We’ve all been curious to see how exactly Josh Boone (‘The Fault in Our Stars’) has planned on cutting down ‘The Stand‘ into a single 3 hour movie and now we’re getting some hints. As the plan is for a single movie and not two or three, the recently leaked ending probably won’t be a part of it.

So how is he planning on making one of his most well known novels into a 3 hour movie and what does King himself think about it? Here’s what Boone had to say:

“I finished writing the script maybe a month ago. Stephen [King] absolutely loved it. It’s, I think, the first script ever approved by him. [It’ll be] a single version movie of The Stand. Three hours. It hews very closely to the novel. It was such an amazing process. I’m so familiar with [King’s] work and I’ve read so many of his books so many times over the years that it was just a really comfortable thing to be able to work with his material. He gives you so much great material to work with. There’s an abundance of it. So it’s not a book where you have to generate new material and make it work for a movie. He writes so cinematically and his characters are so sharply drawn. You don’t have to change much. [You use] a lot of structural things to condense a thousand pages into a three-hour movie but it’s still at heart his material. I just made it work within the confines of what a single film can be.”

So that clearly means we’re going to be seeing some cuts. The movie itself can’t give us everything that it deserves in such a limited time span.

“I just focused on the things that I felt strongly about, that I have strong memories about, that are evocative to me even when I read it now. You just have an internal interest meter. The Stand is about so many things — you could make ten to fifteen different movies and focus on a different aspect of it. I just focussed on the things that were more important to me and felt essential to me and were based in the characters.”

At least he recognizes that this is too short for what could be done. So, I’m curious as to how he would address that on the big screen. Also when could we see this coming to theaters? Well, it looks like there will be some time before that happens:

“It takes a long time to prep a film like that. Six to eight months. I don’t imagine we would shoot the movie until next Spring at the earliest. And we’re still early in the process. I’m still meeting actors and having budget meetings and all that.”

Has Boone’s comments or King’s approval at all appeased your concerns for the upcoming movie or have they just made them worse? Do you think we’re in for three hours of one of the best translations of one of King’s books or will his most recognizable work be massacred? Share your thoughts below!

Source: Collider