Stephen King’s The Stand is the latest project to land on director Doug Liman’s slate. More on the new adaptation here.
From stories of on-set chaos on 2002’s The Bourne Identity to his plans to shoot a film with Tom Cruise beyond the confines of Earth’s atmosphere, Doug Liman always seems to have a knack for creating extraordinary productions that often make for great film stories further down the line. A master of sprawling technical productions he might be, but Liman is surely going to find that reputation put to the test once more now that he’s been announced as the director of The Stand for Paramount Pictures.
After all, Stephen King’s source novel has often been seen as unfilmable. Sure, we’ve had two distinct TV miniseries release over the decades since the book was first published in 1978, but a film adaptation has failed to materialise and not for the want of trying.
Filmmakers have certainly taken a stab at it too: George A Romero, David Yates, Ben Affleck and more have tried and failed to crack King’s apocalyptic tale of good versus evil, but at 1152 pages, the novel’s huge length has often proved to be a rather large stumbling block. Take too much out and you lose what makes the book so epic. Leave too much in and the whole endeavour collapses under the weight of its own ambition.
Enter Liman then, a filmmaker who seems to thrive on this kind of challenge. Just look at Deeper, the underwater thriller project that he’s said to be developing for Cruise and Ana de Armas which we speculated a while back could be ‘risky’ and require something of a ‘daredevil’ attitude to get made in the way we think it’s going to get made.
While The Stand is no doubt a very different type of project, you’d have to be at least a little foolhardy to tread the same path that has stymied so many other filmmakers. But as we said, it’s that sort of challenge that seems to drive Liman onwards as a filmmaker.
One of those challenges will be breaking such an epic story into a form that audiences can digest, but according to according to The Hollywood Reporter, Liman and the studio already ‘have a particular take and that the feature would be a one-off, not a multi-movie endeavour.’ So far, so good then.
King’s novel ‘takes place in an America after a virus wipes out most of the population and follows dozens of characters in overlapping storylines running over many years.’
The legendary author – as usual – has plenty of his works undergoing the adaptation treatment at the moment. Life Of Chuck is set to release this year, as is Edgar Wright’s take on The Running Man and an adaptation of his novella, The Long Walk. More on The Stand when we hear it.
