When asked what his most challenging adaptation has been, Flanagan took a deep sigh. “I feel like I’m climbing my adaptation Everest right now,” he said, referring to his work on Warhammer. “Dark Tower is incredibly daunting. That one I feel I’ve figured out.” The path forward to adapt King’s eight-volume epic, Flanagan reasons, is to “do the books.” “Stephen King is genius in how he structures The Dark Tower because he starts this giant worldbuilding, potentially overwhelming story with two people in a landscape without detail. It’s the simplest start. 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.” Flanagan has been attached to King’s dark fantasy series since late 2022.
For the director, The Dark Tower has proven to be an onerous series to find a home for. Despite signing an exclusive multi-year deal with Amazon MGM Studios in March, there are no plans to plant the series at Prime Video, which is currently streaming Carrie. Still, Flanagan insists the work on Dark Tower continues, telling The Playlist in October that the series is “logistically difficult to get off the ground” but that he and his team “work on it constantly, and scripts are going fantastically well.” Yet, should Flanagan scale his Warhammer mountain successfully, it could be the proving ground he needs to convince his streaming partners to invest in Dark Tower at last. After all, it’s not like Mike Flanagan is new to this King-adapting business; in fact, listening to him talk about making the Dark Tower, it seems like he has it down to a science. “King did it right. He walked you in, started with two people and nothing else, and walks you in one step at a time,” he tells Riley. “So my adaptation was that: It was just doing the books and doing them in order. And there’s little changes you make to fit the format, but my Dark Tower approach is remarkably faithful. And so 70% of my job is done for me by Steve.”
You can watch Flanagan’s Dark Tower comments in the video below, starting at the 22:03 mark.
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