There appears to be an extremely bold and exciting new wrinkle in the development of director Josh Boone’s THE STAND adaptation, as THR is reporting that Warner Bros., CBS Films and Boone are in talks with Showtime to mount an eight-part miniseries that will eventually lead to a big-budget feature film. Ho-ly-shit, that’s something.
THE FAULT IN OUR STARS director who landed the project way back in February of last year, will not only write and direct the feature film, but the miniseries as well, which they hope to start shooting as early as next year. Boom.
Okay, so there are some obvious benefits to Boone’s new plan, the major one being that he’ll be able to cover more ground in King’s ridiculously detailed novel. The one thing we all worried about with Boone’s take on THE STAND was that it was going to be a single film, which is about as ambitious as it gets when adapting something as lengthy and character-driven as King’s novel. Giving it the miniseries treatment makes the most sense if the plan is to really dig up all the good stuff from the book, so that’s exciting.
The biggest problem I see with this, however, is getting fans to not only buy into a miniseries on Showtime, but to get them into the theater as well. Will anyone see the film if they haven’t watched the miniseries leading up to it? Would it be smarter to just do the entire story on Showtime alone? It'll be interesting to see what comes of this, but after the crushing news following Cary Fukunaga's IT adaptation, I'm not getting my hopes up.
King is expected to be involved in some capacity along with producers Roy Lee and Jimmy Miller, and high-level meetings amongst the filmmaking team are taking place next week to finalize the ambitious multi-platform plan, says THR.