American writer and director Mike Flanagan (The Midnight Club, The Haunting of Hill House) was a recent guest on the aptly named Kingcast, a Stephen King-focused podcast, and he shared that progress on the live-action television series based on The Dark Tower is going well despite the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike.
To be clear, development on the project has stalled owing to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike, but Flanagan is pleased with where things have stopped. The project's announcement confirmed that there are plans for a five-season television series based on The Dark Tower, which will be followed by two solo feature films.
"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, Flanagan said on The Kingcast.
"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."
"We're in a healthy place. We are of course in solidarity with the WGA and SAG, and once those immediate needs are taken care of and everyone's back to work, I think that's when we're gonna immediately deploy. But it's going very well."
The Dark Tower fantasy series spans 8 books: The Gunslinger (1982), The Drawing of the Three (1987), The Waste Lands (1991), Wizard and Glass (1997), The Little Sisters of Eluria (1998), Wolves of the Calla (2003), Song of Susannah (2004), The Dark Tower (2004), and The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). It is inspired by the poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by English poet and playwright, Robert Browning.
Sony and Columbia Pictures released a 2017 adaptation of The Dark Tower that inexplicably tried to serve as a sequel to the novels. The film starred Idris Elba as Roland Deschain and Matthew McConaughey as Walter O'Dim, also known as the Man in Black. Fans of Stephen King's The Dark Tower book series responded very negatively to the 2017 film adaptation, criticizing it for its poor adaptation of the source material.
The series' primary storyline revolves around Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger of Mid-World, and his reality-altering journey to the Dark Tower, a legendary structure said to be the center of all creation. A ka-tet, a group of companions that aid Roland in his objective, joins him on his voyage.
Stephen King's Dark Tower fantasy series has received generally excellent reviews, with many critics complimenting the series for its rich characters, complicated narrative, and epic scale. Some reviews, however, have deemed the series to be inconsistent and slow-paced.
Flanagan previously wrote and directed several horror TV series for Netflix including The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club.
The forthcoming The Fall of the House of Usher will be his final series for Netflix as he recently signed a first-look deal with Amazon Prime Video.
It's thought that The Dark Tower series will end up at Amazon, though Flanagan has stated that he will shop the series to other networks, as well.