Last December, we learned that genre filmmaker Mike Flanagan (Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House, etc.) is getting the chance to make his dream project a reality: his company Intrepid Pictures has secured the rights to make a series based on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower saga. And even though development has come to a screeching halt due to the writers strike, Flanagan remains optimistic that the series is going to happen. During a conversation on the new episode of the Kingcast podcast, Flanagan said The Dark Tower is going to be his top priority when the strike comes to an end.
Flanagan said (with thanks to Coming Soon for the transcription), “I feel really good about where we are. Oddly, where we are at the moment is completely frozen, because of the strike, but we had a wonderful spring with it and we’re making enormous progress on it. And I have every reason to believe that on the other side of the strike, it’s gonna be priority #1. We have great partners on it that I can’t talk about, and we’ve got some really exciting actors circling on it that I can’t talk about, and we have some potentially groundbreaking approaches to the filmmaking of it that I just can’t really talk about … but what I can say is that my fears that any momentum we had developed was gonna be obliterated [by the strike], well, I don’t really worry about that.“
Well, it all sounds very promising, even though he can’t talk about it. He has previously said that the script for the pilot episode was already written.
Intrepid was able to get the Dark Tower rights because Flanagan sent Stephen King “a very, very detailed outline of what I wanted to do with it. 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.“
Flanagan says he envisions The Dark Tower story playing out over the course of five seasons, so here’s hoping that he’ll not only be able to get a first season of the show made, but also that he’ll be able to continue through the remaining four seasons worth of story. He has also said that the five seasons could be followed by two feature films, but he doesn’t want to get too far ahead of himself. The focus right now is on getting the series up and running.
Are you interested in seeing a series based on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower saga? Are you glad to hear it’s going to be Mike Flanagan’s top priority when the writers strike ends? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Many of Stephen King’s stories and novels are connected to The Dark Tower in some way, but the Dark Tower series itself consists of The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, The Wind Through the Keyhole, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, The Dark Tower, and the short story The Little Sisters of Eluria.