While Stephen King's The Dark Tower finally seems to be headed in the right direction, recently adding Abbey Lee to star alongside Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, an adaptation of the author's The Stand is going nowhere. Recently its director Josh Boone set the film aside in order to focus on adapting another King novel, Revival, and now producer Roy Lee says The Stand is on hold.
Lee tells Collider...
“Right now it’s just in a holding pattern trying to figure out how to best make the movie because we’ve toyed with breaking it up into multiple movies, making it into one, making it into two. The latest draft, Josh Boone had written it and he was very anxious to make it but since then has written another script, 'Revival,' which he’s gonna do beforehand, so we’re just waiting for that."
The original plan, which Warner Bros. had always been a little skittish about, encompassed four feature films and a TV miniseries, a huge financial and logistical gamble. That was reduced to a single R-rated movie, but when Boone came aboard he said the 4-movie plan was revived. But now Lee suggests a single movie is the way they could go,...
“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.”
How they plan to chop down an 800-page book into a single feature is unclear, and Lee says the parallel TV series idea has been removed completely, so there won't be any help there...
“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.”
So this is sounding like a nightmare that may or may not ever happen. Fans of The Stand aren't going to be satisfied with one movie, and Warner Bros. doesn't seem willing to do more. And yet Sony doesn't seem to be having these kinds of problems doing essentially the same thing with The Dark Tower.
