Although director Doug Liman’s take on The Stand promises to bring an iconic Stephen King novel to life, only time will tell if the ambitious movie actually happens. Although many of Stephen King’s 66 books have been brought to life on-screen, not all the prolific author’s efforts have received movie adaptations. Some of his stories are too trippy and surreal.
Others are too shocking and explicit to work well onscreen, while still others simply have not had a chance to become movies yet. After all, there are many Stephen King projects in development, and while a lot of them are remakes and re-imaginings, like Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, others represent the first time King stories have made it to the big screen.
The upcoming dystopian sci-fi movie The Long Walk adapts a novel that King penned under the pseudonym Richard Bachman way back in 1979. This proves that it is never too late for Hollywood to try making a movie from one of the horror legend’s stories, as does a recent piece of news about another upcoming King project.
Hollywood Has Tried To Make The Stand As A Movie Multiple Times Before
The Stand’s Many Planned Movie Adaptations Have Always Fallen Through
According to ᴅᴇᴀᴅline, Mr and Mrs. Smith director Doug Liman is turning Stephen King’s longest novel The Stand into a movie in the near future. Liman has an eye for action and character, and, from 1999’s underrated Go to 2024’s Road House remake, he has consistently proven his bona fides as a blockbuster director.
That said, adapting The Stand into a movie is a uniquely challenging undertaking. The Stand moves between the perspectives of more than a dozen main characters as the book follows a huge group of survivors navigating a future America that has been devastated by a ᴅᴇᴀᴅly pandemic. A blend of epic fantasy, horror, and sci-fi, The Stand is nothing if not ambitious.
Liman will produce The Stand with Tyler Thompson, with whom he collaborated on 2017’s American Made.
It is also particularly immersive, even for King, making his other doorstepping bestsellers, It and Under the Dome, seem slim and sprightly in comparison. The Stand is an incredibly ambitious story that requires dozens of perspectives and takes place across all of America, meaning the novel seems far better suited to a miniseries adaptation than a standalone movie.
Although 1994’s earlier miniseries of the same name received a kinder critical reception, both shows were criticized for cutting down the story due to their limited runtimes.
Indeed, this is likely why Ben Affleck’s attempts to make the novel into a movie eventually became 2020’s CBS miniseries The Stand, the second TV adaptation of the book. Although 1994’s earlier miniseries of the same name received a kinder critical reception, both shows were criticized for cutting down the story due to their limited runtimes.
The Stand’s plot follows two factions in a war between good and evil, where the side of light is led by the religious figure Mother Abigail, while darkness is represented by King’s recurring villain, Randall Flagg. Numerous characters switch sides throughout the sprawling, complex epic, and the action moves from Flagg’s besieged Las Vegas to Boulder, Colorado, to Georgia, to Nebraska.
Published in 1979 under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Long Walk was the first novel King wrote, but not the first to be published.
Even readers entirely unfamiliar with the novel can imagine how complicated this storyline is. The Stand is King’s best post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, precisely because it manages to incorporate the disparate perspectives of so many characters and weave them together skillfully, but this would likely be lost in the brief runtime of a mainstream movie.
In Don Alex Hixx’s “The Rise and Fall of The Stand,” the writer dissected the many attempts to make The Stand into a movie and the roadblocks these efforts ran into. First, King wanted George A Romero to make a movie of the novel in the early ‘80s and set about penning the screenplay himself.
Although King had written screenplays before, he couldn’t find a way to condense such a mᴀssive, unwieldy story into the cramped runtime of a movie. Screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg, who penned Excalibur and The Exorcist II: The Heretic, took a stab at the project later in the ‘80s, but Warner Bros balked at its proposed three-hour runtime.
Will The Stand Movie Actually Materialize Under Doug Liman?
Liman’s Ambitious Plan Could Run Into A Lot of Roadblocks
After 1994’s miniseries, The Stand went untouched until Warner Bros began developing another movie version of the novel in August 2011. This time, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix director David Yates took on the book, but the project fell through by October 2011. Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper was the next to try out.
Cooper left The Stand’s movie adaptation and was replaced by Ben Affleck, who left and was replaced by The New Mutants director Josh Boone. Boone’s version of the movie eventually became 2020’s critically derided The Stand, a miniseries that had the unique misfortune of arriving during a real-life global pandemic.
When it came time to start trimming subplots and cutting characters, none of the creatives working on The Stand’s movie adaptations proved able to condense the novel’s complex plot.
The Stand’s earlier movie adaptations all fell apart for the same reason, as the book’s unwieldy size stumped everyone from King to Yates. When it came time to start trimming subplots and cutting characters, none of the creatives working on The Stand’s movie adaptations proved able to condense the novel’s complex plot.
In this regard, the announcement of Liman’s involvement may not be the win that it appears to be. Liman has plenty of movies that were meant to happen and never did, from a full-length fictional film set and sH๏τ in outer space with Tom Cruise to a proposed Dark Universe movie for DC, to an Edge of Tomorrow sequel.
Since Liman is no stranger to canceled pᴀssion projects, it would not be surprising if this version of The Stand also ends up being quietly canceled. After all, The Stand’s main characters were ruined in the CBS miniseries thanks in part to its brevity, and that miniseries was more than three times longer than a movie version could likely be.
The Stand 2020 is available to stream on Paramount Plus.
Since many of Liman’s completed movies had various problems during production, the talented director is not exactly a safe bet when it comes to ensuring the film gets finished. However, with King movies still doing well at the box office, this might finally be the version of The Stand that makes it through Development Hell and actually arrives on cinema screens.
Source: ᴅᴇᴀᴅline
“The Rise and Fall of The Stand” (Don Alex Hixx)
