Stephen King’s The Dark Tower TV Series Details Revealed

Today is author Stephen King’s birthday, and Sony Pictures just gave him and his many fans quite the present.

King’s epic, genre-bending fantasy saga, The Dark Tower, is already headed to the big screen in February 2017. Now, there are new details about The Dark Tower‘s companion television series.

The Dark Tower television series, which has been in the planning side-by-side with the film, will be a 10-13 episode adaptation of Wizard and Glass, the fourth book in The Dark Tower series. According to Entertainment Weekly, The Dark Tower television series will begin filming in 2017 with plans for a 2018 debut.

According to EW’s sources, the content of The Dark Tower television series will be dark enough to require a cable or streaming distributor. Idris Elba is already on board to reprise his role as Roland in The Dark Tower TV series, and Tom Taylor will play Jake Chambers, a 15-year-old boy in modern day New York with the psychic power called “the shine.”

Elba and Taylor will appear in frame story for The Dark Tower television series. The show will fill in much of The Dark Tower‘s backstory, including Roland’s origin story, which takes place years before the events of The Dark Tower movie. A younger actor will play Roland in the The Dark Tower TV series’ core story.

The Dark Tower movie director Nikolaj Arcel and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen are writing the series’ script, but someone else will be brought in to serve as series showrunner.

Matthew McConaughey may still appear in The Dark Tower TV series but hasn’t signed on just yet. His character, the Man in Black, is a powerful, quasi-immortal wizard who can take different forms and assume different personas, so there would be an easy mechanic available to recast the character for The Dark Tower TV series.

Wizard and Glass the novel that opens up The Dark Tower to its full multiversal potential, even tapping into some of King’s previous novels and a version of the land of Oz. This is all to say that The Dark Tower television series has every bit as much potential as The Dark Tower movie.

The Dark Tower movie hits theaters on Feb. 17, 2017.