If you turn around in Hollywood these days, there’s a distinct possibility that you’re going to bump into a Stephen King adaptation. As one of the most heavily-adapted authors in history, the horror icon’s back catalogue is in a constant state of development, and even now there are eight TV shows and seventeen movies in the works based on his novels, short stories and other collections.
While the King fascination has resulted in some all-time greats like The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining and The Green Mile, there’ve been quite a few stinkers as well. One of the more notable offenders is The Dark Tower, which is regarded by many fans as the writer’s magnum opus, and was designed as a multi-dimensional epic spanning the vast reaches of space and time.
Instead, we ended up with a 95-minute fantasy film that jettisoned most of what made the source material so unique and engaging in the first place, although Idris Elba does the best he can as badass gunslinger Roland Deschain, and Matthew McConaughey is evidently having fun chewing on the scenery as the entertainingly hammy villain.
However, those are about the only saving graces of Nikolaj Arcel’s would-be franchise starter, which was panned by critics and flopped at the box office after earning just over $113 million. Somehow, though, The Dark Tower has found a new lease of life on Netflix after rising 77 places on the most-watched movies list to become the fifteenth most popular pic on the platform. Why that might be is anybody’s guess when it’s a terrible film, and watching it doesn’t give the slightest indication that there were once originally massively ambitious plans in store to have a multimedia franchise running concurrently across both the big and small screen.
