The past year has seen more than a few Stephen King projects released, including Andy Muschietti's IT and Nikolaj Arcel's THE DARK TOWER. Although IT went on to achieve enormous success, THE DARK TOWER was a disappointment on almost all fronts, bringing Sony's planned franchise to a screeching halt. After so many years spent in development hell, it's certainly a shame that the long-awaited adaptation of Stephen King's series didn't succeed, and King recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the failure of the film.
Stephen King is always careful regarding what he says about THE DARK TOWER as he's said that he likes everyone involved with the film, but he did say that trying to fit the story into the mold of a PG-13 blockbuster was a mistake.
But I will say this, okay? The real problem, as far as I’m concerned is, they went in to this movie, and I think this was a studio edict pretty much: this is going to be a PG-13 movie. It’s going to be a tentpole movie. We want to make sure that we get people in there from the ages of, let’s say, 12 right on up to whatever the target age is. Let’s say 12 to 35. That’s what we want. So it has to be PG-13, and when they did that I think that they lost a lot of the toughness of it and it became something where people went to it and said, Well yeah, but it’s really not anything that we haven’t seen before.
After seeing what Sony's plan was for THE DARK TOWER early on, Stephen King attempted to express his doubts about the direction they were taking, but it seems that they were set on sticking with what they had. "When they actually made the movie I had doubts about it from the beginning, and expressed them, and didn’t really get too far," King said. "Sometimes when people have made up their mind, the creative team that’s actually going to go and shoot the movie, it’s a little bit like hitting your fist against hard rubber, you know? It doesn’t really hurt, but you don’t get anywhere. It just sort of bounces back. And I thought to myself, Well, people are going to be really puzzled by this, and they were. So there was some of that problem, too." The fate of the franchise is still up in the air, but I've no doubt that someone will take another crack at the series, and hopefully, this time, they knock it out of the park.
What were your thoughts on THE DARK TOWER? Was it a total failure or does it have some redeemable aspects?
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