Producer Ron Howard on The Dark Tower failure: ‘It should’ve been horror’

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Although I'm a fan of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, I never wanted to see those books adapted for the screen, big or small. It just seemed so unlikely that any kind of adaptation could live up to what was on the page. An adaptation was made, though, and reached theatres in August of 2017.

Directed by Nikolaj Arcel from a script he wrote with Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, and Anders Thomas Jensen, THE DARK TOWER starred Idris Elba as gunslinger Roland Deschain, Matthew McConaughey as the villainous Man in Black, and Tom Taylor as Roland's gifted protégé Jake Chambers. It told the story of 

the last gunslinger, Roland Deschain, who has been locked in an eternal battle with Walter O'Dim, also known as the Man in Black, determined to prevent him from toppling the Dark Tower, which holds the universe together. With the fate of the worlds at stake, good and evil will collide in the ultimate battle as only Roland can defend the Tower from the Man in Black.

THE DARK TOWER did not go over well. It was so poorly received (our own Eric Walkuski gave the film a 3/10 review) that I still haven't even gotten around to watching it. During an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, producer Ron Howard recently discussed the failure of the film and where the creative team went wrong:

I think it should’ve been horror. I think that it landed in a place — both in our minds and the studio’s — that it could be PG-13 and sort of a boy’s adventure… I really think we made a mistake not — I mean I’m not sure we could’ve made this movie, but I think if we could’ve made a darker, more hard-boiled look and make it The Gunslinger’s character study more than Jake. I think in retrospect that would’ve been more exciting. We always felt like we were kind of holding back something, and I think at the end of the day it was that. … The other thing might’ve been to just straight-on tackle it as television first. Disappointing because I poured a lot of myself into it, and sometimes this happens on these projects where everybody’s best intentions—you’re all pulling in a direction, and then you sort of say, ‘Was that the right direction?’ And I wouldn’t say it was all compromise. I do think it was just a sense of maybe too much listening to what you think that the marketplace is calling for instead of the essence of what Stephen King was giving us."

There is now a Dark Tower series in the works at Amazon, with LEATHERFACE's Sam Strike signed on to play a young Roland. Hopefully it will be more true to the source material than the movie was.

I'll be watching THE DARK TOWER soon to see the mess for myself.