Amazon has passed on The Dark Tower pilot

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

The Dark Tower just can't catch a break. Stephen King's sprawling epic series spent many years in development hell on its way to becoming a feature-film starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, which was unfortunately a critical failure, but hope was renewed when Amazon ordered a pilot for a potential Dark Tower series.

According to Deadline, we're going to have to wait a little longer as Amazon Studios has passed on the pilot for The Dark Tower which starred Sam Strike (Mindhunter) as Roland Deschain and Jasper Pääkkönen (BLACKKKLANSMAN) as the Man in Black. As for why Amazon elected not to move forward with The Dark Tower, Deadline has heard that executives "felt like the pilot was not on the level of other large-scope elevated genre series the streamer has in production/pre-production like Wheel Of Time and The Lord Of the Rings." The pilot was slated to be more faithful to Stephen King's novels than the feature-film was, and was said to explain how Roland first became a gunslinger, how he got his guns, his first love, as well as his first encounter with the Man in Black. While it may be disappointing to see The Dark Tower hit yet another roadblock, it's always possible that the series will find a home elsewhere.

As far as the feature-film goes, Stephen King has previously given his two cents on the failure of THE DARK TOWER.

The real problem, as far as I’m concerned is, they went in to this movie, and I think this was a studio edict pretty much: this is going to be a PG-13 movie. It’s going to be a tentpole movie. We want to make sure that we get people in there from the ages of, let’s say, 12 right on up to whatever the target age is. Let’s say 12 to 35. That’s what we want. So it has to be PG-13, and when they did that I think that they lost a lot of the toughness of it and it became something where people went to it and said, Well yeah, but it’s really not anything that we haven’t seen before.

After seeing what Sony's plan was for THE DARK TOWER early on, Stephen King attempted to express his doubts about the direction they were taking, but it seems that they were set on sticking with what they had. "When they actually made the movie I had doubts about it from the beginning, and expressed them, and didn’t really get too far," King said. "Sometimes when people have made up their mind, the creative team that’s actually going to go and shoot the movie, it’s a little bit like hitting your fist against hard rubber, you know? It doesn’t really hurt, but you don’t get anywhere. It just sort of bounces back. And I thought to myself, Well, people are going to be really puzzled by this, and they were. So there was some of that problem, too."