Given that it has most famously appeared on screens in miniseries form back in the 1990s, it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that the new adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand might be headed for TV itself. According to The Wrap, director Josh Boone and Warner Bros. want to make an eight-part miniseries to lead in to the new planned film version.
The studio is in talks with US cable channel Showtime to handle the series, with Boone overseeing both projects. He said when he first took on the job of turning the sprawling book into a movie that he wanted more space to tell the story, and initially it looked like it could lead to multiple movies to handle the narrative of survivors of a virus that has all but wiped out the American population caught in a battle between good and evil.
It’s an ambitious idea, but not set in stone yet – and there are potential pitfalls as the team behind another Stephen King adaptation, The Dark Tower, have discovered. Despite an initial grand plan to make several movies and a linked TV series, Ron Howard and the rest have now scaled back to an initial film to kick things off, with Nikolaj Arcel in talks to direct that.
So while we may see The Stand back on TV, if the multi-format idea goes ahead and works, expect it to spur other projects to try the same trick.