Mike Flanagan has revealed his approach for the hotly-anticipated The Dark Tower TV show, which is sure to please fans of Stephen King’s book series.
Flanagan, famous for Netflix horror shows The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and, most recently, Amazon's Carrie, has been trying to get an adaptation of King’s much-loved fantasy saga off the ground for years — despite the fact the script for Season 1 has King’s seal of approval.
The Dark Tower is currently “one of the most complicated properties to get started,” Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly in the summer, referencing his struggle to get the go-ahead. “Getting the green light on Dark Tower is a much longer and more involved process than anything else I’ve ever approached in my life.”
Actually getting The Dark Tower made is the hard part, then. But in terms of the adaptation itself, it’s relatively straightforward. That’s because Flanagan has taken the approach of faithfully adapting the books, almost to a fault, leaning heavily on the story King himself told.
“That one I feel like I figured out,” Flanagan said in a recent interview with The Process Unlocked. "You do the books.”
That sounds obvious, but it is not the path previous The Dark Tower adaptations have followed — much to the disappointment of fans. The 2017 movie, starring Idris Elba as Roland Deschain and Matthew McConaughey as his nemesis, Walter Padick, was panned by critics. Flanagan has said of the film: “We can’t let that be the final word. We really can’t.”
The big idea, Flanagan has said, is for five seasons of The Dark Tower followed by two standalone movies. Or, put more simply by Flanagan in this new interview: “just doing the books and doing them in order.”
“Stephen King is genius in how he structures The Dark Tower because he starts this giant worldbuilding potentially, overwhelming story with two people in a landscape without detail. It's the simplest start,” Flanagan explained.
“It's one of the most perfect lines of any book: 'The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.' It is two characters. There's a clear objective. One is running away, one is pursuing, and it's a desert. There is nothing else to look at. It's so simple and so clean and on top of that foundation, he adds a universe one brick at a time.
“And so that's the way to do it. The problem with the other approaches is people who try to jump in in the middle or people who try to jump in at a different point, because you can't throw an audience face first into this huge universe. It's overwhelming. And King did it right. He walked you in, started with two people and nothing else and walks you in one step at a time. So my adaptation was that, it was just doing the books and doing them in order. And there's little changes you make to fit the the format, but my Dark Tower approach is remarkably faithful. And so 70% of my job is done for me by Steve. So it's not that difficult. You know, the difficult thing is just figuring out how to get in.”
The question is, will Flanagan get the chance to realize his vision? The Dark Tower is not a part of Flanagan’s big Amazon deal, although he has suggested Prime Video could get behind it eventually. Next up for the horror specialist is an Amazon TV show adaptation of Warhammer 40,000, which he’s said is much harder to adapt than The Dark Tower.
So while Flanagan’s plan for The Dark Tower sounds great, if it ever does come to pass, it will be many years from now.