Scott Cooper Replaces Ben Affleck To Write And Direct Stephen King's 'The Stand'

Warner Bros. has been working on a new feature film version of Stephen King's giant apocalyptic novel The Stand, which was previously made into a televised mini-series. A few different writers and directors have been attached over the past couple years, with the most recent being Ben Affleck, but now the studio has settled on someone new.

Scott Cooper, who wrote and directed Crazy Heart and the upcoming Out of the Furnace (trailer here), is now in talks to direct and rewrite The Stand.

You may have heard that Affleck is involved not only in Live By Night and David Fincher's Gone Girl, but that little Batman/Superman film. So there's no time for him to make The Stand on a timeline that WB likes, especially since the studio only has the rights for a limited window. (Compounding that, WB no longer has a deal with Legendary to provide big genre material, and you can expect to see the studio moving forward with other stuff like this and Akira to take up the slack.)

Until Cooper gets his new script set, there'll be no cast set for the movie, and we don't know if this will be one film or two. But with the casts of Cooper's other two features including actors such as Jeff Bridges, Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Willem Dafoe, and Sam Shepard, we can likely expect a stellar cast for The Stand.

King's novel follows the aftermath of the spread of an almost universally fatal virus. The few survivors in the US are organized into good and evil factions, with a few members of the good camp infiltrating the opposite side in an effort to prevent further disaster being unleashed on the remnants of humanity. [THR]