Anybody who ever carried around Stephen King’s monstrous and giant novel, The Stand, knows it’s dangerous material–even to the lower lumbar if you’re not used to the heft. At more than 1,100 pages, The Stand has proved difficult for adapters–until now. Looks like The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone and Warner Bros. came up with a solution: make it into four separate films.
The solution fits the times. Big budget franchises with big name actors are a much better investment than one-offs. Studios will trade any number of Gone Girls for a snarky superhero and his friends. You can hear Boone talk about how it all came to be during his interview with the Babble-On podcast. The Stand has superhero chops, even if no one wears a cape. The single element that runs throughout the formidable tome is plain old good vs. evil. That’s the stuff that franchises are made of.
