Mike Flanagan, the director behind Doctor Sleep and Netflix’s The Midnight Club, wants nothing more than to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books.
In an interview with IGN, Flanagan was more than happy to talk about what he’d do with the King’s source material. “It’s my dream project and I keep coming back to it because it has its own gravity,” he said. “I can’t get too far away from it for too long. Nothing would be a bigger honor or make me happier in my career than to be able to work on that.”
Flanagan then made the radical assertion that any adaptation he did would “look like the books”:
“The first scene would be a black screen and the words, ‘The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed’ would come up in silence, and you’d hear the wind, and we’d gradually fade up to this Lawrence of Arabia-esque landscape with a silhouette in the distance just making his way across the hardpan. And we would build it out from there—in order—to the end.”
That doesn’t mean that Flanagan wouldn’t make any changes, of course:
“It would just be a question of taking the more fantastical elements that might be harder to connect to, especially where it gets pretty meta at mid-point, and grounding it, just pulling it in,” he said. “But otherwise, the characters are who they are, the arc is what it is, and I think the way not to do The Dark Tower is to try to turn it into something else—to try to make it Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. It’s what it is. It is perfect. It’s just as exciting as all of those things and just as immersive and it’s a story about a tiny group of people and all the odds in the whole world are against them and they come together. As long as it’s that, it’ll be fine, and there won’t be a dry eye in the house.”
Flanagan ended the interview by saying he was open to doing an adaptation that was either a feature or a series. “It would be my Everest to do that,” he concluded. “Nothing would make me happier and God I hope there’s a chance. I really do.”
There have been screen adaptations of The Dark Tower before, most notably the 2017 film starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey that didn’t get much praise from critics or general audiences. Amazon was also working on a series adaptation, but that got scrapped in 2020.
Flanagan sounds like he knows how he wants to approach King’s story and is more than passionate about taking it on. Based on what he said above, I hope he gets a chance!
