With Ron Howard throwing down the gauntlet on The Dark Tower series, Warner Bros. and CBS Films have responded by announcing their own adaptation of Stephen King’s other sprawling magnum opus The Stand as a feature film—also figuring that if we’re so enthralled by our looming zombie-, robot-, or monster-aided apocalypse, we may as well go back to the classics.
Of course, wrangling King’s vision of a world destroyed by a killer virus won’t be easy: Cramming all of the overlapping plotlines—which take place over many years and involve dozens of characters—proved difficult even before King tacked on another 300 pages or so in 1990, with director George Romero eventually bowing under the pressure and giving up on his planned 1980s version. And even at six hours, ABC’s 1994 miniseries was still forced to combine characters and jettison subplots wherever it could (all to make room for a maximum amount of Molly Ringwald simpering). So as with The Dark Tower, producers are said to be considering doing The Stand over multiple movies—which would be a huge investment, but one that would hopefully allow for tangents like Trashcan Man’s extended jaunt with The Kid, and all the anal-raping-with-a-gun scenes that are so crucial to the book’s central allegory.