The Dark Tower movie adaptation

[Jinsai]

thinking about this just makes me kind of sad. The Dark Tower is probably my favorite Stephen King stuff, maybe just short of IT, and I'm a pretty big fan who's read pretty much everything he's published. You're taking on a big responsibility when you adapt The Dark Tower, which is pretty much the magnum opus from someone who writes like 3 books a year, and one of them is 1200 pages long. So, yeah, he's also known for getting pretty shockingly hardcore and graphic... so...

Hey, let's make a PG-13 movie that's an hour and a half long, and make it sorta like a cross between Crocodile Dundee and The Neverending Story, and let's make the Man in Black like some kind of shitty Final Fantasy villain. I can't think of anything that dumbed down the source material to something that had so much promise.

So it's just sad, because unlike a lot of King's stuff, I could have seen this translate into a really epic series of films. Instead, we got some generic boring bullshit that didn't even include the characters Eddie or Susannah. That's like making Star Wars and cutting out Luke and Leia and Han Solo, and instead just making it into a movie where Darth Vader and Obi Wan are sorta mad at each other, but Darth Vader is a snarky catty asshole who can't stop overacting.

So of course it bombed, and all these studio morons were like "oh no, there's no future for this franchise! Look how badly the movie did!"
This could have soared as an HBO miniseries, and I still have some hope they'll do it right. I actually hope they do it and bring back Idris Elba, because he was pretty much the only good part of the movie... that and the nifty gun battle towards the end.

I'm glad Stephen King has finally come around to admitting that it sucked.

[Jon]

...This could have soared as an HBO miniseries...

The Drawing of the Three would have worked especially well as a miniseries. The problem, for me at least, is that half of these only really work as movies, the other half only really work as miniseries.

[elevenism]

The Drawing of the Three would have worked especially well as a miniseries. The problem, for me at least, is that half of these only really work as movies, the other half only really work as miniseries.

We need like a multi season SHOW.

NONE of those books work as films, imho, except the first one...and that'd be an odd fucking film.

[Jon]

We need like a multi season SHOW.

NONE of those books work as films, imho, except the first one...and that'd be an odd fucking film.

It's almost impossible to do without trying to tie "extra" things into it (i.e. GDT's The Hobbit), and as a "standalone" film it wouldn't really make sense without follow up. Ideally, I wouldn't shoot these sequentially, which would mean that perhaps Part 1 and sections of Part 4 standing alone as their own movie. These really only correctly function, in my opinion, if there is a a series and a film always on-going, as long as the series lasts. The last part, The Dark Tower, would be a clusterfuck no matter what. It seems pretty evident that King had no clue what the grand scheme of things would be, and he was throwing shit at the wall for Parts 6 and 7.

Even with all the faults of the movie apadtation for Dreamcatcher, that seems to be a perfect starting point if you're attempting to shoot 6 or 7 as a movie.

[Jinsai]

The Drawing of the Three would have worked especially well as a miniseries. The problem, for me at least, is that half of these only really work as movies, the other half only really work as miniseries.

Wouldn't that be interesting though... if they made The Gunslinger a movie, then Drawing of the Tree a limited miniseries, then Wasteland a movie, then Wizard and Glass a miniseries, then Wolves of Calla a movie, Song of Sussanah a movie, and then The Dark Tower a miniseries? That would be epic