While The Dark Tower does technically have an existing movie adaptation, this disastrous Stephen King flop is one that is overdue redemption in the form of Mike Flanagan’s upcoming Prime Video show. From The Twilight Zone and its Lovecraftian follow-up Night Gallery to recent streaming hits like The Last of Us, Slasher, All of Us Are Dead, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, horror TV has a long and proud history of scaring viewers senseless.
Long before the streaming revolution, the iconic author, Stephen King, was a perennial source of inspiration for horror TV shows. 1978’s seminal miniseries Salem’s Lot saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper bring King’s hit novel to life on the small screen, creating a series so memorable that the show was spoofed by The Simpsons and influenced Mike Flanagan’s Netflix show Midnight Mass decades later.
However, while King’s many great small-screen offerings have included everything from the underrated miniseries Storm of the Century to the more recent HBO Max hit It: Welcome to Derry, not all the writer’s big-screen adaptations have been quite so lucky. For every The Shining, there is a dud like 1996’s Thinner, and for every classic like Carrie (1976), there is a critically maligned failure like Carrie (2013). One of the most ignominious of these is 2017’s The Dark Tower, an adaptation of King’s epic fantasy saga that failed at the first hurdle.
The Dark Tower Can Redeem 2017’s Failed Movie Adaptation
Released in August 2017, The Dark Tower arrived in cinemas just a few weeks before It earned a staggering $719 million on a budget of only $35 million. In contrast, The Dark Tower cost over $66 million and, at the time, that investment didn’t seem so risky. On paper, The Dark Tower had all the hallmarks of a blockbuster hit that It was seemingly missing.
It was a violent, R-rated story about children being killed, whereas The Dark Tower was an epic action blockbuster about a magical battle between good and evil. The Dark Tower’s PG-13 rating made the movie more family-friendly, while its cast was far starrier than It’s lineup. Although It did feature a comic relief character played by Finn Wolfhard, whose Stranger Things season 1 role had raised his profile a year before, Bill Skarsgård was the lone other recognizable name in the cast list.
In contrast, The Dark Tower starred Idris Elba as its gunslinging hero Roland Deschain, while Matthew McConaughey played his dark warlock nemesis, The Man in Black. As impressive as this cast was, it wasn’t enough to save the movie from disastrous reviews and an underwhelming box office performance. Set between a Wild West-esque alternate reality known as Mid-World and New York City, The Dark Tower tells the complicated story of Deschain and his young apprentice Jake stopping McConaughey’s Walter Padick from destroying the eponymous Tower.
The destruction of the Dark Tower risks bringing about the merging of all realities and universes, so it is easy to see why the movie’s central duo need to stop the villain. However, even though Matthew McConaughey’s True Detective role had cemented his comeback by 2017, his campy villain wasn’t enough to get viewers invested in the convoluted, under-explained plot of this murky adaptation.
The Dark Tower Plays To Mike Flanagan and Stephen King’s Strengths
Fortunately, Mike Flanagan’s fresh take on The Dark Tower, set to debut on Prime Video, will fix the many problems of the 2017 movie. For one thing, Flanagan’s version of The Dark Tower is a show, so it won’t have the same pressure to perform in box office terms. It’s also a more faithful adaptation of the novel saga of the same name, meaning the show will be a massive, ambitious, and emotionally fraught epic that blends dark fantasy, adventure, character drama, and horror.
In contrast, the 2017 movie was a straightforward blockbuster with nowhere near enough screen time to do its multifaceted source material justice. 2017’s The Dark Tower also inexplicably came from Nikolaj Arcel, the director of A Royal Affair, who unsurprisingly turned out to be a poor fit for an action-packed, horror-tinged dark fantasy epic. In contrast, Flanagan’s deservedly acclaimed The Haunting of franchise has already proven that the writer/director can balance intimate character studies with fast-paced, crowd-pleasing genre fare.
Mike Flanagan and Stephen King’s Run Has Already Started Strong
Flanagan and King’s first screen collaboration, 2017’s Gerald’s Game, was a triumph. Based on King’s novel of the same name, the intense horror tells the story of Carla Gugino’s Jessie, an abuse victim who becomes trapped under her husband’s dead body after he handcuffs her to a bed during a kinky game, then has a fatal heart attack. Long considered to be unfilmable, Gerald’s Game became a brutal but beautiful small-scale horror odyssey in the capable hands of Gugino and Flanagan.
In comparison, Flanagan’s 2019 The Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep, was a slower, sadder sort of epic horror that divided critics, although time has been kind to the underrated effort. The two big criticisms at the time were that Doctor Sleep was too long and that it struggled to function as a sequel to both Kubrick’s movie and the novel. However, Flanagan’s small-screen work has since proven that longer runtimes are often beneficial to his complex, emotionally nuanced horror stories.
Meanwhile, a re-watch of Doctor Sleep proves the movie works well as a standalone story when unburdened from comparisons to its literary and cinematic predecessors. Although King has plenty of great adaptations that came from creators other than Flanagan in the years since, the pair’s more recent collaborations make The Dark Tower’s upcoming show one of the most promising on any streaming service.
2024’s immersive fantasy drama The Life of Chuck was a critical triumph, while Flanagan’s upcoming miniseries version of Carrie looks great. Flanagan’s forthcoming take on The Mist is another exciting reboot of theirs, and The Dark Tower show also benefits from a lot of context that puts Doctor Sleep’s mixed reputation in perspective.
For one thing, the 2017 movie’s complete critical failure means Flanagan’s show doesn’t need to live up to any existing adaptation, whereas Doctor Sleep followed in the footsteps of one of the horror genre’s most famous movies. Meanwhile, the fact Prime Video’s The Dark Tower has got both a far longer runtime and a much bigger story to tell than that earlier Mike Flanagan/Stephen King collaboration means the story’s epic scope will be a feature, rather than a bug.
- Release Date
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August 3, 2017
- Runtime
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95 minutes
- Director
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Nikolaj Arcel
