Mike Flanagan was first announced as working on an adaptation of The Dark Tower back on December 8, 2022.
Since then, he's changed streaming homes, survived the 2023 Writers Guild of America (WGA) and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and adapted two other Stephen King projects: Tom Hiddleston's The Life of Chuck (2024) and the forthcoming Carrie series for Amazon.
Speaking to EW about the upcoming eight-episode television miniseries for Amazon Prime Video, Flanagan also provided an update on The Dark Tower.
"To do it the way I wanna do it requires an enormous commitment from a studio," he stated. He went on to reveal that he spent, "a year and a half" developing the project at Netflix (prior to the actual announcement of the project) before signing a new development deal with Amazon. "It didn’t make it easier by moving to Amazon," he admitted.
"The way the Dark Tower universe is connected, you’ve got characters in there that are all over the place when it comes to studio ownership,” he explained.
“So the development process on it has been epic. It, of course, has taken much longer than I’d like it to, but I work on it all the time. It’s never stopped moving. It just moves at its own oil-tanker pace.”
So could his Carrie miniseries actually serve as a pseudo backdoor pilot for The Dark Tower?
"I may have asked this very question several times along the way,” Flanagan said. “It’s certainly not impossible. There are characters in the Tower canon who would serve a very specific purpose in that story, who audiences wouldn’t necessarily recognize because they only exist in certain books."
While Carrie is not directly referenced in The Dark Tower, telekinesis and psychic abilities are repetitive thematic elements within Stephen King's broader multiverse.
"You could say the same, though, of Abra Stone [from Doctor Sleep], you could say the same about Danny Torrance [from The Shining]. How the various Stephen King worlds can connect is always on my mind."
Hopefully the project gets off the ground and starts to gain traction as the 2017 adaptation starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey was a gross misfire.
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is an expansive fantasy saga made up of eight core novels: 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 later-added The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012).
The series draws inspiration from Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” written by the English poet and playwright.
The overarching plot of the series is centered on Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger of Mid-World, and his reality-traversing journey to the Dark Tower, a mythological building supposed to be the center of all creation. Roland is joined on his journey by a ka-tet, a group of comrades who assist him in his mission.