It’s been an fascinating week for Mike Flanagan and his associate Trevor Macy. After the duo introduced their Netflix departure, the streaming service introduced it was canceling their new collection, The Midnight Club, an adaption of the Christopher Pike YA horror e-book collection.
However, speaking to Deadline concerning the departure, the duo revealed that they’re within the midst of growing a Dark Tower collection for Amazon and its Prime Video service, based mostly on the Stephen King fantasy e-book collection. Now, if that venture sounds acquainted, it is due to a pilot helmed by The Walking Dead’s Glen Mazzara, was shot however proper earlier than the pandemic hit, it was introduced that manufacturing was not shifting forward and the pilot stays unaired, providing an enormous what might have been situation. It feels like Flanagan and Macy had the proper pitch thought and imaginative and prescient for the venture.
“I’m floored by what they did with The Lord of the Rings on a scale that we’ve by no means gotten near,” Flanagan said. “It represents, I believe, a really progressive strategy to an iconic IP with the complete weight of studio assist behind it, their confidence they put in a present, the assets they poured within the present. I believe we each discover that very thrilling as a result of it is lengthy been on our checklist of objectives to attempt to stretch into a few of that occasion style area. And that’s one thing that we’re optimistic we might be able to accomplish there.”
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower has been adapted into comics but has never reached the small screen. The duo is planning for a five-season show, in addition to two feature films. Flanagan revealed that he has written a pilot script and season outlines for The Dark Tower, which he has described for years as his “dream venture.” In the past, he’s described how he’d open the movie: a black screen with the words “The man in black fled throughout the desert, and the gunslinger adopted,” resulting in a panorama with a silhouette within the distance.
The Dark Tower has been thought of a holy grail property by studios, in the identical vein that Lord of The Rings was over 20 years in the past when Peter Jackson, coming off of The Frighteners, was introduced to run the options. The Dark Tower was made right into a film again in 2017 starring Idris Elba because the Gunslinger Roland, and Matthew McConaughey because the sorcerer Randall Flagg, who glided by his alias Walter Padick on this adaption. However, the film made simply over $113 million worldwide with a $66 million price range. It acquired typically adverse opinions, with criticism targeted on its compression of the multiple-novel supply materials right into a single movie, which muddled the plot for King purists and movie-goers alike.
