NEWS - THE DARK TOWER (FLANAGAN)

Building 8 Seasons In The Same Structure As King's Books

Posted: October 15, 2026, 13:19
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Mike Flanagan sees his adaptation of The Dark Tower as an 8 seasons TV series and he intends to do them as the books and following the outline and structure that King provide with the source material. Flanagan explained that King's structuring is "genius," beginning simply with two characters, the Man in Black and the Gunslinger, in a vague desert landscape before gradually building and expanding on the franchise's massive universe "one brick at a time."

"The problem with the other approaches is people who try to jump in in the middle, or people who try to jump in at a different point. Because you can't throw an audience face-first into this huge universe. It's overwhelming. King did it right, he walked you in starting with two people and nothing else, and walks you one step at a time. So my adaptation was that. It was just doing the books, and doing them in order."

One challenge could be to get the audience to accept the series leaving the main story and Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy for a season while doing Wizard and Glass and then again with The Wind Through The Keyhole.

Flanagan Gives Update On The Dark Tower

Posted: September 16, 2026, 15:43
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Entertainment Weekly spoke to Mike Flanagan about the upcoming Carrie show but also asked about The Dark Tower adaptation.

To do it the way I wanna do it requires an enormous commitment from a studio.

Flanagan’s main struggles now are the rights that he needs to secure.

The way the Dark Tower universe is connected, you’ve got characters in there that are all over the place when it comes to studio ownership. So the development process on it has been epic. It, of course, has taken much longer than I’d like it to, but I work on it all the time. It’s never stopped moving. It just moves at its own oil-tanker pace.

There has also been questions about if Carrie could turn in to a backdoor into The Dark Tower?

I may have asked this very question several times along the way. It’s certainly not impossible. There are characters in the Tower canon who would serve a very specific purpose in that story, who audiences wouldn’t necessarily recognize because they only exist in certain books.

Carrie White could achieve the same narrative purpose pretty cleanly. You could say the same, though, of Abra Stone (Doctor Sleep), you could say the same about Danny Torrance (The Shining). How the various Stephen King worlds can connect is always on my mind.

The Road To The Dark Tower Is Long

Posted: July 18, 2026, 23:09
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Flanagan says that getting The Dark Tower done is a long process.

When Flanagan struck a splashy television deal with Amazon, after a years-long stint at Netflix, those who gleefully follow his horror work were expecting him to launch into The Dark Tower, a TV passion project he spoke of repeatedly over the years. That, however, became “one of the most complicated properties to get started,” he says. “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.”

It sounds like there will be some time until we se this one…

King Is Happy With The Scripts For S1 Of The Dark Tower

Posted: February 9, 2026, 16:38
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King has commented on the scripts for season 1 of Mike Flanagan's adaptation of The Dark Tower and he likes it.

The scripts for the first season are wonderful. I am so happy with them. Stephen King is very happy with them. He's been through it with his adaptations. He'll tell you he's not pleased. And this one means more to him than any of the others, so the pressure is huge.

Read more here

The Dark Tower Update

Posted: January 6, 2026, 01:06
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Mike Flanagan called The Dark Tower for ”his Holy Grail” and now he says several of the scripts are done:

“We’ve got a lot of scripts done for it. It’s the first priority.”

He envisions it as a series running for five seasons, followed by two stand-alone movies. Flanagan also had this to say about the 2017 adaptation:

“We can’t let that be the final word. We really can’t.”

Stephen King Writes For The Dark Tower Movie

Posted: February 24, 2025, 16:03
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It seems King is more involved with the new Dark Tower movie / TV series than we have been aware of. IGN reports that at a roundtable interview for The Monkey they asked him if he would be interested in contributing new material to The Dark Tower as he did with the 2020’s The Stand and King revealed that he already is:

All I can say is it's happening. I am writing stuff now and I think that's all I want to say because the next thing you know, I'll stir up a bunch of stuff I don't necessarily want to stir up yet. I'm in process right now, and to say too much feels like a jinx.

Update from Mike Flanagan About The Dark Tower

Posted: July 26, 2024, 05:43
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The podcast Talking Scared talked to Mike Flanagan and here’s what he had to say about the potential of The Exorcist getting in the way of The Dark Tower:

“Oh, it’s not in the way. They coexist very well. I think the trick with The Dark Tower is just it still just takes an enormous amount of time to get going. But we’re further along than the last time we spoke. It seems to be moving on its own momentum. There’s so much logistical, boring, legal stuff that we have to kind of machete our way through to get that thing moving. But yeah, it has not at all stalled and none of the other work that’s that’s kind of emerged has in any way taken away from it.”

“It became so clear to me that that kind of oil tanker of a project was just gonna be moving along. It’s perfectly feasible for me to be working on other things at the same time. And I wish that wasn’t the case. And there’s gonna be a point hopefully soon where that project needs to knock everything else outta the way, where Tower has to kind of assert itself … I couldn’t make that the case now if I wanted to. There’s just too much we’re still having to kind of get through to get it up.”

Read more here

Flanagan Talks The Dark Tower

Posted: August 10, 2023, 09:24
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Mike Flanagan has given an update on his adaptation of The Dark Tower.

"I feel really good about where we are. Oddly, where we are at the moment is completely frozen, because of the strike, but we had a wonderful spring with it and we're making enormous progress on it. And I have every reason to believe that on the other side of the strike, it's gonna be priority #1.

We have great partners on it that I can't talk about, and we've got some really exciting actors circling on it that I can't talk about, and we have some potentially groundbreaking approaches to the filmmaking of it that I just can't really talk about ... but what I can say is that my fears that any momentum we had developed was gonna be obliterated [by the strike], well, I don't really worry about that.

We’re in a healthy place. We are of course in solidarity with the WGA and SAG, and once those immediate needs are taken care of and everyone's back to work, I think that's when we're gonna immediately deploy. But it's going very well."

Abra, Danny & Rose To The Dark Tower Go?

Posted: March 18, 2023, 01:10
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Mike Flanagan spoke to Script Apart Podcast about his ideas for The Dark Tower and it turns out he want to add characters from The Shining and Doctor Sleep to The Dark Tower universe.

“Abra Stone in the Dark Tower universe, as a Breaker [telepathic agent], is really interesting,” he says. “There’s a character in The Dark Tower named Dandelo, who I think is a cousin of the True Knot, who’s this emotional vampire but who feeds on laughter instead of fear. But there’s room in that world for the True Knot themselves, there’s room for Rose The Hat. There might be room for Danny Torrance.”

What do you think, should Abra, Danny and Rose The Hat be in The Dark Tower adaptation? Personally I don’t think so. They are fine in their own world and not everything King has written are connected to The Dark Tower.

Flanagan Confirms Rights To The Dark Tower

Posted: December 8, 2022, 16:34
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Mike Flanagan told Deadline that he has the rights to The Dark Tower and wants to do a five season TV series and two movies.

FLANAGAN: You’re the first person we’re saying it to, but yes. Predating our deal with Amazon, we acquired the rights to The Dark Tower, which if you know anything about me, you know it has been my Holy Grail of a project for most of my life. We actually have those rights carved out of our Amazon deal, which doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t get behind it at some point — you don’t know. But that’s something we’ve been developing ourselves and are really passionate about finally getting it up on its feet at some point.

FLANAGAN: Well, to be honest, the way that I have seen it breaking out is five seasons of television, followed by two stand-alone features.

FLANAGAN: A project like this, I wouldn’t want to be involved in it at all If we were taking it in a direction that was going to be blasphemous to the Stephen King material, but he’s been very, very supportive and very excited about what we’d like to do with it.

Thanks to Alex Maidy

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