There’ve been a lot of successful Stephen King adaptations over the past few years, but 2017’s The Dark Tower is not one of them. Somehow the film managed to take King’s most ambitious, most imaginative body of work and reduce it to a generic fantasy flick that pleased nobody. It was supposed to be the start of a sprawling multi-media franchise, but in the end, both a sequel and a spinoff TV series were cancelled.
Looking back at what went wrong on the project, producer Akiva Goldsman has now admitted that he has “a lot of regret” over The Dark Tower. While speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about his involvement in the Star Trek universe, the topic of TDT came up and while Goldsman praised certain elements of the movie – including Idris Elba’s turn as Roland Deschain – he thinks it was just a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth.
“I have a lot of regret about the parts of that that didn’t work out,” Goldsman said. “Our best version of that existed well before television-movie crossovers and streaming were a thing. I have a lot of affection for the books that didn’t end up onscreen [in the 2017 movie The Dark Tower]. And [The Dark Tower producer] Ron Howard had this idea of what could be done across platforms — he didn’t touch the movie, but sometimes things slip away. There are things about that [film] I still admire, and Idris Elba [played a] really wonderful Roland. I think there were too many different points of view — mine included — when it came to figuring out how to tell a cogent story onscreen, and we could have done better.”
King himself was initially supportive of the movie, but he later came clean about his thoughts on it. The author revealed that he thinks The Dark Tower was doomed from the moment the studio committed to making it PG-13 instead of going all in on the mature nature of the books. Likewise, producer Ron Howard felt there should have been more of a horror edge to the film.
Following the failure of the 2017 effort, Amazon’s TV series morphed into a reboot, with former Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazarra at the helm and British actor Sam Strike attached to star. It was in development for a couple of years there, but the streamer ultimately decided not to move forward with it. As for what’s next for the franchise, maybe Doctor Sleep‘s Mike Flanagan should be allowed to have a go at it, seeing as he’s revealed that he wants the job of doing The Dark Tower justice.
