Mike Flanagan loves an adaptation. He’s already tackled The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Midnight Club, but he has a particular predilection for the work of Stephen King. From Doctor Sleep to Gerald’s Game and the upcoming The Life of Chuck, the two have established a strong partnership.
Flanagan’s next King adaptation is a real doozy: the creator intends to tackle King’s sprawling fantasy epic, The Dark Tower, with a long-term plan of five seasons and even follow-up movies. And despite the source material’s checkered Hollywood reputation, a new quote from King should reassure fans that everything is on the right track.
Mike Flanagan and Stephen King have become longtime collaborators.
In conversation with Fangoria’s The Kingcast, King revealed that he’s started to see early material from Flanagan’s take on The Dark Tower. “I've seen screenplays and pitches,” King said. “He starts where he should start. The beats are perfect. They're just perfect."
This quote is a welcome omen, given how the previous adaptation of The Dark Tower, a 2017 movie starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, turned out. The project spent years in development hell. with both Ron Howard and J.J. Abrams attached at different points, and when it finally came out, it was incredibly underwhelming, landing at just 16% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Dark Tower was watered down to create a PG-13 tentpole that ended up appealing to no one.
In a late 2017 conversation with Entertainment Weekly, King revealed his biggest problem with the movie. “It ha[d] to be PG-13, and when they did that I think that they lost a lot of the toughness of it and it became something where people went to it and said, ‘Well yeah, but it's really not anything that we haven't seen before,’” he said.
Notably, the interviewer then suggested that the books would be better served as a series, and could even become the next Game of Thrones, eliciting a “That might happen” from King. Now, eight years later, it is happening, and if this quote from King is anything to go by, it’ll be the faithful adaptation fans have dreamed of for years.
