Mike Flanagan swears he's "working constantly" on his Dark Tower TV adaptation

Flanagan has, after all, said on multiple occasions that his adaptation of King’s sprawling sci-fi/Western/romance/fantasy series is his “dream project,” and a “Holy Grail.” The thing is, he’s been saying that stuff since even before 2022, when he announced he was actually moving forward on plans for “at least five seasons” of show based on the tale of gunslinging knight errant Roland of Gilead, and we still haven’t gotten a glimpse of even season one. At some point, you have to wonder whether the guy’s planning to drop the project, without so much as a “Go then, there are other worlds than these” by way of consolation.

But, no: Flanagan swears that he’s not only working on The Dark Tower, but doing so “constantly.” This is per The Playlist, which reports that Flanagan and his ka-tet of creatives have been actively tinkering with the series for years at this point. “The Dark Tower is so logistically difficult to get off the ground,” Flanagan—who’s successfully adapted four of King’s works at this point—claims. “It looks like inaction from outside. But on the inside, we work on it constantly, and scripts are going fantastically well. We’ve been working on those for a very long time.”

Flanagan says the big problem remains lining up the rights for everything. Part of the appeal of The Dark Tower, after all, is that it runs through huge portions of King’s canon, linking many of his biggest books together. Sure, you could trim some of this—the bits that take place in It‘s Derry are mostly incidental—but big chunks of the books lean on references to works like The Stand and ‘Salem’s Lot. Besides, part of the appeal of adapting Tower is presumably smashing all of this stuff together, like a more epic version of Hulu’s oddball Castle Rock.

Flanagan also still doesn’t have a studio ready to give him a green light; and although betting on Mike Flanagan has turned out pretty well for a lot of people in Hollywood over the last decade, the total failure of the previous Gunslinger adaptation—a movie that Flanagan himself has derided—is a pretty powerful disincentive, especially given how expensive this is all going to be: “Getting any studio to finally pull the trigger on the starter pistol of that thing is one of the most expensive decisions,” Flanagan noted, referring to the costs and risk involved as “Huge, huge.”