Matthew McConaughey To Play Randall Flagg In Josh Boone’s Adaptation Of ‘The Stand’?

Last week, on an episode of Kevin Smith’s podcast, Hollywood Babble-On, director Josh Boone (The Fault In Our Stars) revealed plans to bring Stephen King’s The Stand to the big screen in the form of four movies. It’s a huge reveal for longtime fans of The Stand, but what’s more is that Matthew McConaughey is rumored to star as the film series’ main antagonist, Randall Flagg, The Guardian reports.

“Conceived as an American version of The Lord of the Rings, King’s 1200-page epic spotlights the battle between good and evil after a deadly virus has wiped out the bulk of the world’s population. McConaughey looks set to play the story’s chief antagonist, a grinning cowboy with supernatural powers who establishes a power base in the ruins of Las Vegas.”

Following his Oscar win for last year’s Dallas Buyer’s Club, as well as this year’s hits True Detective and Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey has become quite the Hollywood hot commodity. Slowly but surely, McConaughey’s involvement in a project has become a validation of quality, and with a project the size of The Stand, that validation can go a long way in locking down a well-rounded cast–not to mention what it will do for fans’ perception of the films.

The adaptation of the The Stand has come a long way. Starting off as a single, three hour movie, the adaptation has since turned into something greater than even director Josh Boone could have imagined.

“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. 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. You open with Mother Abigail dying and sending the guys off, and then you jump back in time… 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… [But the studio] would rather have done it more expensive and added bigger set pieces so we can really sell it foreign… so we just said let’s take a beat and think about what we can do to make this tonally what we want, but get it in a budget range we feel like isn’t a huge risk…So they came back and said, ‘ Would you do this as multiple films?’ and I said, ‘F**k yes!'”

Does news of Matthew McConaughey’s involvement have you excited for The Stand, or were you already sold at “four movies?” Let us know below!