Stephen King published The Stand in 1978; he's said it was his attempt to create an epic in the style of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but this is Stephen King we're talking about, so things get twisted. It's about a deadly disease that wipes out the great majority of the human population, leaving the remaining few to divide themselves into good and evil camps. There's a malevolent, otherworldly villain named Randall Flagg who I suppose is our Sauron, except he wears a lot more denim.
Anyway, The Stand has remain consistently popular for decades and has spawned two TV adaptations: one in the '90s and another in 2020. Neither version was a smash hit, but the '90s one has a cheesy charm to it; it stars folk like Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald and Rob Lowe. The 2020 version is more of a prestige effort but ended up being less memorable, despite actors like James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgård and Whoopi Goldberg involved.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount now wants to make a movie based on The Stand, directed by Doug Liman. Liman has a decent résumé; he directed the underrated 2014 Tom Cruise action flick Edge of Tomorrow as well as the recent remake of Road House with Jake Gyllenhaal. I'm sure he could do something interesting with The Stand. That said, cramming King's enormous story into one movie sounds like an order so tall it's practically brushing the sky. There are dozens of important characters and plotlines in The Stand. A movie will have to cut a lot of them, which is fine, but many cuts can you make before it isn't really The Stand anymore?
Maybe Paramount is just determined that The Stand will be a big hit onscreen, no matter how many times it has to make it. Or maybe it's just that Stephen King adaptations are always in style; one of the most recent, Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck, came out just last year. Flanagan is also trying his damndest to get a TV show based on King's other epic series, The Dark Tower, made, although it's a slow process. Personally, I think I'd rather see that than yet another adaptation of The Stand, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.
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