David Yates and Steve Kloves Take On Stephen King’s The Stand

• THUD.

David Yates and Steve Kloves aren’t exactly household names, but everyone who isn’t Amish (and probably a even few of those particularly duplicitous Amish people—you know the ones) have seen their work: Yates directed the last four Harry Potter movies, including the outstanding adaptations of The Half-Blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows, while Kloves adapted the screenplays of all but one of those eight films, which have made a combined total of far more money than I thought even existed. And once you’re adapting the work of J.K. Rowling, there are few other pop authors who can measure up… except, you know, that guy. Says Hitfix:

Warner Bros. is in the process of finalizing the deals for David Yates and Steve Kloves to re-team for a multi-movie version of Stephen King’s epic The Stand.

This makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons… The Mick Garris version for television is a very faithful telling, but there’s something wild and terrifying about the book that television standards and practices just didn’t make room for, a scope to the world of the book that still hasn’t been captured. Kloves is a smart writer and given two (or possibly even three) movies to tell the story, he can let it live and breathe, and hopefully nobody’s going to try to push this to a PG-13….

Yates had mentioned his involvement with The Stand when he was doing press for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II, but he was still just thinking about it at the time. Word is that the deals are now coming together quickly, and that this is a priority project.

I haven’t read The Stand since I was about 13, when I tore through every King book I could find at the library, but I remember thinking it was pretty badass. (I recall next to nothing about the plot, though, aside from: a plague, good and evil, Vegas, a woman laying on her back admiring at her boobs in a ceiling mirror, and a pyromaniac. As with most of the books I read at that age, I was mostly just scouring it for the parts that involved sex and/or violence, on which counts King rarely disappointed.) Still: King’s a great writer, and Yates and Kloves are a solid team, so I’m guessing this could be pretty impressive. As long as they keep that excellent scene with the ceiling mirror, that is—I remember it being pretty pivotal—and also as long as this whole thing doesn’t come to the same sad, whimpering end as Ron Howard’s ill-fated Dark Tower adaptation. Chin up, Opie! You’re a shoo-in for the big-screen Andy Griffith Show reboot.