Mike Flanagan says adapting Stephen King’s Dark Tower would be his “Everest”
Flanagan, a long-time King fan, has just a few changes he'd make to the series' disastrous 2017 film version
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Netflix’s resident horror master, Mike Flanagan, has adapted two of Stephen King’s works to date—Gerald’s Game in 2017, and then King’s Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep, in 2019. Even in his non-King works, though, Flanagan frequently shows his fandom for the Maine-based novelist, whether that’s simply by importing some of King’s love for the intersection between regular folks and creeping, corrupting evil into his works, or with more explicit references—like the cover of an illustrated version of The Gunslinger, the first book of King’s sprawling Dark Tower series, that popped up in Flanagan’s The Midnight Club.
In a recent interview with IGN, Flanagan made it clear that he’s no casual Tower fan, either, describing an adaptation of King’s seven-novel series—which blends Westerns, high fantasy, science fiction, and pretty much every other idea or concept that floated through King’s head between 1982 and 2004 into one massive world—as his “Everest.”
The Dark Tower has, of course, been adapted for the screen once before, with Nikolaj Arcel’s disastrous film version of the books thudding into theaters in 2017. Flanagan is careful not to drag the movie version too hard, but does suggest that he thinks the film’s structure—which dropped King’s fantastical and bleak opening in favor of a long sequence set in “our” world, before Idris Elba’s Roland even appears—was a misstep.
Working himself up as he lays out his ideas, Flanagan says “his” Dark Tower would be a much straighter adaptation of the books, including King’s very good first line:
The first scene would be a black screen and the words, ‘The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed’ would come up in 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 hardpan. And we would build it out from there—in order—to the end.
If anyone was going to talk, say, Netflix, into trying something this ambitious, it’d be Flanagan—who’s generated a lot of heat for the streamer over the years, and with a consistency rarely seen in the streaming space. That being said, it’s hard not to imagine the Dark Tower brand might just be permanently tainted at this point, especially because any sufficiently expansive version of the books would, by necessity, also have to be pretty damn expensive. Still: Nice to think about—and Flanagan clearly agrees.
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it’s hard not to imagine the Dark Tower brand might just be permanently tainted at this point, especially because any sufficiently expansive version of the books would, by necessity, also have to be pretty damn expensive.I know the scale for The Dark Tower is much bigger, but didn’t everyone think that the His Dark Materials brand was permanently tainted when The Golden Compass bombed? The TV series has turned out to be quite successful though. I imagine that someone with the depth of reverence for the books that Flanagan has could make several seasons of quality episodes out of the Gunslinger books.
Yeah… “Grand dark fantasy series by Stephen king” is a tantalizing opportunity that will continue to resurface until it’s done right (or the bubble bursts on expensive genre prestige dramas). I had entirely forgotten the movie came out tbh.
I originally read the first three books as they were being released and then got frustrated with how long it was taking per book (especially for a guy who absolutely churns out novels) and decided to wait until they were all finished to read them. Then I kind of forgot until 2021 when I finally read the entire magnum opus start-to-finish. Would be interesting to see someone do this well… but unless it had about 10 limited-series runs, there’s no way to do it. And I doubt that anyone is going to give someone that kind of guarantee (or money). Maybe it can just be, you know, books.
Honestly, you could cut more than half of the Dark Tower and it would be even better.
Really had my hopes up for that new adaptation of The Stand, but that shit the bed pretty hard and pretty early; nothing at all to do with the casting, but the story structure, the abandoned main characters, and the woeful misinterpretation of the Vegas society did it in for me. Also the weird decision to deify the US military in spite of them being responsible for Captain Trips.Hoping someone else takes a shot at it in my lifetime, but I don’t see it happening again.
I think The Stand CBS version was awful right from the start. The casting was fine on paper but the awful desicion to do a Lost style structure killed the show. The Stand is more along of the lines of a lord of the rings style journey and the progression of the characters is really important to the story. I was always hoping for something larger in scope then the 94 series, given the progress in VFX, but somehow it seemed smaller.
Petty much that. I mean, I’ve tried to never be one of those people who loses their shit because an adaptation doesn’t follow the source material particularly well; I get the idea of time constraints and that television and novels are two different mediums. But for someone who claimed to be a huge fan of the novel, Josh Boone sure seemed to just… not get it.What’s even more baffling is that they had a very good (imo) adaptation of it sitting right in front of them with the Marvel comics series that they practically could have used as storyboards, but… nope.
I love Steven King; I’ve read almost everything he’s written. Frankly, the Dark Tower is NOT his best work. I enjoyed reading it, but the overarching plot is a disjointed, wandering mess. Large chunks of the story are just silly-such as telling Blaine the Mono AI silly meaningless riddles until it’s computer fries? I believe I saw that in an early Star Trek episode.If someone who wasn’t named Steven King tried to get the series published, it would never happen.
mike flanagan is such an absolutely mid writer/director. most of his stuff leans so hard into sentimentality that i wanna throw up in my mouth. i think his best work is probably the ouija sequel, weirdly enough, because that keeps focused and doesn’t disappear so far up its own ass that it causes involuntary eye rolls. bly manor and his newest are the absolute nadirs, though hill house and midnight mass both were at least alright.
