We all knew it would happen one day, but the biggest Stephen King fan in the world is tackling his most remarkable work.
Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy’s Intrepid Pictures are moving from Netflix to Amazon and attempting one of their most significant projects to date. Flanagan and Macy will adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
Deadline broke the story and offered up some information for the game plan concerning this daunting task. The trade reports, “Flanagan envisions [The Dark Tower] as a TV series to run for five seasons, followed by two stand-alone features.”
Deadline notes that Intrepid Pictures have acquired the rights to the book series, and Flanagan has a pilot script and season outlines for The Dark Tower. Previously, the filmmaker shared his vision for the opening shot, a black screen with the words “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” leading to a landscape with a silhouette in the distance.
Flanagan has noted recently that The Dark Tower is is a dream project for him, which says a lot as he’s worked on several Stephen King adaptations; he calls the series his “Holy Grail of a project for most of my life.’ He’s previously helmed 2019’s Doctor Sleep and 2017 Gerald’s Game and Flanagan says his dedication got him the job, telling Deadline, “This happened because I sent [King] a very, very detailed outline of what I wanted to do with it. And it was in response to that, that he gave us the rights.”
Flanagan and Macy’s Intrepid Pictures is currently working on their final Netflix show, a limited series based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. As for the move from Netflix to Amazon, Flanagan says, “given how much change everything’s gone through in the last few years, we were feeling like there might be a better fit for us, and we’re very much feeling like Amazon is that.”
After multiple failed attempts, The Dark Tower was previously adapted for the screen in 2017, with Idris Elba starring as Roland Deschain and Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black. That was planned as a multi-part adaptation spanning both film and television, but it failed to take off with just $113 million at the worldwide box office.
