“These are the questions that keep me up at night,” laughed Mike Flanagan at this year’s New York Comic Con when asked about adapting arguably one of Stephen King’s most seminal works The Dark Tower. “But I honestly think the only way to do it is to just do the books.”
Flanagan is no stranger to adapting King. First adapting Gerald’s Game in 2017 for Netflix, then the 2019 feature of Doctor Sleep starring Rebecca Ferguson and Ewan McGregor, and the soon-to-be-released The Life of Chuck – based on a short story and starring Tom Hiddleston.
Of course, The Dark Tower has been attempted to be adapted before. However, the much-anticipated 2017 attempt starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey only resulted in a 15% Rotten Tomatoes score.
“The thing about The Dark Tower, that’s so incredible is Stephen King builds an astonishing universe, and it’s huge,” Flanagan continued at this year’s NYCC. “It’s populated with such a richness of characters and scale and scope eventually, but he starts that story with one person following another person in a barren desert. It has one of the greatest opening lines of any novel of all time. That’s how you do it. And you start with two people in a simple story. One is trying to catch the other. That’s it, and everything else is gradually added to it.
“I think that’s how you do The Dark Tower. You build it one brick at a time. I can understand the gravity that has pulled people into being like, ‘oh, we’ll jump in in the middle, or we’ll jump in over here, we try to jump ahead, to show the big scale of this thing’. You can’t start like that. Fortunately, Stephen King is a master storyteller who’s constructed a magnum opus and an epic that begins very intimately and ends very intimately and in the middle expands into this giant world. I think that’s the only way to do it, and that’s how we’re going to do it.”
It sounds like Flanagan has got the story down, but when will we be seeing it on the big screen? Well, no word on that right now except Flanagan’s addition of “it’s taking forever!”.