American writer and director Mike Flanagan (The Midnight Club, The Haunting of Hill House) was a recent guest on the aptly named Kingcast- which is a Stephen King-focused podcast, and he shared that despite the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike, progress on the live-action television series based on The Dark Tower is going well.
To be clear, it sounds as if progress has ground to a halt, due to the strike, but Flanagan feels good about where things left off. Plans for an expansive five-season television series, which will be followed up by two standalone feature films.
"I feel really good about where we are. Oddly, where we are at the moment is completely frozen, because of the strike, but we had a wonderful spring with it and we're making enormous progress on it. And I have every reason to believe that on the other side of the strike, it's gonna be priority #1., Flanagan said on The Kingcast.
"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."
"We're in a healthy place. We are of course in solidarity with the WGA and SAG, and once those immediate needs are taken care of and everyone's back to work, I think that's when we're gonna immediately deploy. But it's going very well."
The Dark Tower fantasy series spans 8 books: 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 Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). It is inspired by the poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by English poet and playwright, Robert Browning.
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.
The critical reception to Stephen King's Dark Tower fantasy series has been generally positive, with many critics praising the series for its complex characters, intricate plotting, and epic scope. However, some critics have also found the series to be uneven and slow-paced.
Flanagan previously wrote and directed several horror TV series for Netflix including The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club.
The forthcoming The Fall of the House of Usher will be his final series for Netflix as he recently signed a first-look deal with Amazon Prime Video.
It's thought that The Dark Tower series will end up at Amazon, though Flanagan has stated that he will shop the series to other networks, as well.