THE DARK TOWER TV Series is Moving Forward at Amazon!
After The Dark Tower film landed flat with audiences and critics, I wasn't sure if the TV series that was being planned would actually happen. Well, according to Deadline, it's moving forward at Amazon! I think this is great news because it's giving this incredibly epic book series another shot! Just because the movie didn't turn out as good as fans hoped it would be, doesn't mean that the series can't be great. In fact, I think it would do much better as a TV series than films.
Amazon has got some exciting projects in development that also includes The Lord of the Rings series; a series based on Iain M. Banks’ sci-fi Culture book series; another show based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and an adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash.
When previously talking about what the series would entail, the director of the film, Nikolaj Arcel, who was helping develop the series said that the show will dive back into the books. Specifically, Wizard and Glass and The Gunslinger.
"It’s being written. I was part of writing the pilot, like the first season ideas and the pilot and the second episode. It’s gonna be awesome. What was exciting about that, whereas with the film, we were really trying to create an introduction and make a standalone film that could sort of live in itself, but what was also exciting, working on the TV show at the same time, is that is totally canon."
I love the series will be canon. He went on to explain:
“We’re going back in the past. It’s very, very closely adhering to the ‘Wizard and Glass’ novel and parts of ‘The Gunslinger’ novel. That was exciting to be even more like, ‘Okay, now we’re going to be able to even lift lines directly, or like [write] characters exactly as they are. Which, as a fan, was exciting in a different way.”
As a fan of the books, it's awesome to know that we actually are getting more of an adaptation of them instead of a reimagining. In another interview, Stephen King said that the series would be a complete reboot
"The TV series they’re developing now…we’ll see what happens with that. It would be like a complete reboot, so we’ll just have to see."
I take that as meaning the series will stand apart from the movie and not be connected, which is how it was originally being planned under Ron Howard's guidance. The adaptation of The Dark Tower was originally supposed to be a trilogy of films with a TV series being released between the films and all of them would have been connected with the same cast.
I loved that idea, but with the way things ended up going down, rebooting it as a series seems to be the best direction to go at this point.
What do you think? Are you happy to hear that The Dark Tower will be developed as a series at Amazon?