Stephen King’s epic The Stand novel is getting a movie adaptation, and its director has just been announced as no less than Doug Liman.
You may have caught his 2024 movie Road House, while Liman also directed the fantastic Edge of Tomorrow and the original The Bourne Identity movie.
The man has chops, but this new project will no doubt prove a challenge. The Stand is an epic of quite literally biblical proportions, a 1325-page whopper according to the current paperback edition listed on Amazon.
The plan is to squeeze all of that verbiage into a single film, and it’s in the works over at Paramount. But a lot of the actual work on this one is yet to be done.
There’s no script, suggesting we’re still at least a couple of years off release for this one.
The Stand is the story of a flu virus that wipes out civilisation as we know it, and mostly the ghastly goings-on in the post-apocalypse aftermath. In classic Stephen King fashion, it’s liberally sprinkled with supernatural elements too.
The story has been tackled in TV form a couple of times before. In 1994 there was a version directed by Mike Garris, who also made the TV adaptation of The Shining in 1997. That’s the one King famously liked more than the Kubrick film, despite it being pretty cheesy all-round.
That 1994 version had a roughly 6-hour runtime, and starred no less than Gary Sinise. Then in 2020, Paramount had a hand in the distribution of another attempt, a 9-episode run starring James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgard, Whoopi Goldberg and Amber Heard, among others.
It received largely unenthused reviews, and sits at a 56% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes. But impressing fans of the book will always be a tall order, it having a fan base whose dedication is only really surpassed by fans of the Dark Tower series — whose 7 (and a half) books comprise more than 4000 pages.
At one point Ben Affleck was signed up to direct a The Stand film adaptation, more than a decade ago in 2011. He left the project, to be replaced by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart), but he too dropped out just months after filling Affleck’s spot in 2013.
In other words, Liman coming aboard is no guarantee this adaptation will get made. But let’s hope it does get off the ground this time.
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