Stephen King adaptations are like buses: you wait years for one (well, more like months these days), and then a dozen come along all at once. By the
Stephen King adaptations are like buses: you wait years for one (well, more like months these days), and then a dozen come along all at once. By the end of 2025 alone, we’ll have had Osgood Perkins’ cursed toy flick The Monkey, Mike Flanagan’s soulful weepy The Life Of Chuck, Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, and Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk — and that’s just on the movie front. But now Paramount Pictures and Doug Liman have decided it’s time to take a stand. Oh no, hang on… *checks notes*… they have decided to take The Stand. Yes, King’s biggest book is heading for the gigantic screen.
Per THR‘s reporting, the Edge Of Tomorrow and Road House filmmaker has signed on to do what Ben Affleck, Paul Greengrass, Josh Boone, David Yates, George A. Romero, and more previously could not — which is to successfully turn King’s weighty, 1152-page tome into a feature film. Sure, there’ve been a couple of miniseries adaptations to date (Boone’s 2021 effort with James Marsden was admirable if flawed; the less said about the 1994 one the better), but King’s magnum opus — which, in fairness, is an incredibly dense, many-layered exploration of the aftermath of a man-made plague that’s decimated the American population — has historically proven too much for any one filmmaker to wrangle on a cinematic canvas.
Now, we don’t know exactly what approach Liman is looking to take with his Stand (or indeed who’ll have the unenviable task of turning a book that could fell an ox into a palatable, 120ish page screenplay), but THR‘s sources suggest that both studio and filmmaker have a specific take on the source material in mind, and one that somehow will be containable within a single movie. Now, we’ve been down this post-apocalyptic road with The Stand before too many times now to put all our chickens in the hype basket just yet, but given the increasing timeliness of King’s book, Liman’s world-building nous and genre-switching capabilities, and the current ravenous cultural appetite for adaptations of the Master of Horror’s works, colour us intrigued to see how The Stand stacks up in the weeks and months to come.
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