‘The Stand’ director says it will be four movie mega event.

Generally I troll Stephen King because Bateman and Rendar have both admitted to me under chemical duress that they’ve masturbated into copies of The Dark Tower. But I’m going to be the straight-man here. And far be it for me to critique what people jerk-off into. The Stand seems cool, but I haven’t read it. So I don’t know how to react to this news.

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There’s confidence, there’s hubris, and then there’s Warner Bros.’developing big screen adaptation of Stephen King‘s “The Stand.” If making the leap from smaller character driven dramas to what was previously described as a three-hour, R-rated movie wasn’t enough, “The Fault In Our Stars” director Josh Boone says the plans for the project just got a helluva lot bigger.

Stopping by Kevin Smith‘s Hollywood Babble-On podcast (via Slashfilm), Boone revealed how his single movie version has now morphed into a massively-scaled quartet of films. “I really wanted to do an A-list actor, really grounded, credible version of the movie. I sold them on that and they hired me…I sold them on a single, three hour movie,” Boone explained. “I went and got [Stephen] King sold on it, everybody’s really excited…I told the story non-linear and that was the way I was able to compress that book and get everything into that script… So what happened is the script gets finished, I write it in like five months, everybody loves it, King loves it, $87 million is what it was budgeted at, really expensive for a horror drama that doesn’t have set pieces.”

So far, so good, but a movie without set pieces? Not in today’s world of tentpole filmmaking. So Warner Bros. wanted the project beefed up, and Boone jumped at the opportunity. “They came back and said, ‘would you do it as multiple films?’ and I said, ‘Fuck yes!’ I loved my script, and I was willing to drop it in an instant because you’re able to do an even truer version that way,” Boone said.

“So I think we are going to do like four movies. I can’t tell you anything about how we’re going to do them, or what’s going to be in which movie,” he continued. “I’ll just say we are going to do four movies, and we’re going to do ‘The Stand’ at the highest level you can do it at, with a cast that’s going to blow people’s minds. We’ve already been talking to lots of people, and have people on board in certain roles that people don’t know about. We’re looking to go into production next year, maybe in the spring.”

What do you think?