CBS All Access is going to be getting a hold of Stephen King’s story The Stand in another series adaptation that’s supposed to be a 10-hour long attempt. If there seems to be a lack of faith in the first line it’s because the four-part miniseries that was attempted in 1994 has still left a bad taste in the mouths of those that stayed faithful to the book written by King and would love to see it go to the big screen. Keeping in mind that the book was around 1,200 pages, it’s still possible to get to the heart of the story in two to three films, but so far Warner Bros. kind of dropped the ball on that one.
Honestly it doesn’t make a lot of sense though since IT was such a great hit and was perhaps one of the only Stephen King stories that ever received another chance to prove that it was worth the effort. The Stand is such a great story that it would be far better to see it on the big screen than anywhere else. It’s easy to understand the lack of faith however when one speaks of adapting Stephen King’s stories to film. The Dark Half, Thinner, and especially the Dark Tower were nothing to write home about. But The Mist and The Green Mile were great adaptations and proved that King’s stories can be made into something wonderful if the person behind the camera knows what they’re doing. People were upset by the fact that IT is going to be a two-part film but that makes a lot of sense now that you think about it since the miniseries took a while to play out. Rushing it all through one film would have been as disastrous as The Dark Tower turned out to be.
The Stand is a post-apocalyptic world in which the bombs never fell, but humanity was nearly wiped out by a killer plague that decimated the human race, leaving only those who were somehow immune to survive. And into that wasteland came Mother Abigail and the Walking Man, or Randall Flagg if you’d like to call him that, the savior and the devil that were never meant to meet but were still the polar opposites that people had to choose from when it came to rebuilding the world. The only issue with this is in modern times is that the lines aren’t so clear any longer and those that might have been so easily divided at one point are no longer going to gravitate to just good or evil.
Quite honestly if The Stand is going to be modernized on TV or in film, which the latter would be preferred, then the times are going to to have to change. It’s not the 90’s anymore, and King’s story will have to move up a decade at least like it did with IT if CBS wants people to put any stock in it.
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