It's been a while since any update has been made public on Mike Flanagan's (The Midnight Club, The Haunting of Hill House) long-gestating adaptation of The Dark Tower, but the prolific screenwriter and director is letting it be known that his take on the Stephen King epic fantasy series is next up on his docket.
That's very good news for King fans, considering the fact that the project was first announced back in 2023.
“It’s moving,” Flanagan recently told Empire when asked about the project's status. “We’ve got a lot of scripts done for it. It’s the first priority.”
To elaborate on that statement, Flanagan is currently working on an 8-episode adaptation of Carrie for Amazon (reports state that it just wrapped filming), which is set to be released in 2026. It seems that after his commitment to that series is complete, Flanagan will then turn his attention to The Dark Tower.
The horror filmmaker went on to say that, in his view, the 2017 adaptation starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey fell so far short of expectations that he doesn’t want it to stand as the final live-action version of the story.
"We can’t let that be the final word. We really can’t," he admonished.
Flanagan and his creative partner, Trevor Macy, signed a first-look deal with Amazon back in 2022, following a previous setup at Netflix.
However, Flanagan has previously let it be known that his deal with Amazon doesn't necessarily mean that his Dark Tower project will call the streaming service home, revealing that he secured the rights to the book before signing his deal with Amazon.
Still, most industry insiders expect that the series will end up calling Amazon home.
Prior to the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike a few years back, Flangan stated that there were actually a number of exciting names circling the project, revealing, "We have great partners on it that I can't talk about, and we've got some really exciting actors circling on it that I can't talk about, and we have some potentially groundbreaking approaches to the filmmaking of it that I just can't really talk about ... but what I can say is that my fears that any momentum we had developed was gonna be obliterated [by the strike], well, I don't really worry about that."
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.