While things haven’t been going so well for New Line’s planned big screen take on Stephen King’s IT, the future of Warner Bros. Pictures’ adaptation of the author’s massive 1978 novel The Stand is looking bigger and brighter than ever! According to a story today at The Wrap, the current plan is to, in an unprecedented move, begin the story on television. An eight-part Showtime miniseries event is being eyed, which would set up the story and its characters to culminate in director Josh Boone’s feature film.
Previously adapted as a television miniseries in 1994, The Stand tells the story of a full-scale apocalypse, driven by the accidental release of a biological weapon and the ensuing struggle of good versus evil carried out by the world’s final survivors.
Previous reports suggested that Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey was being sought to play the story’s villain, the demonic figure Randall Flagg. Apropos of nothing, King’s book itself recently made a brief-but-memorable cameo opposite the star in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
Boone is said to be a longtime fan of King and even gave the novelist a cameo in his 2012 film, Stuck in Love. He’s also already attached to 20th Century Fox’s upcoming X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants. He’s also attached to helm the Universal Pictures project The Vampire Chronicles, based on Anne Rice’s famous series of novels.
