At the beginning of August, we reported that the adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower in its transition to the small screen was still very much on track despite poor reviews for its cinematic outing. Since then, King has gone on to reveal that the TV show will be a reboot.
In a recent interview with Vulture King opened up about his Netflix adaptations before they hit on the subject of The Dark Tower and the challenges in making the film for the big screen in which he revealed the reboot confirmation.
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 behaviour in a fairly graphic way. That was something that had to be overcome, although I’ve gotta say, I thought 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. The TV series they’re developing now … we’ll see what happens with that. It would be like a complete reboot, so we’ll just have to see.
Idris Elba could well be playing a part in the series, reprising his role from the film as Roland Deschain (better known as The Gunslinger) with Dennis Haysbert as his father, Steven Deschain, and Tom Taylor as Jake Chambers.
The Walking Dead executive producer Glen Mazzara will act as a showrunner on the adaptation of the fourth book in the series, Nikolaj Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen are writing the script for the series. Akiva Goldsman, Gregory Lessans, Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Jeff Pinkner are attached as executive producers.
Production on the series is due to start in 2018, and it is reported that MRC is looking to produce between ten to thirteen episodes for the first season, as yet there are no cable network partners attached.
