Netflix was dealt a hammer blow when Mike Flanagan – purveyor of consistently acclaimed and top-rated episodic nightmares – decided to see if the grass was greener over at Prime Video, and his lifelong desire to do justice to Stephen King’s The Dark Tower no doubt played a huge part.
The filmmaker had never been shy in naming it as his dream project, but all hope looked lost when the feature-length adaptation finally escaped from decades in development hell to find itself torn apart by critics, trashed by fans of the source material, and fall off a steep cliff at the box office.
Thankfully, Flanagan is finally getting his shot, and as he revealed on The Kingcast podcast, once the strikes are over he’s planning to move full steam ahead.
“I feel really good about where we are. Oddly, where we are at the moment is completely frozen, because of the strike, but we had a wonderful spring with it and we’re making enormous progress on it. And I have every reason to believe that on the other side of the strike, it’s gonna be priority number one.
We have great partners on it that I can’t talk about, and we’ve got some really exciting actors circling on it that I can’t talk about, and we have some potentially groundbreaking approaches to the filmmaking of it that I just can’t really talk about … but what I can say is that my fears that any momentum we had developed was gonna be obliterated, well, I don’t really worry about that.”
Flanagan could deliver the worst project of his career and still end up helming the best version of The Dark Tower by some distance, but his track record ensures that definitely won’t be the case whenever it ends up on streaming.
