Summary
Stephen King is one of the best-known authors alive, and the first name in horror. His books have been adapted to the screen many, many times, often with spectacular results. But there are just as many terrible Stephen King adaptations. His work can be difficult to do justice. Although best known for horror novels like The Shining, Carrie, and IT, King’s most ambitious work is The Dark Tower, an eight-book series that blends fantasy, horror, westerns, and more, with some brain-melting metatextual elements thrown in for good measure. Of all of King’s works, it may be the most “unadaptable.” And yet, Amazon Prime Video is taking a stab at it, and they have a very good chance of success. What is The Dark Tower? And why is it hard to adapt? The Dark Tower begins with our lead character, the gunslinger Roland Deschain, chasing a mysterious sorcerer known as the Man in Black across the desert. Although we don’t know everything at first, we eventually learn that Roland is searching for the Dark Tower, an edifice that connects all places in time, space, and reality together. The Man in Black is part of an effort to topple the Dark Tower and reduce all existence to primordial chaos. That makes The Dark Story series sound fairly simple, and in a way it is. But once you get into the details, you understand why this series is so difficult to adapt. While Roland’s crumbling world resembles the Old West, the story takes frequent detours to modern-day New York City. In one book, Roland and his friends board Blaine the Mono, a sentient, insane train that challenges them to a deadly contest. At one point, Roland travels to Maine and meets Stephen King himself, so a fictionalized version of the author ends up being an important character in his own story. In 2017, Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey starred in a movie version of The Dark Tower, and it may be the worst of the many bad Stephen King adaptations out there. The script attempts to collapse King’s sprawling series down to one, 95-minute film, and it doesn’t work at all. With a bizarre story and a history of failure, it’s no wonder studios are hesitant to touch this series, even as Stephen King adaptations experience a renaissance. The TV adaptation of The Dark Tower has a secret weapon Enter Mike Flanagan The modern wave of Stephen King adaptations started in earnest with 2017’s IT, which spawned a sequel as well as an HBO series. The other big factor has been writer-director Mike Flanagan, a Stephen King superfan who has adapted several of the author’s works over the last decade. What’s more, Flanagan has adapted some of the author’s more difficult works, like Gerald’s Game, about a woman whose husband handcuffs her to a bed during a kinky sex game, only to die of a heart attack and leave her to figure out what to do from there. Flanagan wrote and directed Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining; and The Life of Chuck, based on a little-known King novella that explores the life of the main character in reverse chronological order. Flanagan recently debuted his eight-episode adaptation of Carrie on Prime Video. All of these adaptations have gotten excellent marks from critics, proving that Flanagan knows what he’s doing when it comes to Stephen King. He’s been working on adapting The Dark Tower since 2022. “Dark Tower is incredibly daunting, Flanagan said recently on The Process Unlocked. “That one I feel I’ve figured out.” 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. If there’s one person who can say they’ve “figured out” a Dark Tower adaptation and actually get other people to believe it, it’s Mike Flanagan. His experience makes him the perfect, and maybe the only, person for the job. The Dark Tower needs to take one more step And it’s a big one Mike Flanagan has had a deal with Amazon MGM Studios since March of 2026, but technically, his Dark Tower series has not been greenlit yet. We don’t even know if it would end up on Prime Video, although that seems like the most natural place. The truth is that The Dark Tower is such a daunting undertaking that studio heads may need more convincing before they agree to make it. Flanagan is currently writing a series based on the expansive Warhammer 40k universe for Amazon, starring Henry Cavill. That’s another huge undertaking, so if it succeeds, perhaps that will convince Amazon to get serious about The Dark Tower. Further Flanagan That said, it’s a little silly that Flanagan needs to prove himself given his successes. Even apart from his Stephen King adaptations, most of what Flanagan touches turns to gold. Before he signed his deal with Amazon, Flanagan was known for his work on Netflix, when he created hit shows like The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher. The evidence is piling up. Amazon just has to act on it. In the meantime, Flanagan also wrote the new DC horror movie Clayface, which is getting very solid reviews.