Ron Howard says he made ‘errors’ while filming The Dark Tower

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Director Ron Howard admits he made a few mistakes while filming THE DARK TOWER. A Stephen King adaptation, the film is based on the book series of the same name. The story follows the last Gunslinger: Roland Deschain, who has been locked in an eternal battle with Walter O'Dim, also known as the Man in Black, and is determined to prevent him from toppling the Dark Tower that holds the universe together. With the fate of the world at stake, good and evil will collide in the ultimate battle, as only Roland can defend the Tower from the Man in Black.

Hitting theaters in the summer of 2017 without much fanfare, there's more than a few reasons why THE DARK TOWER didn't sit well with audiences. Although a little too late, Howard has finally figured out what went wrong with his adaptation. During a guest appearance on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast for his new documentary PAVAROTTI, Howard admitted that the movie really should have leaned into the source story’s horror content and focused more on the Gunslinger himself rather than the kid who becomes his ally.

“I think it should’ve been horror" admits Howard. "I think that it landed in a place—both in our minds and the studio’s—that it could be PG-13 and sort of a boy’s adventure… I really think we made a mistake not—I mean I’m not sure we could’ve made this movie, but I think if we could’ve made a darker, more hard-boiled look and make it The Gunslinger’s character study more than Jake. I think in retrospect that would’ve been more exciting. We always felt like we were kind of holding back something, and I think at the end of the day it was that.”

Howard admitted another error in planning, suggesting that a TV-first approach would have been a better way to conjure up interest in the sprawling franchise from the general audience:

“The other thing might’ve been to just straight-on tackle it as television first. Disappointing because I poured a lot of myself into it, and sometimes this happens on these projects where everybody’s best intentions—you’re all pulling in a direction, and then you sort of say, ‘Was that the right direction?’ And I wouldn’t say it was all compromise. I do think it was just a sense of maybe too much listening to what you think that the marketplace is calling for instead of the essence of what Stephen King was giving us.”

It's always nice when a filmmaker owns up to his or her mistakes, but it would've been a bit better if he had realized these ideas before the movie was released onto general audiences. THE DARK TOWER TV series is set to arrive on Amazon next year and act as a prequel to the movie itself, so we'll see if the show learns a thing or two from Howard's shortcomings.