Mike Flanagan and his creative partner, Trevor Macy, recently talked about pulling up stakes from Netflix and decamping to Amazon, and what their vision for a proper take on Stephen King's The Dark Tower series would look like.
Stephen King has long been America's favorite (and best) horror writer ever since he first hit big with Carrie in 1974. However, all the works of his tremendous oeuvre—including The Shining, Salem's Lot, It, and Misery—it’s his seven-book-long series of The Dark Tower that has kept his truest fans in its fevered grip. One such fan is new horror golden boy Flanagan, of the recent King adaptations Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, who has just announced he’s got the fabled tower in sight.
While speaking to Deadline, Flanagan announced his departure for the greener pastures of Amazon Prime Video after Netflix recently unceremoniously cancelled Flanagan's The Midnight Club, in which he set up several threads to be paid off in a second season. Flanagan had also produced several horror hits for the streamer (Hush, Gerald's Game), but Netflix is the content farm that knows no loyalty, and so Flanagan went where he felt more wanted and where The Dark Tower rights could more easily be secured. Flanagan detailed that he and his partner have acquired the rights to the entire Dark Tower series (with no indication if this means the original books only or if this includes The Wind Through the Keyhole, which would sit between books 4 and 5 of the original 7). He then shared his vision for a pilot episode, explaining it would open on a black title card with the famous line, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” before fading in on a silhouette in the far distance.
The books—a mishmash of fantasy, Westerns, horror, sci-fi, action, adventure and every other thing—are like taking a jaunt through the mind of King and touching on everything that’s ever influenced him, which makes King's work notoriously hard to adapt. How does one adapt an author’s imagination? It’s why a series of attempts have ended almost as quickly as they began until Sony rushed out a movie starring Idris Elba as the titular gunslinger, Roland Deschain of Gilead, and Matthew McConaughey as Randall Flagg, Roland's nemesis and the nemesis of a few other King books (principally The Stand). It sank like a lead balloon as most low-budget, quickie productions do and left fans despairing of anyone else willing to take the risk.
Enter Amazon, trying to get into the streaming game in a big way, and Flanagan and Trevor's good impression of the studio, first with The Boys. Eric Kripke took a sprawling, wild comic and adapted it in a way that not only honors Garth Ennis' source material but elevates it out of the often juvenile realm it wallowed in to be one of the few satires today that could touch the work of an Armando Iannucci. Then came The Rings of Power, which showed that Amazon wasn’t shy about throwing a lot of money at an epic fantasy adaptation, with the audience being able to see all those greenbacks up there on the screen, something The Dark Tower needed. Amazon was not only willing to risk the money, but they were hungry for content and The Dark Tower provides a lot of it.
So now it seems like there’s the perfect cocktail for The Dark Tower: A fan of the material in Flanagan (who knows his way around the thornier parts of King adaptations), a studio not shy with throwing around the money, and an audience hungry for the next big fantasy thing. In other words, if it couldn’t be pulled off under these circumstances, the series probably couldn’t be pulled off at all, as it doesn’t appear that there will be a riper opportunity or talent involved with as deep a love of the material. Fans should keep their fingers crossed—and maybe their toes—but it seems Flanagan and Macy have remembered the faces of their fathers and, like Roland's seemingly miraculous gunshots, might pull off the impossible with King's The Dark Tower.
Source: Deadline