A mere five years ago, Ben Affleck was viewed as a mediocre actor that was simply poison at the box office, now he has given his career second life by becoming the accomplished director of critically acclaimed works like Gone Baby Gone and The Town. Those two hits have convinced Warner Brothers to hire Affleck as the director of one of the company's most ambitious projects to date, The Stand, according to Deadline.
Based on Stephen King's novel of the same name, The Stand revolves around a post-apocalyptic world that only .6% of the population has survived long enough to see. The survivors must now fight off a mysterious stranger with bizarre powers named Randall Flagg aka The Dark Man. This will be Affleck's biggest movie to date, with a much larger scope and budget compared to his other character-driven films.
Affleck apparently beat out some stiff competition for this job with one of them being Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows director David Yates, who was the frontrunner at one point. With The Stand novel clocking in at over 800 pages, it's not clear if Warner Bros. will expand the movie into multiple installments, but it would make sense for the studio to turn this cash-cow into a franchise.
[via Deadline]
