THE STAND Director Promises A 3-Hour R-Rated Adaptation

First! At last my time has come.

Still might not be enough of you ask me.

3h is NOWHERE near enough to do justice to the source material. He's gonna have to drop a LOT of stuff.

I appreciate his dedication to the characters but MAAAAN is that a short running time, given the material.

I'm looking forward to seeing how they do this. I think it would be better to make a trilogy out of it, because they're just going to keep the main plot point of the book while discarding a lot of other stuff.

Sounds good.

They might need to make it Rated X for the "gun rape" scene involving TrashCan Man.

I cannot remotely see how you could do a good adaptation of The Stand with a single 3-hr long movie. To truly do that book justice (and no, you do NOT have to graphically portray the "gun rape" scene), you would really need to make about a ten-hr long mini-series on HBO or Showtime or maybe Netflix. Or, if it just had to be in theaters, at least a trilogy of 3-hr long films might work. One 3-hr film? I'm not seeing it.

This is going to be an extremely flawed movie. Even if they did 3, 3 hour movies it might not be enough to truly get it right. Unless the buzz is incredible and trails and early reviews tell me otherwise, I will probably skip this movie. Too many Stephen King adaptations have been super disappointing, and with the Stand being the granddaddy of them all(outside of the Dark Tower), I have serious doubts and reservations.

I look forward to see how it turns out.

The mini-series had problems because it didn't know how to pace itself. Yes, bad acting was one of the biggest problems, but even then - the trouble is going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between characters as they deal with Captain Tripps and the apocalypse that follows.

Incidentally, that was how the book played out, however, we're not watching a book larger than the Bible.

Stu should be one of few characters focused on for 'the Plague'. He's there when the deserter brings the superflu at the gas station, he gets quarantined, and we see most of the government response through his story. The rest doesn't need to be spelled out all at once.

All the characters are tethered to Mother Abigail anyway, so we don't need to see so much of their own personal suffering and loss as the world dies around them.
I know Larry's a favorite, but there's so much of his story that can be cut down for pacing. He's a one-hit wonder who went back home to New York to get a loan from his mom, and realizes that he's pretty worthless and has treated people like crap all his life.

Fran and Harold don't need a whole lot of story-telling - it should be made clear that he has an obsessive crush on her, and she's not interested. She's pregnant, didn't really care about her boyfriend, and after burying her father, comes across Stu who fills the void. She chronicles their time in a long, open-ended letter (similar to how Mina's Diary works in 'Dracula') to her unborn child. Fran can be a side character.

Nick doesn't do a whole lot before he comes across Tom - well, that's not true I guess. He gets mugged, arrested(ish), gets acquainted with a family, they die, he plays with their bodies, he gets attacked (again), and then finds Tom. Tricky thing is, we can't have Nick just explain what happened when the superflu broke out.

Randall Flagg needs to be much more behind the scenes and in the shadows to give the audience a larger sense of dread. The transition from man-in-the-shadows to a focused character can happen when he rapes Nadine. Lloyd can show us a narrative, but not too much.

It's going to be tricky, but if they work a lot from the Walking Dead's first and second seasons (ironically influenced by the Stand), they can make it happen.

Slightly worried that they're making a 3 hr film out of a massive book. If they can turn The Hobbit into 3 films, surely they can make 3 films out of this. After all, the book's split into three sections;

Captain Tripps
Crossing The Border
The Stand

There's your trilogy, and there's more than enough material in the book to fill 3 films.

And Trash-can Man better be in it or I won't be happy.

The Hobbit: 330 pages, 3 movies at 2 hr 45 mins each = 1.5 minutes per page

The Stand: 900 pages, 1 movie at 3 hrs = 0.2 minutes per page

Never read The Stand, but the premise sounds pretty interesting to me, especially knowing that Stephen King wrote it. But if a 6 hour mini-series couldn't even cover every aspect of the book, I fail to see how one 3 hour film could.

Perhaps this "new" character will be used as a kind of narrator to move the story along in more of a "tell us about what happened" mode, similar to how Paul Atredes mother and sister were used in the first Dune movie...

I thought they would break it up into three films, Hobbit style, but why it works with those films is the source material has a pretty great ending battle. The Stand, on the other hand, literally has a Deus Ex Machina ending. I read the uncut edition, so maybe King added in far more than was originally there, but the ending didn't feel as ramped up as other situations from the novel. But from other King novels I've read, there seems to be a common thread of endings that feel like the inspiration of their concepts peter out and he doesn't know where to take the story.