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Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Tower’ TV Show Alive And Well: The Ambitious Movie-And-TV Plan

By Dustin Kemp
Published on: 18:06 PST, Sep 1, 2016

Fasten your seatbelts, Stephen King fans: there are other worlds than these! And by “these,” we are referring to the locations that appear in this coming February’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.

Although most people thought the idea of an accompanying TV show was dead after the prospective Dark Tower cinematic trilogy was revised to a single movie, movie creators and Stephen King devotees Ron Howard and Brian Grazer recently revealed in an interview with Deadline that a Dark Tower TV series is still slated to follow the release.

Stephen King fans and movie buffs will likely recall that when Howard and Grazer originally came up with the concept of the Dark Tower movies based off of Stephen King’s epic eight-book saga of the same name, the plan was to split the series into three movies. The prospect of an entire trilogy dedicated to Mid-world, End-world, Gilead, and The Wastelands was tantalizing to say the least for those familiar with Stephen King’s work. Howard and Grazer were excited, too, but they felt even three full-length movies would not be enough to do justice to the sprawling world and storyline that make up Stephen King’s self-proclaimed magnum opus. So the plan was to supplement the trilogy with two TV series, one in between each pair of films, to help flesh out the mammoth universe Stephen King created even more.

Later, the trilogy concept was axed, and it was revealed that The Dark Tower would only get one movie. That’s a series that Stephen King fleshed out over 4,250 pages and 30 years (the first book, The Gunslinger, came out in 1982 and the last, The Wind Through The Keyhole, came out in 2012) that was going to be condensed into a single feature-length film? Could that really be done?

It turns out that no, it couldn’t. Howard and Grazer, obviously huge Stephen King fans themselves, wanted to do the series justice.

“One of the things we did was put together a team of Dark Tower researchers, devotees of the books,” Howard told Deadline.

“We wanted to restructure the novels to be most cinematic and Stephen King agreed completely and understood the journey we were on immediately and supported it. We used this group to inspire our thinking and stay in the universe of Dark Tower.”

It did not take much time after production on the cinematic Dark Tower began, adds Howard, for he and Grazer to realize that squeezing Stephen King’s giant world into one film was impossible. That realization caused them to rewrite the script, focusing on one major event from the first Dark Tower installment and using the movie as less of a standalone story and more of a launching-off point into Stephen King’s rustic, mystical universe.

“We focused more on the Jake Chambers-Roland relationship at the very center of the first movie as a way of launching the universe,” Howard explained. “We simplified the story line, made it less expensive as a result, but we still utilized a lot of those important structural adjustments.”

Stephen King Fans and lovers of fantastical adventure tales in the vein of Lord of The Rings and The Walking Dead can get psyched about this news. After all, the world will get to see a lot more of Roland, Jake, Susannah, Eddie, and the rest of the wonderful world of which only a great creative like Stephen King could conceive. The diverse settings and themes in the books will get ample time to shine on the screen, a longtime dream of many loyal fans of The Dark Tower, a fairly sizable group.

In fact, now that new life is being breathed into the Dark Tower movie, there is a very distinct possibility we will be seeing more movies from the series in the future.

“We’re developing the television part now. We don’t know what platform it will be on at this point, but we’re developing the content in hopes for more movies that will cover the epic and the characters involved.”

The Dark Tower movie is already finished filming and will be released on February 17, 2017. It will star Idris Elba as the main protagonist and Matthew McConaughey as the main antagonist.

What direction can you see them going with the Dark Tower movie?

[Photo by iStock]

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