Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is being turned into a TV show. According to Deadline, the ambitious project is in the works from Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy’s Intrepid Pictures under a new deal with Amazon Studios.
“I wrote a pilot. We view it as a series that’s going at least five seasons,” said Flanagan. “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.”
Flanagan is certainly no stranger to King’s work, having already adapted both Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game.
“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,” he added. “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.”
Flanagan has also built up quite a name for himself at Netflix, with the recent hits The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass under his belt. He's now leaving Netflix, however, and it looks as though he’s taking The Dark Tower with him over to Amazon.
And this time, he won’t be doing it alone. “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,” he revealed. “I think they would be really fabulous for a very small, intimate writers' room where we can continue to break it.”
The fact The Dark Tower series is being planned for “at least five seasons” certainly matches the rich complex multiverse set out in the original series by King, and while it’s been tackled on the big screen before, many fans believe it needs longform storytelling to truly adapt it.
Stephen King has already been involved too. “This happened because I sent him a very, very detailed outline of what I wanted to do with it,” said Flanagan. “And it was in response to that, that he gave us the rights.
“A project like this, I wouldn’t want to be involved in it at all If we were taking it in a direction that was going to be blasphemous to the Stephen King material, but he’s been very, very supportive and very excited about what we’d like to do with it.”
Want to read more about Stephen King? Check out the 12 best Stephen King movies of all time as well as how to read The Dark Tower books in order.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/stephen-kings-the-dark-tower-getting-tv-adaptation-by-haunting-of-hill-house-creator