Mike Flanagan says he "can't" let 2017's Dark Tower be "final word" on Stephen King series

Flanagan sounds positively desperate to salvage the on-screen reputation of King's sprawling sci-fi-fantasy Western.

By William Hughes | January 3, 2026 | 5:29pm

Idris Elba in 2017's The Dark Tower, Screenshot: YouTube

TV News Mike Flanagan

Mike Flanagan has never been shy about expressing his love for Stephen King’s books in general, or his massive Dark Tower Western/sci-fi/fantasy series in particular. Flanagan—who previously adapted King to the screen with Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life Of Chuck, and is currently hard at work on a miniseries version of King’s original break-out hit, Carrie—has owned the TV rights to Dark Tower for years at this point, and recently embarked on concrete plans to get the show made. In fact, he went so far as to tell Empire magazine this month that “It’s the first priority,” that several scripts have already been written, and, most pointedly, said of the franchise’s disastrous 2017 film adaptation that “We can’t let that be the final word. We really can’t.”

It’s the harshest Flanagan has been to date toward Nikolaj Arcel’s film, which utterly failed to launch an Idris Elba/Matthew McConaughey Dark Tower film franchise nearly a decade ago. He has talked about the movie before—notably stating that the starting point for the script (credited to Arcel, Anders Thomas Jensen, Jeff Pinkner, and Akiva Goldsman), which deviates from King’s text by beginning with the series’ kid hero instead of its grizzled gunslinger protagonist, isn’t where he’d start the story. But there is something moderately amusing about reading a degree of near-desperation in Flanagan’s assessment that the movie simply can’t be the end of the books’ legacy in the public mind; it’s not for nothing that he’s referred to adapting the books as the “Everest” of his career.

Still, the figurative mountain climber has a lot to get through before fully starting his ascent, most notably Carrie, which he’s making for Prime Video, and which wrapped filming back in October. (No word on release date yet.) He was also previously attached to the Clayface supervillain horror movie he pitched to James Gunn and Peter Safran a few years back, although he revealed last year that he’s stepping away from that particular project, which is being directed by James Watkins from a script rewritten by Hossein Amini.

[via ScreenRant]

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