Although it took one of the most ambitious Stephen King movie adaptations over a decade to hit screens, the resulting fantasy movie was so bad that it never even received a sequel. From Disney’s The Black Cauldron to the expensive Antonio Banderas misfire The 13th Warrior, dark fantasy movies have always been unreliable at the box office. While not quite as radioactive as sci-fi westerns like 2011’s Cowboys & Aliens or 1999’s Wild Wild West, dark fantasy movies do have a long history of missing the mark and losing millions in the process.
Despite this documented box office ignominy, one ambitious adaptation of author Stephen King’s most famous fantasy saga tried to buck this trend in 2017. The Dark Tower was a sci-fi/ fantasy/ western/ horror/ action blend directed by A Royal Affair‘s Nikolajj Arcel. Starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, respectively, as the protagonist and antagonist of King’s epic eight-book novel series of the same name, The Dark Tower was nothing if not ambitious.
The movie mainly pulled its byzantine plot from books One and Three of the eight-book The Dark Tower saga, introducing Elba’s gunslinger antihero Roland Deschain, McConaughey’s version of the iconic King villain Randall Flagg, and Tom Taylor as Roland’s 11-year-old apprentice Jake. Deschain’s job is to protect the titular Tower from Flagg, a.k.a The Man in Black, an evil warlock who hopes to bring all realities crashing down by destroying this pivotal structure. Set in both contemporary New York and the post-apocalyptic parallel universe Wild West of Mid-World, The Dark Tower‘s movie adaptation had a knotty, complex storyline.
The movie’s trim 95-minute runtime never had a chance of explaining the saga’s dense lore in such a brief window, and the fact that The Dark Tower also needed to simultaneously function as a tight, entertaining crowdpleaser ultimately doomed the adaptation. Viewers could have guessed this outcome from the project’s lengthy, troubled history, as The Dark Tower movie was first announced in 2007 with JJ Abrams attached as a director, only to be reworked with Ron Howard as its new proposed director from 2010 until 2015.
By the time the movie reached its third director in nine years, the writing was on the wall. Over the intervening decade, everyone from Aaron Paul to Liam Neeson was reportedly attached to the project, but, in the end, The Dark Tower had neither the screen time nor the narrative finesse to do its mammoth source material justice. Luckily, after Mike Flanagan adapts King’s debut novel Carrie for Prime Video, the legendary writer/director’s next project is a miniseries based on the The Dark Tower saga.
By the time Flanagan’s show arrives, it will have been over a decade since The Dark Tower’s August 2017 release. While it is a shame that the movie wasted a well-cast Elba and McConaughey, it is still great news that Flanagan’s new take on King’s endlessly re-readable novel series will be able to offer viewers a more immersive, less chaotic and overstuffed screen version of the saga. After all, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series is crying out for a great adaptation, provided it’s not in the form of a bizarrely brief fantasy blockbuster.
