Mike Flanagan has promised that his in-development adaptation of The Dark Tower, Stephen King’s epic fantasy saga, will prioritize faithfulness to the sprawling story of the novels. As if Flanagan’s sterling history of bringing King to life with movies like Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game wasn’t enough to make that a bankable promise, we now have some assurance that The Dark Tower will be as authentically King as it gets. IGN has learned exclusively that Flanagan has drawn a most powerful ally into his Ka-tet as his journey to adapt The Dark Tower continues: Stephen King himself.
During a roundtable interview in support of The Monkey, IGN asked King if he’d be interested in contributing new material to Mike Flanagan’s The Dark Tower, like he did for 2020’s Paramount+ limited series The Stand. King revealed: “All I can say is it’s happening. I am writing stuff now and I think that’s all I want to say because the next thing you know, I’ll stir up a bunch of stuff I don’t necessarily want to stir up yet. I’m in process right now, and to say too much feels like a jinx.”
If he says so, let it be so.
The Dark Tower is one of King’s most celebrated and personal works — he began writing the first novel, The Gunslinger, in 1970 — and the nature of his involvement with Flanagan’s Dark Tower adaptation is open to speculation. As mentioned above, King wrote an epilogue to the Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access) The Stand limited series, which better wraps up the storyline of central character Frannie Goldsmith, who he always felt got the short shrift as that mammoth novel wrapped up its loose ends. But the mythology-heavy story of The Dark Tower, which encompasses nearly all of King’s fiction, dwarfs the scale even of The Stand, so the opportunities for King to deepen his established work are myriad.
Whatever new material King’s working up is bound to feel right at home in Flanagan’s adaptation, considering the writer/director has promised his adaptation would stick to the letter of King’s words wherever possible, saying in a 2022 interview with IGN that “it would look like the books” and that “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 make it Lord of the Rings.”
Flanagan continued: “It is what it is, what it is is perfect. It’s just as exciting as all of those things and just as immersive. It’s a story about a tiny group of people, 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.”
It’s a comforting sentiment in the wake of 2017’s calamitous Dark Tower movie starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey as Roland and The Man in Black, which shuffles around events from all over King’s seven novels.
It’s still unclear when we can expect Mike Flanagan’s The Dark Tower adaption, or exactly what form it will take, but the horror mainstay has plenty of Stephen King to keep him busy in the meantime. Flanagan’s adaptation of King’s short story The Life of Chuck is due to hit theaters in May, and he’s also currently developing a Carrie series for Amazon, based on King’s 1974 novel.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
