It’s no secret that The Dark Tower is held up as Stephen King’s greatest achievement.
Spanning multiple genres and fantastical worlds, the classic is an eight-part saga that began life in 1982 with The Gunslinger, and after years of false starts and scrapped plans, Sony’s big-budget adaptation finally arrived in theatres back in August. Though the film’s long, meandering journey to the silver screen was public knowledge, many still held out hope that somehow, everything would turn out alright for the trouble production. How wrong they were.
As we now know, The Dark Tower was a complete dud, both financially and critically, failing to impress just about everyone and halting the studio’s plans for a full-blown franchise. Or did it? While it’s widely assumed that we won’t be seeing anymore from this world on the big screen, Idris Elba isn’t so sure about that. The actor, who played The Gunslinger in the flick, says that a sequel’s still possible.
“I think any TV series that is an offshoot from the film can have more time to explore some themes,” he said during a recent interview with Radio Times. “I’d personally prefer to do another Dark Tower film, exploring some more of the gunslinger – as a film. I don’t know much about where they are with the TV show – but I think there’s definitely talks to try and do another one.”
Speaking of the TV series, from what we understand, the studio definitely plans to move forward with it and recently tapped The Walking Dead alum Glen Mazzara to take point at the helm. Details are scarce at this early stage, but according to King, it’s set to be a “complete reboot.” How that will work alongside the sequel (assuming it gets off the ground) is unclear, but here’s what the author had to say.
“The major challenge was to do a film based on a series of books that’s really long, about 3,000 pages,” King told Vulture. The other part of it was the decision to do a PG-13 feature adaptation of books that are extremely violent and deal with violent behavior in a fairly graphic way. That was something that had to be overcome, although I’ve gotta say, I thought [screenwriter] Akiva Goldsman did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I thought was a pretty good movie. The TV series they’re developing now … we’ll see what happens with that. It would be like a complete reboot, so we’ll just have to see.”
King makes some good points about what went wrong with the adaptation, though the film’s problems run much deeper than just what he mentions here. Still, the source material is fantastic and if a sequel could improve upon where the first one went wrong, we’d be all for giving it another chance. The TV show, meanwhile, sounds intriguing, too, and we’re curious to see how it could all tie together.
Right now, though, it seems like any plans regarding The Dark Tower are very much up in the air – and understandably so – but we’ll be sure to bring you any further updates as and when we have them.
