The Dark Tower: Mike Flanagan shares more of his vision for the Stephen King adaptation

For years, genre filmmaker Mike Flanagan (Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House, etc.) has been saying that his dream project would be an epic adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower saga. Back in 2020, he said, “The Dark Tower is forever going to be the story I wish I could tell.” Just last month, he told us that he and his producing partner Trevor Macy are “going to keep pushing to try and make (The Dark Tower) happen until someone stops them.” Now, during an interview with IGN, Flanagan shared more of what his vision for the adaptation would be.

Asked what a Mike Flanagan Dark Tower movie would look like, Flanagan said, “Nothing would be a bigger honor or make me happier in my career than to be able to work on that. What it would look like, it would look like the books. No disrespect to the film or other people’s approaches with adaptation, but when I saw the movie it’s like, ‘They’re starting in this whole other place?’ The first (image in his adaptation), it would be a black screen and the words ‘The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed’ would come up in silence. You’d hear the wind and we’d gradually fade up to this Lawrence of Arabia-esque landscape with a silhouette in the distance, just making his way across the hardpan. We would build it out from there, in order, until the end. It would just be a question of taking the more fantastic elements that might be harder to connect to, especially where it gets pretty meta at midpoint, and grounding it. Just pulling it in. But otherwise the characters are who they are, the arc is what it is. The way not to do The Dark Tower is to try to turn it into something else. To try to make it Star Wars or make it Lord of the Rings. It’s what it is, what it is is perfect, it’s just as exciting as all of those things and just as immersive. It’s a story about a tiny group of people, all the odds in the whole world are against them, and they come together. As long as it’s that, it’ll be fine, and there won’t be a dry in the house. Is it a series? Is it a franchise of feature films? I don’t know. It’s all of those things, it’s none of them. It would be my Everest to do that, but nothing would make me happier, and God I hope there’s a chance. I really do.“

At least one element of Flanagan’s vision was shared by Glen Mazzara, who tried to get a Dark Tower TV series off the ground at Amazon a couple years ago. The pilot episode of Mazzara’s show began with the words “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed” appearing on a black screen. As you can see in a screenshot HERE.

The one Dark Tower adaptation that has made it out into the world so far was the 2017 feature film, which didn’t go over well.

Would you like to see Flanagan get the chance to bring King’s Dark Tower saga to the screen? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.