It’s no secret that The Dark Tower is held up as one of author Stephen King’s greatest achievements.
Spanning multiple genres and fantastical worlds, the story 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 movie’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. Unfortunately, they were wrong.
As we now know, The Dark Tower proved to be 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? Not too long ago, we learned that a sequel was still being considered and apparently, that planned TV series is still a go as well, but don’t expect it to feature Idris Elba.
During a recent interview with Screen Crush, the actor admitted that he has no idea what’s going on with the project at the moment, indicating that he’s probably not going to be involved with it:
You know what? I didn’t know Stephen said that. I don’t know, actually, where it lies. I must figure this out, I don’t know where it lies. I’m unfortunately the last to know at this point.
Speaking of the show, it 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 on the small screen venture, as well as any possible theatrical sequel, as soon as we have them.
