For more than fifty years, filmmakers have turned to the works of Stephen King for some of Hollywood’s most memorable adaptations. From Carrie and The Shining to It and Pet Sematary, they have repeatedly found ways to bring King’s worlds to life. But there was always one story that seemed almost impossible to adapt: The Dark Tower.
King’s epic saga was unlike anything else in his bibliography: a strange blend of horror, fantasy, science fiction, westerns, and metafiction. At the center was Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, crossing a dying world in search of the mysterious Dark Tower that holds reality itself together.
For years, Hollywood tried to figure out how to bring that story to the screen. But the project struggled because The Dark Tower wasn’t just a story. It was an entire universe.
In 2017, director Nikolaj Arcel finally brought Roland’s journey to theaters, with Idris Elba playing the gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey playing his mysterious enemy, the Man in Black. It seemed like a great combination. Elba had the intensity and presence needed for Roland, while McConaughey brought a smooth, playful evil to one of Stephen King’s most iconic villains. But when The Dark Tower arrived, critics were disappointed, longtime readers questioned the changes to King’s mythology, and audiences were left underwhelmed.
It was a failure, but an intriguing one. Because behind the troubled development process, shortened runtime, and changes to the source material was a fascinating challenge: How do you adapt one of Stephen King’s most personal and ambitious creations for a mainstream audience?
Was The Dark Tower truly impossible to adapt, or did Hollywood simply make the wrong choices? And after years of failed attempts, production problems, and disappointed fans, does The Dark Tower still have a chance to rise again?
Today, we’re going to find out what happened to The Dark Tower.
The Dark Tower began as a challenge Stephen King set for himself in the late 1960s and early 1970s. King loved J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He was in awe of Tolkien’s imagination and storytelling, but he had little interest in writing a traditional fantasy filled with elves and medieval kingdoms. After watching Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, King envisioned something different: a sweeping, Tolkien-style quest set against the landscapes of the American West.
Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” provided the basic setup. It told the story of a fallen knight named Roland journeying through a nightmarish wasteland toward a mysterious Dark Tower. King’s Roland would be a gunslinger rather than a knight: the last in a line of gunslingers stretching back to Arthur Eld, essentially King’s version of King Arthur.
King began writing the story by hand while he was still a student at the University of Maine. He wanted to create an epic, even imagining that it might become the longest book ever written. He fell short of that particular record, but he certainly succeeded at creating an epic.
It took King more than forty years to complete the story. By the time he was finished, The Dark Tower had become an eight-volume saga blending fantasy, horror, science fiction, westerns, and metafiction. At the center of everything was the Dark Tower, a structure standing at the crossroads of all realities. Protecting the Tower meant protecting existence itself. Roland’s search became a story about obsession, sacrifice, destiny, and the cost of chasing an impossible goal.
Roland wasn’t just a cowboy with a pair of revolvers. He was a tragic figure whose obsession with reaching the Tower repeatedly cost him the people he loved. Throughout the saga, he is forced to choose between his quest and his humanity. That makes him one of King’s greatest characters.
The saga is unlike anything else King has written, and yet it’s connected, in various ways and to various degrees, to many of his other books. The Stand, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon, Insomnia, ’Salem’s Lot, Hearts in Atlantis, and others all connect to The Dark Tower.
The story’s world is also unlike a conventional fantasy setting. Roland’s Mid-World resembles the American Old West, but it clearly isn’t the Old West. There are strange creatures and magical beings. Areas have been poisoned by nuclear radiation. Remnants of a technologically advanced civilization destroyed by war remain scattered throughout the landscape. There are robots, monorails, demonic spirits, and songs that, in our world, were recorded by artists like ZZ Top and The Beatles.
And this isn’t simply some twisted, post-apocalyptic version of our world. King reveals that our reality can be accessed through special doorways: portals to other dimensions. Through those doorways, Roland eventually gathers three companions from 20th-century New York City, including a young boy named Jake Chambers.
The Dark Tower wasn’t just a series of novels. It was an entire universe. That universe would be almost impossible to fit into a traditional blockbuster. But that didn’t stop Hollywood from trying.
The seventh Dark Tower novel was published in 2004, seemingly bringing Roland’s story to an end. King later returned to the world with The Wind Through the Keyhole, which was published in 2012 and became the eighth book in the series. Hollywood’s attempts to bring the saga to the screen started soon after the seventh book went out into the world.
In 2007, J.J. Abrams, Carlton Cuse, and Damon Lindelof, the creators of Lost, optioned the rights to The Dark Tower for just $19. The number was a deliberate reference to the significance of the number 19 throughout King’s saga.
Abrams hoped to make The Dark Tower a seven-film series, with each book receiving its own cinematic adaptation. The problem was that Abrams, Cuse, and Lindelof had just made six seasons of Lost. They weren’t ready to immediately take on another enormous project.