I’m overall more favorable on Flanagan than not, but the best description I ever saw of Midnight Mass was “the story of a small town battling an infestation of audition monologues.”
holy shit that’s perfect
Please, please let this happen
The movie wasn’t bad considering they condensed 8 novels into 95 minutes. I’d love to see it developed into a series on a platform that had the $$$ to do it justice.
YES PLZ.
I’m convinced that The Dark Tower is unadaptable. The scope is too big, the pacing is all over the place, and there’s a ton of questionable literary decisions that if you changed, would then change the nature of the character involved. It would take a writing prodigy to turn this into something really good.
And that’s the problem that most King fans ignore…it’s a deeply, deeply flawed series. Incredibly ambition, but there’s a whole lot of bad along with the good, especially the horrible, cop-out of an ending that rivals ‘Lost’ in its banality.
I thought the ending was a copout at first but over the years I’ve actually grown to appreciate it.
I really should re-read this. I too thought the ending blew, but now, with years (and, hopefully, some wisdom) I should probably revisit it.
When it first came out I hated it but I went back like 5 or so years later and appreciated it more. It ends up being a commentary on fiction in general and King’s fiction specifically, since it all takes place on a level of the Tower somewhere.
Hell, he’d already told us in the third book how it would end:
“Ka was like a wheel, its one purpose to turn, and in the end it always came back to the place where it had started.”
Yup
I like the very very ending. The run up to that, however, not so much. It didn’t help that the big villain (Crimson King) was only really ever mentioned toward the end of the saga and never really explored in any way to make us care, and then his ultimate appearance was totally anticlimactic. Not to mention other stuff (e.g., Patrick Danville) that we knew had to happened ended up happening but not adding anything at all to anything. And another giant spider with some pointless anagrams.
This. It’s a massive fantasy epic that isn’t really about anything except the inside of King’s head; all of his major preoccupations, his recurring characters and themes, his major influences, etc. It just barely work as that in the hands of King’s itself. I can’t imagine it ever doing anything but collapsing in anyone else’s hands.That being said, there’s no reason why someone couldn’t adapt the Gunslinger (and probably Drawing of the Three, with some changes) and make something good.
Glen Mazzara had a pretty great plan for The Dark Tower over at Amazon, basically starting with Wizard and Glass, then working through the rest of the books. It’s a shame Amazon decided not to pick up the pilot he shot.
Leaving the movie aside, there’s definitely some things you’d have to rework from the original story; the whole Detta thing, the time Susannah [redacted] a [redacted], and a certain cameo by a familiar face in the later books, among others.
Yes. That last example, in particular, was embarrassingly bad. In a serious filled with annoyingly pretentious bits, that trumped them all.
Yeah like, it’s a meta joke that wouldn’t have been terrible if it was like a two-paragraph aside rather than the central plot point of one of the last books.
I got to the part in Wolves of the Calla where they were like “oh what are all these books by a man named Stephen King” and I literally said “Oh no!” aloud.
The first scene would be a black screen and the words, ‘The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed’ would come up in 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 hardpan. And we would build it out from there—in order—to the end.So start with the opening of the book you’re adapting and then do the rest, in order, until the end. An idea so crazy and novel, it might just work!
I mean he’s saying that because it was apparently an idea that, however obvious, clearly didn’t occur to the people who made the terrible McConaughey movie. if there’s anyone who could make a mostly faithful adaptation of this work, it’s probably Flanagan
Oh yeah, to be clear my criticism is not directed at Flanagan. I support his “back to the basic idea of adapting a thing” approach. It’s just kinda crazy that it has to be suggested.
Can we get him to adapt The Stand?
Probably gotta let that one rest for a few more years, but yeah, I’d be into it!!
If anyone’s gonna do it they have to do a highly condensed TV series.Honestly I’d rather see The Talisman or a couple of Clive Barker’s books become TV series before TDK.
At some point, for me, the Dark Tower series shifted from having and end-of-times world moving on story to an exercise in writing various pieces and putting them between book covers. The rampant borrowing of elements from other authors just to add a gory twist to it was particularly distracting. It felt like he had no good ending, was never going to have a good ending, and kept throwing pages at that problem until he went onto the next coil in the helix, rather than turn of the wheel. Each fragment was sufficient, but it’s like a jigsaw puzzle where all different pictures have been shuffled to fit, but they don’t really match. I cannot see how putting that on the screen can fix the underlying lumps of story. Simply – King is a great horror writer and large parts of the Dark Tower series are certainly horrible.