Stephen King’s book series The Dark Tower may have finally been adapted into a feature film a few years ago, but not only was it a disappointment to readers of the books but also a financial failure. As such the inevitable reboot of the property will almost certainly come back around (Amazon Prime Video previously tried to before going into the Lord of the Rings business) and there’s one guy who really wants the job, Mike Flanagan. A Netflix favorite after creating The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club, Flanagan is eager to adapt the King novels in some way, calling it his “dream project” in a new interview.
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“I keep coming back to it because it has its own gravity,” Flanagan told IGN. “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.”
Flanagan even teased how his version of The Dark Tower, be it a TV show, a series of movies, or a combination of the two, would begin, revealing its first scene in full:
“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.”
Beyond his extensive resume as a television creator, Flanagan also has his Stephen King bonafides already claimed as well, having directed adaptations of both Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep from novels written by the horror master.
