Mike Flanagan is a very busy guy. The horror filmmaker and showrunner has been busy cranking out a multitude of projects over the course of the past decade-plus and shows no signs of slowing down. In the next month alone, his new Stephen King adaptation, Carrie (which he served as the creative lead, primary writer, and director on), will premiere on Amazon Prime, and DC’s Clayface (a movie he initially pitched and wrote) will debut in theaters.
But even with all of that going on, Flanagan is far from content to rest on his laurels. In fact, the filmmaker is actively gearing up to begin work on one of the monumental projects of his entire career: a prestige TV series adaptation of King’s magnum opus of a book series, The Dark Tower. Though the series had previously been reported on, Flanagan clarified in a new interview that while he’s working on it, the show is still far from a certainty at this point.
For the uninitiated, The Dark Tower is an absolutely batshit insane literary franchise that spans practically every genre you can think of and even a few you can’t. What began as King’s interdimensional riff on a fairly straightforward western story was swerving wildly into other genres pretty much immediately thereafter and hasn’t looked back for several decades since. To give you an appropriate understanding of all of this, consider that of this eight-book series, the second book involves time travel, possession, and a character going under cover in the mafia. Completely normal stuff.
All of this to say, an adaptation of The Dark Tower series is certainly not a walk in the park, as proven by the critical and commercial failure of the incredibly poorly-thought-out 2017 movie attempt. But if anyone can make it work onscreen, it’s Flanagan, who has made a career out of adapting seemingly unadaptable King stories like Gerald’s Game and The Life of Chuck. However, according to Flanagan now, his version of The Dark Tower is far from a sure thing.
While Flanagan insists the project is “very much still on the table” at Amazon after Carrie, he also candidly admits that “to do this the way that I wanna do it requires an enormous commitment from a studio.” He goes on to elaborate that despite years of wrangling, the rights are still an issue. “The way The Dark Tower universe is connected, you’ve got characters in there that are all over the place when it comes to studio ownership… it has taken much longer than I’d like it to, but I work on it all the time.”
The Dark Tower does essentially connect King’s entire body of work into a single interconnected story, full of various universes and alternate versions of characters, in what was a multiverse story far before the phrase entered Hollywood’s lexicon. While I would be immensely interested to see Flanagan’s take on this series, it also would not surprise me at all if this just never happens. It seems like an extremely costly and arduous endeavor, so it may just not ever all coalesce into an actuality, despite the filmmaker’s best efforts.
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