Paramount Pictures and Doug Liman are taking a stand. The Stand, as a matter of fact.
The studio and the filmmaker are teaming up to adapt Stephen King’s magnus opus. Liman is attached to direct the feature and will produce along with Tyler Thompson of Cross Creek Pictures. The two previously teamed to make the 2017 Tom Cruise crime drama American Made.
The project will now head to writers to pen an adaptation of what is King’s longest work, with a page count of 1,152. It will instantly become one of the hottest writing assignments in town.
The book, first published in 1978 then revised in 1990, is a bar-setting literary masterpiece that has influenced pop culture, from television shows such as Lost to musical acts such as Metallica to various forms of post-apocalyptic literature.
An ambitious story of good vs. evil, it takes place in an America after a virus wipes out most of the population and follows dozens of characters in overlapping storylines running over many years. And while readers root for the characters such as the Trashcan Man and Mother Abigail, the final showdown came down to a group of survivors fighting the Antichrist-like Randall Flagg in the wasteland known as Las Vegas.
Stand was adapted twice as a mini-series, once in 1994 and again in 2020, and as comic by Marvel Comics. Featurewise, however, it has bedeviled many a Hollywood player. Directors ranging from George A. Romero to David Yates to Ben Affleck have tried to tackle the material, and Warner Bros. and CBS Films partnered on developing it in the 2010s.
Sources say that Liman and the studio have a particular take and that the feature would be a one-off, not a multi-movie endeavor.
Liman likes to bedevil Hollywood itself as he continues to forge an unconventional film oeuvre. After bursting out as an indie darling in with Swingers and Go, he went the action route as he launched Universal’s Bourne franchise with The Bourne Identity. He then navigated the most famous couple of the century with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. His most recent movie was a return to the action genre, last year’s glossy macho remake of Road House, which starred Jake Gyllenhaal that became, for a while, the most watched movie from Amazon MGM.
Liman also is a collaborator of Tom Cruise, helming the well-regarded 2014 original sci-fi movie The Edge of Tomorrow as well as American Made. He is now working on Deeper, an underwater supernatural thriller that is being targeted for Cruise and Ana de Armas.
King continues to be one of Hollywood’s favorite authors, almost 50 years since it made its first King adaptation, 1976’s Carrie. This year alone has seen Neon release both The Monkey, adapted by Osgood Perkins, and The Life of Chuck, written and directed Mike Flanagan. This fall comes The Long Walk from Lionsgate and a new version of The Running Man, which Edgar Wright directed for Paramount. And that doesn’t even count TV projects.
Liman is repped by CAA and Weintraub Tobin. King is repped by Rand Holston Management and Gang Tyre.
