Mike Flanagan, the horror maestro who has been killing it at Netflix with Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and The Midnight Club, recently made the jump to Amazon Studios. And it turns out his first major project as part of that deal won’t be a straight-up horror, but it will be what many consider to be Stephen King’s magnum opus: The Dark Tower.
In a recent Deadline interview, Flanagan and producing partner Trevor Macy revealed they’re working on a series adaptation of The Dark Tower. A sprawling epic that combines multiple genres including Western, sci-fi, horror, and fantasy, The Dark Tower follows a legendary gunslinger and his battle against an unfathomable evil.
King’s story spanned eight novels, but crossed into other forms of media, as well. A 2017 movie starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey bombed at the box office after being in development for more than a decade. An ambitious plan was laid out that would combine a trilogy of films with TV shows that would connect everything. None of that came to be.
Flanagan’s goals are just as lofty, seeing The Dark Tower as a five-season series along with two feature films. And while the project is set up through Flanagan’s label and Amazon Studios, it could wind up on a totally separate network from Prime Video. If studios aren’t gunshy about investing in The Dark Tower, it could fetch a pretty penny in a bidding war.
“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,” Flanagan said. “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.”
