The Stand Director Josh Boone Teases Miniseries As CBS All Access Announces Premiere Date

Just in time for the holidays, CBS All Access’ new adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Stand” will drop December 17.

The streamer confirmed the news on Tuesday, revealing eight additional episodes will come out weekly following the premiere.

TooFab caught up with miniseries director Josh Boone earlier this month — ahead of the release of his “New Mutants” film — where he teased the “awesome” adaptation. While filming was completed before Covid shutdowns began, Boone admitted the project was “just eerie” amid the pandemic. “Nobody knew 99.9% of the time it was being made this was gonna happen,” he added.

While he’s been working on getting “The Stand” off the ground for six years now, it’s a story that’s been with him for even longer. “It is a massive book, it was one of my favorite books from childhood,” he said, adding that it was also “burned in my fireplace when I was a kid.”

The director was thrilled he “accumulated a cast and developed it with amazing TV show runners and some of my producing partners,” telling TooFab he believes the finished product is “really, really cool.”

“I think the cast is amazing, I think we can do things they couldn’t do in the ’90s in terms of content,” he added. “I brought all my movie-making force with it, my editors, my composers, we really tried to do this at the highest level that we could. I focused really exclusively on the first hour and the last hour. I wrote the first hour with the showrunner and Stephen King wrote the last hour, so it was sort of the gig of a lifetime because I got to go direct something he actually wrote.”

He went on to praise the cast, which includes Alexander Skarsgard, James Marsden, Amber Heard, Greg Kinnear and Marilyn Manson — calling them “amazing” and saying the series will “be awesome.”

Of Whoopi Goldberg, who plays the all-important Mother Abigail, he explained she’s been on board with the project for six years now and is “the only person I ever wanted to have in” the role.

“My association with her was always ‘Ghost,’ ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘Sister Act.’ I never watched ‘The View,’ so in my mind, I was like, ‘There’s this Academy Award winner who’s been hiding in her house all these years, not giving us these performances we want,'” he continued. “There was nobody else and she’s the biggest Stephen King fan her whole adult life. She is one of the greatest actress on the planet, I think she’s an incredible force of nature and we literally, like 6 years, we got it done and she is Mother Abigail.”

The Stand takes place following a plague which has wiped out the population on a global scale

“The fate of mankind rests on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg) and a handful of survivors,” reads a press release from CBS All Access. “Their worst nightmares are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgrd), the Dark Man.”