How Stephen King Really Felt About Idris Elba's Failed The Dark Tower Adaptation

The hype around Stephen King's magnum opus "The Dark Tower" is more real than ever thanks to the upcoming adaptation by fellow horror master and serial King adaptation-maker Mike Flanagan ("Gerald's Game," "Doctor Sleep," "The Life of Chuck"). Granted, Flanagan's "The Dark Tower" TV series is taking pretty long, and there's no telling when we'll actually see the show on Amazon Prime Video. As such, patience is needed — though this may actually be a good thing since even an experienced King adapter like Flanagan will require plenty of time to wrangle the vast source material into a cohesive and hopefully great series.

That last part is imperative, because "The Dark Tower" already has one infamous entry in the failure category. The 2017 "Dark Tower" movie is a fantasy flop that ultimately found an audience on Netflix but was nigh-universally hated by critics. Understandably, people have been keen to learn what King thought about that bomb, and in a 2017 interview with Vulture, the author took some time to express his feelings towards the Nikolaj Arcel-directed film ... and revealed that while he gets what went wrong, he personally quite liked the movie:

"The major challenge was to do a film based on a series of books that's really long, about 3,000 pages. The other part of it was the decision to do a PG-13 feature adaptation of books that are extremely violent and deal with violent behavior in a fairly graphic way. That was something that had to be overcome, although I've gotta say, I thought [screenwriter] Akiva Goldsman did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I thought was a pretty good movie."

Turning "The Dark Tower" into a movie was always going to be a challenge, and even a stacked cast that featured Idris Elba as Roland Deschain and Matthew McConaughey as the evil Walter "The Man in Black" Padick couldn't save the 2017 adaptation. King — whose bibliography has its share of awful film adaptations — has always been aware of the difficulties of bringing a work as vast as "The Dark Tower" to the big screen, too. In 2017, he told Collider that he hadn't particularly kept tabs on "The Dark Tower" becoming a movie:

"I never really thought about it that much. There were times when people would express an interest in it, then it would go away again. Then interest seemed to come back at the time when Peter Jackson had success with the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, and I thought maybe, but it never seemed like a movie idea to me. It was complex, and it was long."

Though King also had kind words about the film adaptation, this indicates he wasn't fully on board with the idea of condensing the massive work into a relatively short movie. Flanagan's project, on the other hand, has elicited stronger emotions from the author. King has called Flanagan's plan for "The Dark Tower" adaptation "perfect," so whenever the show actually materializes, expect the writer to be all over it. After all, Flanagan himself has confirmed to ComicBook that no one is more interested in the project than King is:

"It's constantly in the works, and you better believe as often as you guys may want to ask about it, Stephen King is asking me about it more, and I'm not gonna let him down."