THE STAND Movie is "In a Holding Pattern," and The TV Component Has Been Abandoned

Hollywood has been trying to adapt two of Stephen King's most famous stories — The Dark Tower and The Stand — for the big screen for years, but they both have run into the problem of the original source material being too long for a traditional movie. In the case of The Dark Tower, a movie is pushing forward (with a female lead being announced last night) and the idea of having a TV show air in between sequels is still in place. For The Stand, though, things are turning out to be a bit more difficult to pin down.

The latest plan we heard for that adaptation was that the story would begin as an eight-episode miniseries on Showtime before moving into four feature films, all of which I believe were to be written and directed by Josh Boone. Just the other day, though, Boone decided to direct a different King adaptation (Revival, starring Samuel L. Jackson) and put The Stand on the back burner. And now the future of The Stand is once again back up in the air.

Collider caught up with producer Roy Lee at DICE 2016, and Lee gave an update about the progress:

“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.”

So that confirms everything we already knew. As for the TV show aspect of this adaptation? Well, it sounds like that's no longer happening:

“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.”

Makes sense. It was an ambitious idea to start with, and I'm not entirely convinced it's going to work for The Dark Tower, either. It's a massive project on a studio level, and it remains to be seen whether Warner Bros. actually wants to risk spending a ton of money on a franchise that isn't a guaranteed sure thing at this point, with Batman v Superman and Fantastic Beasts both yet to prove their worth. As for the whole four movie idea, it now sounds like that's off the table as well:

“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.”

So it's back to being just two movies again. We're now at the stage where we've experienced so many updates and so much back and forth that I'm not going to put much stock in anything anybody says until cameras actually start rolling on this production. Then it'll have my attention.