Captain Trips Strikes! THE STAND Coming To Theaters

They’re at it again. They’re trying to make a movie out of Stephen King’s The Stand. George Romero took a crack at it way back in the 80s, and then there was the terrible (but weirdly watchable and weirdly on SyFy every third weekend) miniseries back in the 90s. Now the book is supposedly finally headed to the big screen.

King’s massive tome about an ultimate conflict between good and evil after a superflu called Captain Trips wipes out most of humanity is the best and the worst of the author. It’s got scope and ambition and great characters… and a terrible ending and way too much padding and far too many reflexive Stephen Kingisms. But the stuff that works is sublime.

Roy Lee, who produced a huge chunk of the Asian remakes that hit in the last decade, is producing this one. There’s no creative team yet; the announcement in The Hollywood Reporter seems to be there to juice up people to pitch their take in the coming weeks.

Also still up in the air: if this will be one movie or multiple films. The breadth of The Stand is wide, and even with a lot of the padding cut I think two films would be packed full of good stuff. I guess a lot of this depends on what happens with Ron Howard’s The Dark Tower.

By the way: how awesome would it be if whoever played Randall Flagg in The Dark Tower was cast in The Stand? That would make this lapsed Stephen King nerd super happy.