Back in August it was revealed that the Harry Potter writer-director duo of Steve Kloves and David Yates were in negotiations to take on The Stand, Stephen King's greatest apocalypse novel, for Warner Bros. Everything seemed like it was on track, there was already talk of it being a multi-film adaptation of the King's sprawling tale of the special survivors of a viral pandemic. Kloves/Yates were hot off of Deathly Hallows Part 2 at the time, so it made since that the WB would lock them down for one of its most viable properties... And then something changed.
What exactly that change was in unclear, but Deadline is suddenly reporting that Warner Bros. has chosen Ben Affleck to direct The Stand.
Will he be directing from Kloves' script? Is it still going to be a mult-film project? Will Yates produce? There's no comment on the matter, all Deadline says is that Affleck has developed a great relationship with the studio and they've chosen him for the helm. We'll update this space if new details emerge, but in the mean time we're going to considering this an interesting but nebulous bit of news.
We're excited to hear that Affleck is gaining more and more clout as a director, but he's never taken on anything close to the scale of The Stand, so we wouldn't be surprised if in another two months we're writing up a similar story about a new director suddenly taking on the project.