In an interview with Collider, writer/director Josh Boone revealed he's finished the script for THE STAND adaptation, and says author Stephen King really enjoyed Boone's take on his novel.
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.
It's interesting Josh Boone says new material doesn't need to be created to make THE STAND work as a movie, since David Kajganich's draft of the adaptation had a very different ending compared to the novel. Sounds like Boone might not be using Kajganich's ending for the film.
Josh Boone goes on to talk about deciding what to leave out from King's book for the movie, and says spring of next year is the earliest production might start on the project.
I just focused on the things that I felt strongly about, that I have strong memories about, that are evocative to me even when I read it now. You just have an internal interest meter. The Stand is about so many things — you could make ten to fifteen different movies and focus on a different aspect of it. I just focussed on the things that were more important to me and felt essential to me and were based in the characters…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.
If Boone has already been meeting with actors for THE STAND, maybe one of them was Matthew McConaughey, who last month we learned might be being eyed by Warner Bros. to play Randall Flagg in the adaption. Boone previously promised "an amazing A-list cast across the board" for his movie, and I'm really hoping McConaughey does end up playing the villain.
Josh Boone's THE STAND doesn't currently have a release date. When do you think would be a good time for it to hit theaters? During the summer? Flu season?