Author Stephen King Weighs In On Why THE DARK TOWER Movie Didn't Work
IT has been a huge hit but The Dark Tower crashed and burned earlier this year both critically and commercially. Now, author Stephen King has weighed in on why he believes the movie simply didn't work...
Early on, things looked good for The Dark Tower. The movie was featured on the cover of last year's Comic-Con edition of Entertainment Weekly and the premise - that it was a sequel to Stephen King's novels as opposed to a direct adaptation - intrigued fans. However, after numerous delays and reports of issues behind the scenes, The Dark Tower was mauled by critics and flopped at the box office.
IT, on the other hand, has become the highest grossing horror movie of all-time and a sequel is already in the works so where did The Dark Tower go wrong? King himself has now weighed in on just that.
"The major challenge was to do a film based on a series of books that’s really long, about 3,000 pages. The other part of it was the decision to do a PG-13 feature adaptation of books that are extremely violent and deal with violent behavior in a fairly graphic way. That was something that had to be overcome, although I’ve gotta say, I thought [screenwriter] Akiva Goldsman did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I thought was a pretty good movie. The TV series they’re developing now … we’ll see what happens with that. It would be like a complete reboot, so we’ll just have to see."
It very much sounds like The Dark Tower's big screen franchise is dead and buried so it will be interesting to see if the TV show will remain a prequel or be reformatted to a direct adaptation of the series similar to Game of Thrones. Either way, King makes some very good points here and it's clear that mistakes were made during the process of bringing these beloved novels to a live-action setting.
What did you think of The Dark Tower? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
About The Author:
A lifelong comic book fan who grew up on Spider-Man: The Animated Series in the '90s, Josh Wilding has been contributing to ComicBookMovie.com since 2009.
While he's also written for websites like Batman-News, HeyUGuys, and WhatCulture, Josh is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic for CBM and the site's #1 contributor with nearly two decades of experience covering film and TV news (including interviews with Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Gary Oldman, Halle Berry, Jon Bernthal, Tom Welling, and hundreds more).
Based in the UK with his wife, Josh is also an avid WWE and Formula 1 fan and writes about those passions on CBM's sister sites, TheRingReport.com and FullThrottleHQ.com. Favourite superhero? Spider-Man. Favourite pro wrestler? CM Punk. Favourite F1 driver? Max Verstappen.