After years of anticipation, Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, an adaptation of the seminal Stephen King novel, has released and proven to be a sizable success for Amazon Prime Video. The show has netted predominantly positive reviews, secured a respectable amount of viewers, and consistently ranked highly on the platform’s most-watched content. This is very good for Prime Video, but even better for Flanagan, who has a different Stephen King adaptation waiting in the wings, just itching for a greenlight in the form of The Dark Tower.
The Dark Tower is Stephen King’s most long-running, dense, and sprawling series out of the entirety of his work. There are seven primary novels (there’s also a bunch of extra stuff, and even connections to other King novels, but that’s a conversation for another time), the first of which was released in 1982 and the final of which was released in 2004.
Over the course of twenty-plus years, King crafted a narrative that encompassed thousands of pages and just about every genre known to man: western, science fiction, horror, romance, comedy, mafia, swords-and-sandals myth, etc. The question has long been how to properly adapt it to the screen, but Flanagan has been working on such a task for years now, and revealed the details of his plans in a recent interview.
With regard to how to do a Dark Tower adaptation that works, following the critical and commercial misfire of the misbegotten 2017 Dark Tower film attempt, Flanagan says his plan is "just doing the books and doing them in order. Stephen King is genius in how he structures The Dark Tower because he starts this giant world-building, potentially overwhelming story with two people in a landscape without detail.”
He elaborates that, “It's one of the most perfect lines of any book: 'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.' It is two characters. There's a clear objective. One is running away, one is pursuing, and it's a desert. There is nothing else to look at. It's so simple and so clean, and on top of that foundation, he adds a universe one brick at a time. And so that's the way to do it. The problem with the other approaches is people who try to jump in in the middle or people who try to jump in at a different point, because you can't throw an audience face-first into this huge universe. It's overwhelming. And King did it right.”
He concluded that "My Dark Tower approach is remarkably faithful. And so 70% of my job is done for me by Steve. So it's not that difficult. You know, the difficult thing is just figuring out how to get in.”
King himself recently released a video to social media imploring fans to watch Flanagan’s Carrie during its opening week, revealing that something else was gestating and would be helped by such successful viewership numbers. It has been all-but-confirmed at this point that Dark Tower is what he was referring to. So who knows; Flanagan may get the chance to bring The Dark Tower to life sooner rather than later.
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