When discussing his work on adapting Stephen King's The Dark Tower, Mike Flanagan has consistently preached patience. The filmmaker has regularly employed the metaphor of an oil tanker to describe how things are moving in development, and it has meant him taking on other projects in the meantime – including his new film The Life Of Chuck, the Carrie series he is working on for Prime Video, and the next installment of the Exorcism franchise.
But what exactly is it that is making The Dark Tower such a "behemoth" (to borrow another one of Flanagan's descriptors)? The most significant issue concerns rights to Stephen King books and characters that belong to multiple studios, and Flanagan recently went in depth to explain the nitty-gritty of it all.
It May Not Look Like The Dark Tower Is Moving Forward, But Mike Flanagan Promises That Progress Is Being Made
With the aforementioned The Life Of Chuck now playing in limited release, Mike Flanagan joined as a guest for the latest episode of The Kingcast, and part of the extended conversation is dedicated to an update on The Dark Tower. It was back in December 2022 that Mike Flanagan first acquired the rights to Stephen King's masterpiece, and while simply adapting the material has its own different challenges (more on that later), a big time suck has just been different legal dealings. Said the filmmaker,
Just the rights situation with this story, because it covers so many other things that are owned by so many other people, pulling it all in and negotiating that stuff literally can take more than a year just with the lawyers. So it's moving at the pace the fastest it can.
For those who aren't familiar with the material, part of what's impressive about The Dark Tower is that its narrative reach goes far beyond the series of seven books that make up the main series. The epic ties together a great number of different novels from Stephen King's bibliography – with Father Callahan from Salem's Lot becoming a key character at one point, The Stand's Randall Flagg being the principal antagonist, and other tomes like Hearts In Atlantis and Insomnia having important ties to King's big picture vision.
For Mike Flanagan and his Dark Tower adaptation, this is problematic – especially because his ambition is to bring to life the most faithful version of the story possible. The rights to Salem's Lot and Hearts In Atlantis both belong to Warner Bros., for example, so negotiation has to happen to allow his streaming series to include elements of those books. Flanagan explains,
Randall Flagg you have to [have], and there's others where it's just like, 'Okay, you know, you have to get into Father Callahan.' That's not negotiable, which means you're going to Warner Bros. because they've got Salem's Lot. You know, you gotta talk to them. Crimson King is actually a whole different thing because there's a history of adaptation with Hearts in Atlantis, which pulls in all sorts of stuff based on that deal that shouldn't have been pulled in because it's not in the movie!
(For those in need of context here, Stephen King's 1999 novella collection Hearts In Atlantis includes a story, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," with deep ties to the Dark Tower story, but director Scott Hicks' film based on the book specifically excludes everything to do with King's western/sci-fi/fantasy epic.)
If that alone sounds like it's frustrating, it's really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to figuring out how to properly make The Dark Tower.
Finding A Middle Ground Between Stephen King's Constant Readers And General Audiences
For Stephen King fans, a special part of the joy in The Dark Tower is discovering all of the ways that the series ties into and connects all of his books. It's a treat on the page... but Mike Flanagan is grappling with how to translate it in an adaptation. King's pop culture impact is ridiculously massive, but there are things that are going to have to change from the source material to be properly registered by general audiences who don't have degrees in King Studies.
Flanagan has said that his vision for The Dark Tower always starts with the image that starts King's story ("The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed"), but he knows as a veteran filmmaker that making a 1:1 adaptation of the book is impossible. Part of the adaptation process is finding where some pieces fit and some need to be tweaked. He explained,
I am aiming for something... it can't be what's in the book. It's not logistically possible. And I think to the cinematic audience, they're not gonna pick up on Insomnia the way the Constant Readers are. So it's like, 'Okay, how do you deal with [that]?' What you need from that is a character with psychic ability who's gonna be brought in as one of the Breakers, and it's gonna be really important how you deal with that. What are the other characters in the King universe that could fulfill a role like that and get the fans excited even though you're changing it?
It's Mike Flanagan's ambition to make a faithful adaptation, but he has considered what alternatives look like if he is unable to get the rights to approach certain parts of the source material. For example, he suggests that the powerful young psychic Abra Stone (introduced in Doctor Sleep) could become one of the "Breakers" who are employed by the Crimson King to try and destroy the Dark Tower. Likewise, he wonders if Dick Hallorann from The Shining/Doctor Sleep can be a substitute for Father Callahan.
There is a needle-threading that Mike Flanagan has to accomplish when it comes to different ideas, and it makes a lot of choices potential hazards:
How do you make it so that the King fans will lean forward and be excited about this particular change, but that people who haven't read the books and are being introduced to this connected universe will be able to recognize it from their cinematic experience. And that's part of what makes this thing so goddamn hard to do.
The biggest irony of all? The vast majority of these questions/conflicts are details that audiences watching a Mike Flanagan The Dark Tower series won't be aware of until multiple seasons in.
The Dark Tower Becomes Incredibly Complicated, But It Starts Off Being Very Simple
If each season of a Dark Tower TV show covered a single book, all of the complicated material mentioned above wouldn't actually become a part of the series until Season 5. It's really in the last three sequels – Wolves Of The Calla, The Song Of Susannah, and The Dark Tower – where everything from King's world starts to meld together.
For Mike Flanagan, this is a part of the material he views as a gift.
The first Dark Tower book, The Gunslinger, starts out as simple as simple can be (good guy chases bad guy), and the way in which the narrative snowballs is part of its mystique. There are still hurdles to overcome in the early parts of the story (like getting the rights to The Beatles' "Hey Jude" for a scene where protagonist Roland Deschain enters the town of Tull), but Flanagan loves the way the whole thing builds:
If you do it right and you start at the beginning, you're dealing with one character following another character in a barren wasteland where there's not even a structure to distract you. It is one person following another person... It's very simple and everything is added, and it's added at the right cadence so that you're meeting new characters and the world is expanding, so that by the time you're arguing about like, 'What to do with Father Callahan?' and to what extent, you know, the Emerald City is gonna come into play, by then you've already built enough of this that the audience is with you regardless of their familiarity with the source material.
There are other logistical issues as well. For example, Jake Chambers is eleven years old when we meet him in the story, and he is definitely not 21 years old at the end... but that's going to happen if it takes a decade for Mike Flanagan to complete a full adaptation of the books. Grappling with it all, he understands why there has been a desire in the past to take shortcuts... but those shortcuts resulted in the disastrous 2017 Dark Tower movie starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey.
Fans Are Being Impatient For The Dark Tower... But It's Also Good For Them To Be Passionate And Vocal
While The Dark Tower remains in development, Mike Flanagan has taken on other projects (in his words: "If I sat and waited for Tower to be up and running, I wouldn't be able to pay my bills anymore"), but he promises that he won't keep audiences on the hook if the project dies. For now, he's lightly annoyed by impatience from fans who pester him on social media, but he is also happy that there is an audience for the adaptation that is making itself very clear. Says Flanagan,
While they might make me go like, 'Oh guys, come on, gimme a break,' they are visible evidence that there is an audience, and that the audience is waiting and that they don't have infinite patience. And that's all useful too. That's all useful for me.
Mike Flanagan's The Life Of Chuck is now in limited release (expanding this coming Friday, June 13), and be sure to stay tuned here on CinemaBlend about not only The Dark Tower but all upcoming Stephen King adaptations.
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