The Dark Tower Movie Flopped — and Stephen King Knew It Would
Back in 2017, Sony tried to turn Stephen King's epic The Dark Tower saga into a blockbuster franchise.
What they got instead was a 95-minute disaster, a fan mutiny, and one of the most forgettable King adaptations ever released in theaters.
Even with Idris Elba as gunslinger Roland Deschain and Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black, The Dark Tower bombed with critics and barely broke even at the box office. But King? He wasn't exactly shocked.
In an interview with Vulture, King explained exactly what went wrong:
"The major challenge was to do a film based on a series of books that's really long — about 3,000 pages... 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."
Translation: They watered it down. And tried to cram an entire multiverse-spanning saga into a tight runtime. But surprisingly, King was still polite about the result, even complimenting screenwriter Akiva Goldsman:
"I thought he did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I thought was a pretty good movie."
Still, he never believed The Dark Tower was meant for the big screen. In another 2017 interview with Collider, King said:
"It never seemed like a movie idea to me. It was complex, and it was long."
Which is probably why fans are far more excited about Mike Flanagan's upcoming Dark Tower TV series, currently in development at Amazon. Flanagan, who previously adapted Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, has earned King's trust — and the author's full support.
King hasn't been subtle about it either, calling Flanagan's plan for the series "perfect." And according to Flanagan himself, the pressure is real:
"You better believe as often as you guys may want to ask about it, Stephen King is asking me about it more. And I'm not gonna let him down."
So while The Dark Tower movie remains a cautionary tale about cramming an epic into a runtime better suited for a sitcom pilot, the series reboot may finally do the source material justice — assuming it ever makes it out of development limbo.