Dark Tower director confirms that huge twist, explains major characters’ absence
[The following contains spoilers for both the Dark Tower books and the Dark Tower movie. If you prefer to avoid spoilers, abandon your quest and turn back now.]
Much like a black monolith in an endless field of roses that gets more and more intimidating the closer you get to it, the Dark Tower movie is slowly beginning to come into focus thanks to a big Entertainment Weekly cover story. The magazine itself, with Idris Elba’s Roland and Matthew McConaughey’s Man In Black on the cover, doesn’t come out until next week. But preview stories on the website are already dropping some surprisingly huge reveals about how the movie is going to differ from the books.
For starters, Dark Tower author Stephen King tweeted an image back in May that—for various complicated reasons—seemed to suggest that the movie would be a sequel to the book series instead of a direct adaptation of it. The final book ends in a way that lays the groundwork for a follow-up without actually necessitating one, so the idea of the movie continuing that thread seemed like the kind of thing that would either be totally ridiculous or totally brilliant. Now, though, director Nikolaj Arcel has just come right out and confirmed that particular theory, telling EW that “the hardcore fans…will know that this is actually a sequel to the books in a way,” adding that it “has a lot of the same elements, a lot of the same characters, but it is a different journey.”