‘The Dark Tower’ Finally Getting a TV Series

When The Dark Tower finally made its way from Stephen King’s books to the big screen in 2017, the plan was for the movie to lead into some kind of spinoff television series. But The Dark Tower was a major flop, grossing just $113 million worldwide, and got dreadful reviews. Any plans to continue the story elsewhere pretty much ended there.

Since then, at least one other attempt has been made to get a Dark Tower TV show on the air, but it too fell apart. Now yet another attempt at a Dark Tower series is being mounted by Mike Flanagan, the guy behind Netflix series like The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club, and the director of the Stephen King adaptations Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep.

Flanagan told Deadline The Dark Tower is his “Holy Grail” project, something he’s “dreamed about” for more than half his life. Here was the current status of and vision for his adaptation:

I wrote a pilot, we view it as a as a series that’s going at least five seasons. And having lived with this project as long as I have, I have an enormous amount of it worked out in my brain. But I have a pilot script I’m thrilled with and a very detailed outline for the first season and a broader outline for the subsequent seasons. I think eventually, if we’re able to get it going, there are some other writers I want to fold into that process whom I’ve worked with before; I think they would be really fabulous for a very small, intimate writers room where we can continue to break it.

Flanagan said that his version of the material is totally different than the 2017 film (meaning don’t expect to see Idris Elba as the Gunslinger or Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black). But he also said beyond five seasons of TV, he could also see the show then being followed by “two stand-alone features.”

Flanagan is a very talented guy and a good horror filmmaker. Hopefully he can succeed where others in the past has failed (namely director Nikolaj Arcel). When The Dark Tower came out, I wrote…

The Dark Tower left me confused and often very annoyed, but not necessarily bored. Part of that is because the movie has been cut to the bone; at 95 minutes, it’s always moving forward, often to its detriment. (A slower movie would have deepened the characters and brought out their motivations for members of the audience who don’t already know that stuff from the novels.)

The previous Dark Tower was so disappointing, there’s pretty much nowhere to go but up. But it’s still going to be quite a challenge to pull off.