to show signs of age. Enter Mr. Boone.
A devout King fan, the enthusiastic director included a King-related subplot in his severely underrated drama, Stuck In Love. In a story that paralleled his own writing experiences, a young writer receives a phone call from the author as encouragement for his short story. If you haven’t checked it out already, you’re missing out.
In an interview with Collider, the self-confessed aficionado revealed a great many details about the upcoming project. Set to be a three-hour long epic, it’s reportedly attracting an impressive A-list cast. Details of which should be coming soon, as Boone announced he’s finished with the script. And King’s quite a fan:
“I finished writing the script maybe a month ago. Stephen [King] absolutely loved it. It’s, I think, the first script ever approved by him. [It’ll be] a single version movie of The Stand. Three hours. It hews very closely to the novel. It was such an amazing process. I’m so familiar with [King’s] work and I’ve read so many of his books so many times over the years that it was just a really comfortable thing to be able to work with his material. He gives you so much great material to work with. There’s an abundance of it. So it’s not a book where you have to generate new material and make it work for a movie. He writes so cinematically and his characters are so sharply drawn. You don’t have to change much. [You use] a lot of structural things to condense a thousand pages into a three-hour movie but it’s still at heart his material. I just made it work within the confines of what a single film can be.”
So far it’s all very promising. Previous talk on the project has never reached this stage in development, which leads us to believe there’ll be some casting announcements to come. But when exactly can we expect cameras to roll?
“It takes a long time to prep a film like that. Six to eight months. I don’t imagine we would shoot the movie until next Spring at the earliest. And we’re still early in the process. I’m still meeting actors and having budget meetings and all that.”
Early or not – consider us incredibly excited for Boone’s version of The Stand.
Tell us, what do you think he should include in the final script? Or does the 1994 version suit you just fine?
