Mike Flanagan says once the strikes are over, his Dark Tower series is top priority!

One of my favourite worlds to be immersed in is that of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, which sits at the centre of Stephen King’s massive catalog of novels and stories  – honestly if you thought the MCU was the first shared universe, you really should jump into King’s work.

And as such a massive fan of King and The Tower, I have been burned twice with my dream of having it realised in live-action with the canceled TV series back in 2020 and then later the so bad, I wish it was canceled, movie adaptation which tried to cram eight novels’ worth of story into an hour and a half!

Things had got to the point where it was looking like a proper adaptation of The Dark Tower would never happen.

Enter Mike Flanagan.

MIke Flanagan developing The Dark Tower series!

Flanagan had directed the cracking King movies (an accomplishment in itself) Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, establishing him as a King fan and a big hit with King himself and King’s fans. He then made the Haunting of Hill House and The Midnight Club and, well, he’s basically TV’s Stephen King.

So imagine my excitement when Flanagan revealed that he had the rights to The Dark Tower and was developing the series (here) and now he offers up exciting details on the TV show’s development, which was taking off nicely before the strikes began in Hollywood.

“I feel really good about where we are. Oddly, where we are at the moment is completely frozen, because of the strike, but we had a wonderful spring with it and we’re making enormous progress on it. And I have every reason to believe that on the other side of the strike, it’s gonna be priority #1,” he says on The Kingcast.

“We have great partners on it that I can’t talk about, and we’ve got some really exciting actors circling on it that I can’t talk about, and we have some potentially groundbreaking approaches to the filmmaking of it that I just can’t really talk about… but what I can say is that my fears that any momentum we had developed was gonna be obliterated [by the strike], well, I don’t really worry about that.”

Is Pedro Pascal set for Roland Deschain role in MIke Flanagan’s Dark Tower series and movies?

He adds that once everyone gets back to work “I think that’s when we’re gonna immediately deploy. But it’s going very well.”

This is very, very exciting news, indeed.

One of the few things I admired about The Dark Tower movie was that it tried to set up the end of the story of Roland of Gilead, the Gunslinger who leads the journey to The Dark Tower – I won’t go into what this means as it’s very spoilerific but if you’ve read the books, you’ll know there’s more story to be told – and I would love if King and Flanagan could sit down and work out a way for the series to do that too.

I’m so excited for this to happen, having been burnt twice before, but I have faith in Flanagan and The Dark Tower is a tale that needs to reach ore people.

Thoughts? I know you have them! Voice-off in the usual ways on FTN’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

In the meantime, check out the trailer for Flanagan’s latest series, The Fall of the House of Usher coming on October 12th.

She’s coming for them all. In this wicked series from Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House) and based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, ruthless siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built Fortunato Pharmaceuticals into an empire of wealth, privilege and power.

But past secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman from their youth.