Fans of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower have sought a faithful adaptation of the horror author’s magnum opus for decades. While Ron Howard originally pitched an adaptation that would have spanned movies and interconnecting TV shows, it ended up being released as a single, relatively short movie that barely touched the sides of King’s story. One person who would love to bring The Dark Tower to screens as a linear and faithful adaptation is someone who is no stranger to working with the horror master’s stories — Mike Flanagan.
Having previously worked on King-based movies Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, and being tapped to direct the now-abandoned Revival, Flanagan seems perfectly placed to bring The Dark Tower to life in a way that is more in line with King’s story of Roland Deschain and his quest for the elusive Man in Black and the Dark Tower that sits at the nexus of worlds. King’s novels spanned many worlds, including some from his own older works, and following the success of the likes of The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and now The Midnight Club, Flanagan would love to have a go at bringing them all to the screen. He told IGN:
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“I keep coming back to it because it has its own gravity.It would just be a question of taking the more fantastical elements that might be harder to connect to, especially where it gets pretty meta at mid-point, and grounding it, just pulling it in. Otherwise, the characters are who they are, the arc is what it is. And I think the way not to do The Dark Tower is to try to turn it into something else, to try to make it Star Wars or make it Lord of the Rings. It’s what it is. What it is is perfect. It’s just as exciting as all of those things and just as immersive and it’s a story about a tiny group of people and all the odds in the whole world are against them, and they come together. As long as it’s that, it’ll be fine, and there won’t be a dry eye in the house.”
Will A New Version of The Dark Tower Be Made?
With the previous movie version of The Dark Tower being a costly box office bomb and a planned TV series being canceled at Prime Video in 2020, it would seem that the chance for King’s tale to be told has passed. However, The Dark Tower arrived at a time when streaming was relatively new, and no one was throwing millions of dollars at fantasy and horror projects like The Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time, and Flanagan’s own upcoming The Fall of The House of Usher. This shift could be the one thing that could save The Dark Tower from being known as one of the modern King movies that completely missed the mark. Flanagan even knows how he would begin the story if he was given the chance.
Mike Flanagan’s The Midnight Club is streaming now on Netflix.
“The first (thing), it would be a black screen and the words, ‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed’ would come up on silence, and you’d hear the wind, and we’d gradually fade up to this Lawrence of Arabia-esque landscape with a silhouette in the distance just making his way across the hard pan and we would build it out from there, in order, to the end.”
