A film adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand has been in talks for a while now, but some fans have expressed concern about cramming such a massive book into one 2-3 hour film. Now we're finding out the adaptation won't be just one movie.

According to Slashfilm, Josh Boone's adaptation of The Stand is now being planned as four movies. The Fault in Our Stars director revealed the plans for the project on Kevin Smith's Hollywood Babble-On podcast.

Boone said that the movie was actually originally written as a single, 3 hour film with a budget of $87 million, but then Warner Bros. wanted something more expensive with more set pieces so it was easier to market. The studio approached him asking if he'd want to do it as more than one movie. Boone said this caused him to drop his script so they could do it right.

"I’ll just say we are going to do four movies, and we’re going to do The Stand at the highest level you can do it at, with a cast that’s going to blow people’s minds," he said.

So with The Stand, Warner Bros. is probably going for a Hunger Games type approach, except the Stand movies will all be based on the same book. They will also be R-rated, as the director told Vulture earlier this year.

Is four films a good idea for The Stand? The book is 823 pages, so it definitely seems appropriate to have more than one movie, but four still does seem like a lot for just one book. On the other hand, with The Hobbit Peter Jackson managed to squeeze three movies out of a 300 page book, so The Stand at least is more deserving of that kind of treatment. Though all this plus the idea that Warner Bros. specifically came to Boone asking for a more expensive movie with more set pieces is a little concerning, and there's definitely the danger of this becoming a bloated, overlong blockbuster series that should have just stuck to one or two movies.

The Stand was written by Stephen King and released in 1978. It's a post-apocalyptic horror story about the survivors of a plague which kills most of the world's population. It was previously adapted into a TV miniseries in 1994, but no major feature film has been attempted before now.

The Stand will go into production this spring.