I am a huge King fan and I particularly love The Stand. I was very excited for the new miniseries adaptation coming to Paramount Plus last year. It was a great cast and creative team, and was going to be 9 episodes long, which meant they could tell a lot more of the story than in the previous miniseries.

However... it was kind of a dud. They made the absolutely puzzling decision of telling the story out of order, which makes a lot of the events feel pointless and aimless because you're getting a pay off before you get the full set up. It's the equivalent of telling someone the punchline of a joke, then over explaining how you got to the punchline.

They also didn't really tell much more of the story. Huge swaths of the plot were rushed through or completely cut out. It really was a bit of a mess.

But! There's a lot of good stuff in there. So, I'm removing the confusing narrative structure and cutting tons of footage out to create a Trilogy of films that tell the story of The Stand.

This is the story of two groups of survivors of an apocalyptic event and the ensuing showdown between them.

Narratively, this edit doesn't change that much from the original. In fact, I tried really hard to maintain the narrative as much as possible. I didn't want to alter the story, just to tighten it up and make it a single-sitting affair. I did add some stylistic changes and shifted around the timeline a little to cause tiny changes in peripheral events.