Any and all concerns I have with TDT movie have zero to do with the casting choices so far that all seem great. Who's directing, who's writing, what order are the books being adapted, how much are they going to try and cram into one film, how are you going to handle how much of the series relies on other books, etc. That worries me more than anything. Most of Wolves of the Calla would need to be changed dramatically because of Doctor Doom, 'Salem's Lot and that Harry Potter thing in it. King's self-insertion worked in the book but would feel incredibly dumb in a movie. Things like that.

The biggest thing for me is that within the first thirty seconds I want to see Elba walking through the desert and reaching down for a canteen or something and the camera following his hand, panning over his body and going across the Horn of Eld secure at his hip. That's all it's going to take to either make me feel like I'm in good hands and not complain about most narrative changes or make me terrified and far more critical of the overall thing.

To me TDT is so incredible because of the entire journey around it literature-wise, not just the journey in those seven books themselves. It being King's magnum opus, it being the literal center of the multiverse of his fiction, the series being the literary equivalent to the Tower itself, the way that you'd read a random novel of his and suddenly spot different references and connections and tie it all back in your head to the series, the way that so much of the series involves bring in elements of his other work -- all of that makes it feel like this genius, organic sort of artifact of a story that makes being a Stephen King fan obsessive in a way. I remember having some "guide to the Stephen King universe" book growing up and that being this fantastic reference point that went out of its way to show how literally no story he had told in a novel couldn't somehow be connected back to the series, and it was fantastic. it was the DC or Marvel comics of literature in a sense to me. It was his own Lovecraftian thing, realizing that the monster from It was even more terrifying and had even bigger implications, that kind of thing.

Absolutely zero of any of that can translate on screen in any meaningful way that has any similar impact. So at best I'm hoping for a visually stunning epic of a series that tells the basic story and tells it well with lots of weirdness and grit beneath it's fingernails but I don't expect anything close to the book series that moved me and made me an obsessive King junkie for years and I don't expect it to be the amazing force of nature those books were at all.