We found out earlier this week that Mike Flanagan is working to bring Stephen King’s “THE DARK TOWER” to the screen, and now the filmmaker has given us another update on where things stand. When it comes to this particular project, that is something we will happily take, because getting Flanagan’s version of King’s sprawling fantasy epic made is no small task.
To put this into perspective, think of Flanagan with THE DARK TOWER the way Peter Jackson approached THE LORD OF THE RINGS. We’re talking about a massive undertaking that requires a filmmaker willing to dive headfirst into an enormous mythology, and King certainly did not make things simple. The Dark Tower books are packed with interconnected characters, stories, worlds, and Easter eggs that stretch across King’s larger body of work, with some of those individual threads capable of carrying stories of their own.
Flanagan was first announced as working on an adaptation of The Dark Tower in December 2022, and the project has been through some significant changes since then. The filmmaker initially developed the series at Netflix before moving over to Amazon, all while navigating the industrywide WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly about his upcoming eight-episode Carrie series for Amazon Prime Video, Flanagan offered a candid look at just how enormous The Dark Tower has become behind the scenes.
“To do it the way I wanna do it requires an enormous commitment from a studio,” Flanagan said.
The filmmaker also revealed that he spent “a year and a half” developing the project at Netflix before moving to Amazon, adding, “It didn’t make it easier by moving to Amazon.”
That is probably the understatement of the century when you’re dealing with Stephen King’s multiverse.
One of the biggest complications is the sheer number of connections within King’s work and the various rights involved. Flanagan explained just how complicated that can become when trying to bring the larger Dark Tower universe together. “The way the Dark Tower universe is connected, you’ve got characters in there that are all over the place when it comes to studio ownership,” he explained.
That has made the development process a marathon rather than a sprint, but Flanagan made it clear that the project has never been abandoned.
“So the development process on it has been epic. It, of course, has taken much longer than I’d like it to, but I work on it all the time. It’s never stopped moving. It just moves at its own oil-tanker pace.”
There is also an intriguing possibility that Flanagan’s upcoming Carrie adaptation could contain some connective tissue to The Dark Tower. When asked whether the series could potentially function as a backdoor pilot of sorts, Flanagan admitted that the idea has crossed his mind.
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“I may have asked this very question several times along the way,” Flanagan said. “It’s certainly not impossible. There are characters in the Tower canon who would serve a very specific purpose in that story, who audiences wouldn’t necessarily recognize because they only exist in certain books.”
That doesn’t mean Carrie is secretly becoming The Dark Tower, but it does give us another look at how Flanagan is approaching King’s larger mythology. He has already demonstrated an interest in finding the connections between King’s stories, and apparently those connections remain very much on his mind.
“You could say the same, though, of Abra Stone [from Doctor Sleep], you could say the same about Danny Torrance [from The Shining]. How the various Stephen King worlds can connect is always on my mind.”
And this is exactly why THE DARK TOWER feels like such a monumental project for any filmmaker. King’s saga is not simply a matter of adapting one book and calling it a day. The core story spans eight novels, including The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, The Dark Tower and The Wind Through the Keyhole, with additional stories and connections scattered throughout King’s work. This is like Game of Thrones but with western gunslingers and monsters galore. It has to be a huge.
Considering how long fans have been waiting to see this world properly brought to life, we’ll continue to wait if it means a total King universe worthy of the title.
