Stephen King Calls Mike Flanagan's THE DARK TOWER Adaptation "Perfect"
Writer and director Mike Flanagan is hard at work on developing a film and series adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower stories for Amazon Studios. King has seen what the filmmaker has got cooking, and he says it’s “perfect.”
On a recent episode of The Kingcast, host Eric Vespe brought up The Dark Tower, and while King didn’t offer much, he did say:
"I've seen screenplays and pitches. He starts where he should start. The beats are perfect. They're just perfect."
King went on to joke that Flanagan is “the King Whisperer." This is in regards to Flanagan’s reputation for being able to do such a great job adapting King’s work.
The Dark Tower consists of eight novels and follows the character Roland Deschain and his Ka-Tet on an epic quest to reach the Tower.
Flanagan has been working on the project since 2022, and his plan is to start with a simple story and then go from there. In that story, Roland is pursuing The Man in Black. The opening line of The Dark Tower is, "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
Flanagan said: “These are the questions that keep me up at night. The only way to do it is to just do the books. The thing about The Dark Tower that’s so incredible is Stephen King builds an astonishing universe and it’s huge.
“It’s populated with such a richness of characters and scale and scope, eventually, but he starts that story with one person following another person in the barren desert.
“It’s one of the greatest opening lines of all time. That’s how you do it. You start with two people and a simple story. One is trying to catch the other. That’s it. It’s taking forever.”
The director previously explained: “That thing’s launching an oil tanker. But we’re working on. It was stalled first by me moving from Netflix to Amazon and stalled again by the strikes.
“It’s progressing, and we’re further along than we’ve ever been on it. I do see feature components to some of the other stories, but the main storyline is ongoing series.”
In regards to bringing the story to life, Flanagan teased that they “have some potentially groundbreaking approaches to the filmmaking of it,” but he didn’t offer any details of what that could be.
When Flanagan first announced the project, he said that the pilot script is “one of my favorite things I’ve ever gotten to work on.” He shared at the time:
“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.
“I’ll tell you, more than half of my life, I’ve closed my eyes and been able to watch a lot of this play out, I’ve dreamed about this.
“That first shot which comes right off at the first incredible sentence of the first book, The Gunslinger, I’ve had that image just rattling around in my head since I was an undergrad. It’s going to have to get out of there eventually, I really need to get it out of my head.
“The pilot script is one of my favorite things I’ve ever gotten to work on. It’s been surreal working on that. So we’ve been floored and grateful that Stephen King trusts us with such an undertaking, something so precious to him, and we hope to find the right partners to realize it.”
I can’t wait to see what Flanagan does with this!