Glen Mazzara breaks down what The Dark Tower Amazon series would have been

We learned in January that Amazon had passed on The Dark Tower series (here) and twice in three years our hope for a proper adaptation of Stephen King’s masterpiece was taken from us.

But now we have some details on the series that almost came to pass.

On the latest episode of The Kingcast Podcast (here) showrunner Glen Mazzara talked about what could have been.

After the disastrous movie starring Idris Elba (wonderful actor, brutally miscast as Roland) and Matthew McConaughey (perfectly cast as Randall Flagg) completely bombed with fans and general audiences, it seems that Amazon, rather than being frightened off, became more determined to do it right.

But, it was originally, waaaaaaaaaaay back in the day, the plan to make the movie and the TV series one and the same story running for years and, let’s be honest, if they’d done it right, that would have been a hell of a way to go.

Mazzara, who executive produced The Walking Dead, even went so far as to shoot a pilot but, as said above, Amazon stepped back in January.

“I was actually thankful that someone made that movie, believe it or not, because, I think that movie… was exactly what I said not to do in my initial pitch,” Mazzara says.

“It was about The Dark Tower. My plan was not to mention The Dark Tower, not to explain there was a Dark Tower. I wanted Roland to find the dark tower as he finds it in [the books].”

When the movie was still part of the plan, the idea was for Mazzara’s series to pick up from that point and to tell the story of the quest for the Tower from a later stage in Roland’s story.

However, once the movie tanked, he was happy to go back to the beginning and tell the story of Roland as a young man who had lost everything and became obsessed with The Dark Tower, the nexus of reality.

This seems to confirm the rumours that the series was set to start off with Wizard and Glass, the fourth book in the series which tells the story of Roland and how he first crosses the path of Flagg and the Tower.

“By episode 3.03 or 3.04 I was going to have Roland stumble out into the desert, follow him into the desert, and then I was going to do a time-lapse so that maybe you actually age Roland and switch actors,” he added.

“Then you have a new Roland reset the show at the top of season three, then go into The Gunslinger and by the end of that season go into The Drawing of Three.”

This sounds like a superb way of transitioning the story to the Roland we are most familiar with from King’s novels.

There’s a lot more information in the podcast and if, like me, you’re a fan of King’s universe, you’re definitely going to want to listen and pine for the awesomeness we missed out on.

Now… wonder if we can ever see that pilot?