Josh Boone’s The Stand has been inching closer to actually getting made for a while, but this latest revelation might make things more complicated.
Speaking to Kevin Smith’s Smodcast (via SlashFilm), Boone revealed that his single-movie take on Stephen King’s massive classic is now going to be four films. Which is a bit of a jump.
Turns out the budget might have been a sticking point for the studio, as Boone explained. “I really wanted to do an A-list actor, really grounded, credible version of the movie and they hired me…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 the book and get everything into that movie script…So what happened is the script gets finished, I write it in like five months, everybody loves it, King loves it, it was budgeted at $87 million. 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 ‘F–k yes!’…So I think we are going to do like four movies”
That budget was denied, so Boone had to go back to the drawing board, and The Stand turned from a single epic to an epic saga. “I loved my script but I was willing to drop it in an instant because you’re able to do an even truer version this way… 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.”
While every piece of The Stand news that isn’t “The Stand is being made right now!” is a little bittersweet, it’s encouraging to know that there is indeed progress in getting it going and that we won’t be seeing something too radically compressed.
Still, four movies? What do you think, is that stretching it too far?
You can buy The Stand in paperback for £6.99 at Amazon.co.uk. Read more about Stephen King in the new issue of SciFiNow.
