Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER TV Series Gets a Promising Update From Mike Flanagan

Mike Flanagan has spent years trying to bring Stephen King’s The Dark Towerto television, and while the massive adaptation still hasn’t received an official green light, he just offered fans a promising update on where things stand.

While promoting his newCarrie series following the release of its official trailer, Flanagan responded to fans on Bluesky who asked about The Dark Tower. His answer was short, but encouraging: “It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever worked on, but we’re making progress.”

Considering the scale of King’s sprawling fantasy saga, “biggest thing” sounds about right. The Dark Tower isn’t exactly a story you casually turn into a TV series. It crosses fantasy, horror, westerns, science fiction, and plenty of other strange territory while connecting to various corners of King’s larger literary universe.

Flanagan independently secured the television rights to The Dark Tower in December 2022, several years after Sony Pictures attempted to launch the property as a feature film.

The 2017 The Dark Tower movie failed to win over critics and fans and didn’t perform well enough to build the franchise that had originally been envisioned.

Flanagan is taking a much more ambitious approach. His plan is to adapt The Dark Tower across five seasons of television and follow those with two standalone movies.

The filmmaker has already completed the scripts for Season 1, and King has given his approval. The bigger challenge now is getting a project of this size officially moving.

While previously discussing The Dark Tower, Flanagan described it as “one of the most complicated properties to get started.”

He continued: “Getting the green light on Dark Tower is a much longer and more involved process than anything else I’ve ever approached in my life.”

Flanagan has also suggested that Prime Video could potentially become involved with the series, though the project currently remains in development without an official green light.

King’s The Dark Tower saga spans eight novels, beginning with The Gunslinger in 1982. It was followed by The Drawing of the Three in 1987, The Waste Lands in 1991, Wizard and Glass in 1997, Wolves of the Calla in 2003, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower in 2004, and The Wind Through the Keyhole in 2012.

That’s a lot of material to adapt, but it also explains why Flanagan wants the room that five seasons and two films would provide. Trying to squeeze Roland Deschain’s journey into a single movie already proved problematic.

There’s still no production date or official home for Flanagan’s The Dark Tower, but the important part is that the project is alive and continuing to move forward. For King fans who have been waiting to see Roland’s journey receive a proper long-form adaptation, progress is certainly good news.

Now we just need somebody to finally give Flanagan the green light and let him follow the Beam.