THE STAND Will Be Three Hours Long And R-Rated

Josh Boone is the latest guy slated to direct Warner Bros' big budget adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand, a project that has defeated a whole bunch of other filmmakers. Boone's feeling good about it, though, and while out promoting his new movie, The Fault In Our Stars, he has been talking about what to expect from his superflu film. It turns out it's going to be awesome.

We’re gonna do one three-hour, R-rated version with an amazing A-list cast across the board. Every single one of those characters will be somebody you recognize and somebody you relate to. And it’s gonna be awesome.

One movie? There's been a lot of debate about how long a movie version of The Stand needs to be, and plenty of folks feel like it should be two movies long. But I guess you could look at a three hour movie as two ninety minute films jammed together. 

The R-rating is a relief - we had heard rumors that WB might want to go PG-13. I don't think there's much in The Stand that you couldn't show on AMC these days, but the MPAA tends to be a little tough on stuff like watching people die horribly. 

But will it be any good? The idea of an across-the-board A-list cast is cool... but also pretty much what disaster movies did in the 70s. Sometimes you just want killer character actors in there, not the cast of Ocean's Eleven (half of whom aren't even that A-list themselves). The big takeaway: Boone feels confident he's making the movie, and once The Fault In Our Stars is a supersmash this weekend, he's probably right.