In today's Hollywood where The Hobbit can be blown up to multiple three-hour movies, or the final chapter of The Hunger Games is needlessly expanded into a two-parter, one adaptation that definitely needs the extra time is Stephen King's The Stand. So it was disheartening when Warner Bros.' plans for a trilogy were shrunk down to a single film, directed by The Fault in Our Stars' Josh Boone. Somewhere along the way things have changed, and now Boone says The Stand won't be one film or even three films, it will instead be four.
On Kevin Smith's Hollywood Babble-On podcast Boone talked about the script he pitched to the studio, followed by their incredibly enthusiastic response...
Boone: “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.... They 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.”
That last part is interesting because the only casting we've heard about was a rumor that Matthew McConaughey could play the evil Randall Flagg.
