Stephen King Discusses THE DARK TOWER Film and Why He Think it Failed
As a fan of Stephen King's The Dark Tower book series, I enjoyed the film that was made. Yeah, it wasn't the masterpiece that I was hoping for but I was still entertained by it. Ultimately, the movie was a disappointment for a lot of people. It failed both critically and at the box office and in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King offers his thoughts on why:
"The real problem, as far as I’m concerned is, they went in to this movie and I think this was a studio edict, pretty much, this is going to be a PG-13 movie. It’s going to be a tentpole movie. We want to make sure that we get people in there from the ages of, let’s say, 12 right on up to whatever the target age is. Let’s say 12 to 35. That’s what we want. So it has to be PG-13 and when they did that, I think that they lost a lot of the toughness of it and it became something where people went to it and said, Well yeah, but it’s really not anything that we haven’t seen before."
It totally did lack the grit and originality of the book. Even though I liked the movie, I still wish they would have went the hardcore R-rated route. He went on to explain how the setup of the story was an issue as well, saying:
"There was a decision made, too, to start it pretty much in the middle, and when they actually made the movie I had doubts about it from the beginning, and expressed them, and didn’t really get too far. Sometimes when people have made up their mind, the creative team that’s actually going to go and shoot the movie, it’s a little bit like hitting your fist against hard rubber, you know. There’s a kind of it doesn’t really hurt, but you don’t get anywhere. It just sort of bounces back and I thought to myself, Well, people are going to be really puzzled by this, and they were. So there was some of that problem, too."
Like me, Stephen King hopes that this first film isn't the last one that we'll see. It would be great to see another filmmaker come in to give it another shot and take the movie to the level that it needs to be next time. King previously said that if the sequel ever happens, it needs to be rated R and I think the fans would agree. That would take away certain restrictions and give the filmmakers more freedom to do what they want with the story.
There's also a TV series that is supposedly still in development, which is said to be a complete reboot. We'll just have to wait and see if that will actually happen.