Stephen King’s Best Saga Is Becoming A TV Series
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Filmmaker and showrunner Mike Flanagan has been telling horror stories for years through his art, most recently for Netflix in the miniseries Midnight Mass. His deal with Netflix sparked quite a bit of interest in several projects for the streamer, including The Midnight Club, but the series was not renewed despite fans loving the show for its use of supernatural horror aspects in storytelling. However, Mike Flanagan will be moving his writing skills to Amazon, and according to a report by Deadline, his next project will be developing an adaptation of Stephen King’s best saga, The Dark Tower.
Mike Flanagan and his Intrepid Pictures partner Trevor Macy have begun developing an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, which they anticipate will run on Prime Video for five seasons. Flanagan is hopeful that if the series is a success at the subscription streaming platform, then they will expand the franchise into two feature films to cap off the stories outlined by King in his saga. Intrepid Pictures have acquired the rights to The Dark Tower book series, and the two men believe they have found a dream project that mixes several genres like westerns, horror, and fantasy.
Stephen King first introduced the world to The Dark Tower with the 1982 novel The Gunslinger, which follows a character on his journey to a physical and metaphorical tower. A series of novels was developed by King that have amounted to nine books so far, with the most recent being The Wind Through the Keyhole in 2012. Inspired by The Lord of the Rings and the spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood, Stephen King himself believes that The Dark Tower saga is his best work, and his website describes the novels as the horror writer’s “magnum opus.”
Prior to Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy acquiring the rights to Stephen King’s The Dark Tower saga, many filmmakers attempted to bring the novels to the big and small screen. In 2017, Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey starred in a film adaptation directed by Nikolaj Arcel, which ended up grossing over $113 million at the box office but was overwhelmingly panned by critics upon its release. Most of the criticism thrown the film’s way was due to its process of combining all the novels in the saga into one standalone movie that barely surpassed 95 minutes of screen time overall.
Amazon had also tried to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower as a television series after the critical failure of the 2017 movie made it possible for them to acquire the rights to the saga. The series was supposed to be a reboot rather than featuring any of the actors that were involved with the 2017 film, although there had been interest on Idris Elba’s part in reprising his role in future installments. In 2020, the series pilot was taken off Amazon’s agenda and it didn’t proceed until recently when Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy were interested in outlining their own path to produce the material for a television audience.
