It’s not a great week for Stephen King I guess. After filming a pilot based on the author’s popular Dark Tower books, Amazon Prime Video has passed on ordering a series.
The proposed series was from Glen Mazzara, formerly a showrunner on The Walking Dead and production company MRC. While the pilot won’t be marketed to other platforms, the scripts will be, so this isn’t the complete end for the project.
The Dark Tower is a massive series, containing well over a million words and eight books. It tells the complicated tale of The Gunslinger, Roland, on his quest towards a tower (it’s dark, shocker). It an incredibly complex series that weaves in multiple genres and even other works from Stephen King.
The story was first adapted into a film in 2017 by Sony, starring Idris Elba as Roland, the gunslinger, in 2017. The film also starred Matthew McConaughey and was a massive … failure. This may have been due to the difficulty of the material and breadth of the story, so it seemed like it was a better bet to adapt the books as a television series.
The series was described as taking place long before the events in the film (which makes sense because there’s timey wimey stuff at work), According to Deadline, the series “focused on the origin story of Roland Deschain’s (Sam Strike) – how he first became a gunslinger and got his guns, his first conflict with the man in black (Jasper Pääkkönen), his first love and his first mission as a gunslinger.” I share this mainly because the lack of an Oxford comma here means that the man in black is the Gunslinger’s first love—which sounds like a fun series!
Unfortunately, it wasn’t what Amazon wanted. According to Deadline’s write up Amazon felt the project was not large scale enough to compare to a Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings style epic. That’s odd considering Amazon doesn’t need that since they have an actual Lord of the Rings series in the works. The ways of Hollywood are strange.
There may be a future for this series, but Glen Mazzara shared a eulogy for the project on twitter nonetheless.
I’m incredibly proud of the work our cast and crew did on The Dark Tower pilot. They are an immensely creative group of people who gave it their all and took big risks. I know they delivered big time. Tbh, I wouldn’t change a thing.
— Glen Mazzara (@glenmazzara) January 16, 2020
He shared also “There are other worlds than these,” alluding to the book and possibly other projects or other networks. Another joke seemed to imply he wasn’t done with the property.
It’s a tough business but I’m incredibly lucky to have worked on The Dark Tower for the past three years. I started in March 2017. I believe @StephenKing wrote it over 37 years. See you in 2054. 😬
— Glen Mazzara (@glenmazzara) January 16, 2020
We’re sad to see this project not going forward, as it seemed like a great fit between platform, creatives, and story. SO hopefully this isn’t the real end and the series still will happen, one distant day.
(via: Deadline, Image: Illustration by Michael Whalen)
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Published: Jan 16, 2020 11:20 am