Their plans sputtered out, and their option eventually lapsed. Hollywood, however, wasn’t finished with Roland.
Just a few months later, Universal Pictures optioned the rights with an even more ambitious plan: a trilogy of films with two seasons of a television series airing between the movies. That was what the studio believed would be required to faithfully bring King’s story to the screen.
Ron Howard was set to direct the first film, with Akiva Goldsman writing the screenplay. Mark Verheiden was attached to executive produce the television side and write the pilot with Goldsman.
Universal had reportedly paid $15 million for the rights, but concerns quickly emerged about the cost of the proposed three-movie-and-TV-series plan.
In July 2011, Universal canceled development of the entire project. But Howard wasn’t ready to give up. He moved the television series to HBO, while the movies were pitched to Warner Bros. Warner passed. Finally, in 2015, Sony Pictures and Media Rights Capital put an adaptation on the fast track to production.
But the plan had changed. There would no longer be a trilogy, and the television series was pushed to the back burner. Howard stepped aside as director but remained attached as a producer. Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner wrote a new screenplay. When Nikolaj Arcel was hired to direct, he rewrote the script with Anders Thomas Jensen.
After years of development, The Dark Tower was finally going to become a movie. But the version that reached theaters would be very different from King’s books.
The writers had more than 4,000 pages of source material to pull from. In the end, they chose not to directly adapt any of the books. Instead, they cherry-picked elements from the saga: a little from the first book, some from the third, more from the sixth and seventh, and other pieces from elsewhere.
Faithfulness was no longer the priority. If they had polled fans and asked what they thought about this approach, those fans probably would have told them not to bother. But nobody asked. Sony wanted the movie in theaters in 2017, and the filmmakers pushed forward.
There was a clever way to explain the changes, though. In the final book, Roland reaches the Dark Tower only to discover that he has been there many times before. He is caught in a loop. Every time he reaches the Tower, he is sent back to the beginning of his quest. The book ends with Roland beginning that quest again.
The filmmakers decided their movie would take place during Roland’s next cycle. That meant The Dark Tower wasn’t replacing King’s story. It was a sequel to it. The filmmakers weren’t saying, “This is our version of the books.” They were saying, “This happened after the books.”
King supported that idea. Unfortunately, the concept was much more interesting than the movie itself.
Now that a Dark Tower movie was actually happening, the filmmakers needed an actor to play Roland. This was the most important piece of the puzzle because the actor would be at the center of the franchise Sony hoped to build. Javier Bardem had previously been attached to play the gunslinger during the Universal era. Russell Crowe and Liam Neeson were later rumored to be contenders.
Ultimately, Idris Elba brought Roland to life. Elba was already one of the most respected actors in the world. He had demonstrated his range across numerous genres and had the physical presence needed to play a legendary warrior. More importantly, he could communicate the emotions beneath Roland’s hard exterior. Roland isn’t interesting simply because he can fire a gun faster than anyone else. He’s interesting because of what those skills have cost him. He has lost almost everything while pursuing his mission.
But the casting announcement immediately created controversy among some fans. In King’s books, Roland is described as a white gunslinger inspired by western stars like Clint Eastwood, with light blue eyes. Some fans questioned whether changing his appearance would alter the character.
King quickly came to Elba’s defense. “To me, the color of the gunslinger doesn’t matter,” King said. “What I care about is how fast he can draw, and that he takes care of the ka-tet.” He also praised Elba as one of the best actors working.
For his performance, Elba spoke with Arcel about soldiers with PTSD and veterans of traumatic experiences. He wanted to bring that emotional exhaustion to Roland. His Roland would be driven by grief and duty.
The other major piece of the puzzle was Roland’s greatest enemy: Walter, the Man in Black. The character is essentially the same person as Randall Flagg from The Stand, making him one of the most important villains in King’s larger mythology.
While Elba had to bring emotional depth to Roland, Matthew McConaughey was able to have a little more fun with the Man in Black. He was happy to play such a character. As Arcel explained, McConaughey immediately saw the character as essentially the Devil.
“He was really happy to just be able to play evil,” Arcel said, explaining that many villains are given complicated reasons for their actions. “I thought it was refreshing that the Man in Black is just evil.”
In the movie, the Man in Black abducts children with psychic abilities, or the “shine,” and uses their mental energy to attack the Tower. He wants the Tower to fall because demons living in the darkness outside the universe will then be able to enter and rule everything. This brings him to Jake Chambers, an 11-year-old living in New York City. Jake has a particularly powerful shine and has been plagued by nightmares that are actually psychic visions of the Man in Black and Roland’s world, Mid-World.
The Man in Black believes Jake’s abilities are powerful enough to destroy the Tower. But Jake discovers a portal to Mid-World and comes under Roland’s protection.
