The Dark Tower Is Taking Forever For a Reason

The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed, and Mike Flanagan followed, too. So, where’s his adaptation of the Stephen King series? Since 2022, the horror filmmaker has been at work on a new television adaptation of the Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, a dark fantasy saga centered on the battle between a knightly gunslinger and an evil sorcerer known as Randall Flagg, “The Man in Black.” With eight books to work off of, Flanagan admitted to New York Comic Con he’s intimidated by the epic story series widely regarded as Stephen King’s literary masterpiece. Asked by Josh Horowitz of Happy Sad Confused how he’s trying to approach the material, Flanagan replied: “These are the questions that keep me up at night.” But he may have a silver bullet. “The only way to do it is to just do the books,” he said to applause..

Sounds deceptively simple, but “the thing about The Dark Tower that’s so incredible is Stephen King builds an astonishing universe and it’s huge.” (That explains what’s taking so long.) “It’s populated with such a richness of characters and scale and scope, eventually, but he starts that story with one person following another person in the barren desert,” Flanagan continues. “It’s one of the greatest opening lines of all time. That’s how you do it. You start with two people and a simple story. One is trying to catch the other. That’s it.”

As the Comic-Con crowd cheered, Flanagan apologized for how long the project has been in development. “It’s taking forever,” he acknowledged. Good news to anyone who swears they’ll finally read the books. There’s still time.

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