Simon Brew

Sep 26, 2017

The Dark Tower television series is now likely to ignore the recent movie and start again…

Over the past two months, a pair of major adaptations of Stephen King’s work have come to the big screen. IT has proven to be a juggernaut success, closing in on $500m at the global box office and counting. Conversely, The Dark Tower – a project long in gestation – failed to catch on. The film, starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, was intended to be a franchise-launcher, but its $110m global gross, and less than stellar reviews, have put that plan under serious threat.

King himself, in a new interview with Vulture, has pinpointed just where he thinks the movie stumbled.

“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 behaviour in a fairly graphic way”, King said, zeroing in on two of the main complaints with the adaptation.

“That was something that had to be overcome, although I’ve gotta say, I thought [screenwriter] Akiva Goldsman did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I thought was a pretty good movie”.

King went onto say that the planned TV series of The Dark Tower, that was set to accompany the movie, now looks like being “a complete reboot”.

We’ll keep you posted as we hear more on it. Here’s the interview with Vulture.