Tom Taylor was cast as Jake Chambers, another crucial character in the Dark Tower saga. Despite his psychic abilities, Jake serves as the audience surrogate. We experience this strange world through his eyes. He is a newcomer, just like the audience, and we learn about Mid-World as he does.
The supporting cast included Katheryn Winnick as Jake’s mother, Dennis Haysbert as Roland’s father, Claudia Kim as a seer, and Jackie Earle Haley, Fran Kranz, and Abbey Lee as some of the Man in Black’s followers.
Casting wasn’t one of the movie’s problems. The supporting cast was solid, and Elba and McConaughey had more than enough talent to carry the lead characters. Unfortunately, the movie didn’t give them enough time.
The Dark Tower had the nearly impossible task of introducing an entire mythology while telling a complete story. It tried to do both in a shockingly short running time.
For budgetary reasons, Arcel made the movie as short as he could. The Dark Tower runs just 95 minutes, with the end credits beginning before the 88-minute mark. That isn’t enough time to properly tell a story about a universe this complicated. It’s enough time to give viewers the basic idea.
For a typical action movie, a 95-minute runtime might not be a problem. But this was supposed to be the beginning of an epic franchise.
When The Dark Tower arrived in theaters in 2017, it carried an enormous amount of history with it. This was the result of years of development, decades of fan anticipation, and the pressure of adapting one of Stephen King’s most ambitious creations. It had a talented cast, a filmmaker passionate about the material, and the potential to launch an entire franchise.
But audiences noticed the problem immediately. The Dark Tower felt smaller than the story it was trying to tell.
King’s books are filled with mythology, character relationships, strange details, and world-building that make Mid-World feel alive. The movie simplified almost all of it.
Concepts such as the Dark Tower, the Beams protecting reality, and Roland’s battle against the forces of darkness are introduced, but the movie moves through them so quickly that they never have time to develop.
For longtime fans, the mythology that made the books fascinating was reduced to short explanations. The mysterious, hard-edged nature of King’s universe was replaced with a straightforward hero-versus-villain story with a soft PG-13 rating.
The result was a movie that was arguably too different and simple for established fans and too rushed for newcomers. It was trying to build a franchise and tell a complete story at the same time. It didn’t succeed at either.
There are some fun moments, particularly when Roland gets to unleash his gunslinger skills, but The Dark Tower should have been much more than this. The scenes involving the Man in Black and his assistants have the style and atmosphere of a low-rent TV movie.
The movie was made for a reported $66 million and earned approximately $113 million worldwide. It was a box office disappointment. Critics tore it apart. Fans were let down. Even Ron Howard was dissatisfied with how the movie turned out. He said the filmmakers had done “too much listening to what [we thought] the marketplace was calling for instead of the essence of what Stephen King was giving us.”
King also believed the PG-13 rating played a role in the movie’s failure. He said the concept had “lost a lot of toughness” and became something audiences could look at and say they had seen before.
The Dark Tower experiment was over. Or at least it seemed that way.
Media Rights Capital hoped to repair the damage with a television series developed for Amazon Prime Video. The Walking Dead‘s Glen Mazzara was chosen as showrunner, while Sam Strike and Jasper Pääkkönen were cast as Roland and the Man in Black.
Unlike the movie, this series was intended to be independent of the film and provide a more faithful adaptation of King’s books. A pilot episode was filmed, but Amazon ultimately passed on the project.
And that was it for The Dark Tower. For a while.
In December 2022, filmmaker Mike Flanagan revealed that he had acquired the rights to The Dark Tower. Flanagan already has experience adapting Stephen King, having made Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, The Life of Chuck, and an adaptation of Carrie. He has said that the ideal way to bring The Dark Tower to the screen would be a television series running for five seasons, followed by two movies.
The project has not yet gone into production, but it is set up at Prime Video. And Flanagan understands the biggest problem with the 2017 movie. He believes another adaptation needs to happen because, as he put it: “We can’t let [the 2017 movie] be the final word. We really can’t.”
Hopefully, there will eventually be a more faithful Dark Tower adaptation to watch. A series, movies, or a combination of both could finally capture the epic feeling and emotional weight of King’s novels. Because the problem wasn’t necessarily that The Dark Tower couldn’t be adapted. The problem may have been that Hollywood tried to turn an enormous, strange, deeply personal saga into a conventional 95-minute blockbuster.
King’s story needed room to breathe. It needed its mythology. It needed Roland, Jake, Eddie, Susannah, Oy, Walter, Mid-World, the Beams, the Tower, and all the strange connections that make the books so fascinating. The 2017 movie didn’t have the time or the willingness to fully embrace all of that.
Instead, it was compromised by budgetary limitations, marketplace concerns, a soft rating, and a script that scrambled elements of an enormous saga into a story that simply didn’t work very well.
And that’s what happened to The Dark Tower. For now, the 2017 movie is all we have. But Roland has been to the Tower before. Maybe he’ll get another chance to make the journey.
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