Mike Flanagan Swears His Dark Tower Series Is Still Happening

The Dark Tower, Stephen King’s magnum opus, is still on the cards for prolific adapter Mike Flanagan.

Mike Flanagan is very much a Stephen King guy, having already adapted Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life Of Chuck. Right now the creator of Netflix‘s The Haunting Of Hill House and The Fall Of The House Of Usher is beavering away at a new take on Carrie, both King’s first novel and his first book to be brought to the screen, for Amazon. But he’s also got his eyes on the big prize: a long-gestating adaptation of The Dark Tower, King’s weird, apocalyptic fantasy epic that sort of ties the whole Stephen King universe together.

“It’s moving,” Flanagan said to Empire Magazine. “We’ve got a lot of scripts done for it. It’s the first priority.”

Of course, The Dark Tower has previously been adapted. Directed by Nikolaj Arcel and starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, it was a total garbage fire, reducing King’s epic down to a bog standard portal fantasy and deservedly tanking at the box office. And it seems Flanagan is keen to bring a more fitting vision of Big Steve’s opus to the screen.

“We can’t let that be the final word. We really can’t,” he said.

Written between 1982 and 2021, The Dark Tower‘s nine books (seven main books and a couple of midquels) tell the story of Roland Deschain, the last gunfighter, as he quests for the titular tower at the centre of all reality, making his way through “Midworld”, a world that has mysteriously “moved on”, experiencing a kind of slow, gradual falling apart. It’s a big job for any prospective adapter, and when Flanagan’s involvement was announced in 2022, he said he envisioned his take running for five seasons, plus two stand alone movies.