Stephen King's The Stand is officially coming to CBS All Access on December 17th. It's currently scheduled to air one episode every Thursday for nine weeks. The finale is written by Stephen King himself, adding a new ending onto the story that he's reportedly been thinking about for 30 years.
The Stand is based on King's 1978 novel, in which a bioengineered superflu with a nearly 100% kill rate escapes from a Department of Defense laboratory. Two weeks later, the "Captain Trips" virus has nearly wiped out humanity, and the handful of survivors are mysteriously drawn to either Boulder, Colorado or Las Vegas, standing on opposite sides of a supernatural fight between good and evil.
This new version of The Stand has been in development since March of 2018 at CBS All Access, which picked it up to make a TV show after a 2014 film project stalled out. Josh Boone (The Fault In Our Stars) is attached as director, as well as co-writer of the first episode. Other writers on the project include former Dread Central host Jill Killington, Knate Lee (New Mutants), Eric Dickenson (SEAL Team, Masters of Sex), and Owen King (co-author of the 2017 novel Sleeping Beauties with his father Stephen).
The Stand's showrunner, Benjamin Cavell (Justified, SEAL Team), said in a press release that "none of us could have imagined that Stephen King's 40-year-old masterpiece about a global pandemic would come to be so eerily relevant. We're honored to tell this sprawling, epic story, including a new coda that Stephen King has wanted to add for decades."
2020's The Stand stars Whoopi Goldberg, perfectly cast as Mother Abigail, and Alexander Skarsgård as long-running Stephen King antagonist Randall Flagg. The cast also includes James Marsden, Odessa Young, Jovan Adepo, Amber Heard (playing the psychotic turncoat Nadine Cross, so that's gonna make for some fun discourse), Owen Teague, Henry Zaga, Brad William Henke, Irene Bedard, Nat Wolff, Eion Bailey, Heather Graham, Katherine McNamara, Fiona Dourif, Natalie Martinez, Hamish Linklater, Daniel Sunjata, and Greg Kinnear.
A previous adaptation of The Stand aired on ABC as a miniseries in May of 1994, starring Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald, with Ruby Dee as Abigail and Jamey Sheridan as Flagg. It picked up Primetime Emmy Awards for its makeup and sound mixing, with nominations for art direction, cinematography, music composition, and Outstanding Miniseries. The Stand has also been adapted as a comic book by Roberto Aguirre-Sarcasa and Mike Perkins, which was published by Marvel Comics in a total of six miniseries from 2008 to 2012.
King's new finale for The Stand marks his third major revision of the novel's story. The original 1978 hardcover version was edited down by around 400 pages on King's publisher's insistence. King kept the excised material, however, and later rewrote the book for a "Complete & Uncut" rerelease in 1990. The unabridged edition updates the novel's setting from 1985 to 1990, adds in a number of cut scenes for minor characters such as the Trashcan Man, and has a new epilogue featuring Randall Flagg.
The Stand is the latest new Stephen King adaptation to come out, following a resurgence of interest in the horror author's work after the box office success of 2017's It. Other King film and TV projects in various stages of development currently include The Tommyknockers at Universal, 'Salem's Lot and The Long Walk at New Line Cinema, From a Buick 8 at Renegade Entertainment, The Dark Half at MGM, The Eyes of the Dragon at Hulu, Joyland at Freeform, and Sleeping Beauties at AMC.
Source: IGN