Paul Greengrass eyed to direct the film adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand

After coming off of two projects where the drama outweighed the action, Paul Greengrass may now be looking to possibly get back into blockbuster filmmaking. According to unnamed sources over at Badass Digest, with Out of the Furnace filmmaker Scott Cooper dropping out of directing the big screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand, Warner Bros. is now hoping that they can rope Greengrass into taking the director's chair. While it doesn't sound like things have exactly entered the negotiation stage, he is reportedly at the top of the studio's wish list. [hit the jump to continue]

This new adaptation of The Stand has been in the works since 2011, and in that time it has run through directors like tissue paper. Harry Potter's David Yates was the first one to sign on for the movie, attaching himself in July 2011, but then he quit a few months later citing that the source material didn't have enough big action sequences and set pieces to create the tentpole picture that Warner Bros. wants the movie to be. Ben Affleck came on in October 2011, but then this past August he was forced from the chair due to commitments to David Fincher's Gone Girl, Zack Snyder's Batman vs. Superman and his own next directorial effort Live By Night. Affleck was then replaced by Cooper, who dropped out last week due to creative differences with the studio.

It's taken a long time for the project to get to this point, and absolutely nothing has been accomplished. According to Badass Digest's report, the project hasn't even managed to answer big questions, like those about the size of the franchise and what rating they will be aiming for. They are working from square one.

That being said, the film's lack of progress could be seen as a positive aspect by Greengrass. Working from a clean slate would potentially be enticing for the filmmaker, as it would allow him to really leave his stamp on the material. That being said, the project's history thus far suggests that the studio has been doing a lot of meddling, and there probably aren't many directors out there who would be willing to jump into a pit of snakes like that.

As alluded to earlier, Greengrass does have some experience with big action movies having made both The Bourne Supremacy in 2004 and The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007. Since then he has made the Iraq War thriller Green Zone - which reunited him with Bourne star Matt Damon - and then just last month we saw the release of his latest, Captain Phillips (which is expected to be a player in this year's award season).

[source: cinemablend]