Cloud Atlas, Dark Tower, and 5 movies that would have worked better as a television series
By Monita Mohan
4. Dark Tower
Even someone with only a passing knowledge of Stephen King knows that King’s books involve immersive and expansive stories. His Dark Tower books are a series of eight books with complex worlds at the center.
The story begins with a gunslinger in Mid-World who must stave off enemies and protect a Dark Tower. The 2017 film, starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey tried to combine elements of the entire series into one film. And it tried to be both an adaptation and a sequel. Suffice to say, it was too ambitious for its boots.
The original idea for the film was to extend it into a multimedia franchise, but after its box office failure, those plans seem to have been shelved. The books are behemoths that interconnect with King’s other works.
The only way to give the Dark Tower series its due is with a television series. Adaptations of King’s work are quite popular, irrespective of how faithful they are to the source material. Dark Tower is already a massive favorite for many readers, so a show could do the story justice.
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3. Cloud Atlas
This 2012 film by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer was an adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel of the same name. It was an ambitious project given that Mitchell himself believed that his book was unfilmable. The book features six interconnected stories told in the ‘Russian Doll’ style – each protagonist is a reincarnation of another. Just describing it is hard!
Despite its ensemble cast including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw, and Doona Bae, the film was both loved and hated, depending on which aspect of the adaptation you focused on. There was a lot of criticism of the length of the film, which means only one thing – this book needs to be adapted into a limited series.
The central conceit of the book can play out much better visually over several episodes. An adaptation needs to focus first on bringing the stories to screen, and worry about the innovative approach of the book second.