Mike Flanagan's Dream Project Is Stephen King's The Dark Tower
Mike Flanagan has proved over the last decade why he's one of the pre-eminent names in modern horror. From the unique premise of a film like "Hush" to his daring, devastating Netflix series "Midnight Mass" and "The Haunting of Hill House," Flanagan has a knack for effectively analyzing our fascination with horror and exploring it in an expert way.
Still, the writer-director might be most well-known for his love of Stephen King. Famously, Flanagan has adapted both "Gerald's Game" and "Doctor Sleep" into feature films. This feat is all the more impressive when you consider how difficult it must have been to bring these stories to the big screen, particularly "Gerald's Game," a tale that is almost completely comprised of a woman stuck in a room by herself. Either way, Flanagan hopes to one day adapt an even more challenging Stephen King story in the form of "The Dark Tower," a fantasy series that is comprised of eight novels and a novella.
Flanagan says the previous film deviated too far from the books
Flanagan sat down with IGN to talk about his obsession with "The Dark Tower" and what his version of that story might look like if he were ever to adapt it. "It's my dream project, and I keep coming back to it," Flanagan gushed. "It has its own gravity — I can't get too far away from it for too long. Nothing would be a bigger honor or make me happier in my career than to be able to work on that."
While the project would be massive in scope if Flanagan were ever to undertake it, being that the series crosses time, space, and nearly every genre under the sun, if there's anyone who can successfully bring "The Dark Tower" to life in a satisfactory way for fans, Flanagan is probably the best bet. After all, no one wants another adaptation that lets fans down the way the 2017 version did (via Rotten Tomatoes).
Though Flanagan didn't trash Nikolaj Arcel's version of the story as badly as some critics did, he did point out that it went wrong by deviating so much from the source material. The writer-director then went on to lay out how his more faithful adaptation would begin, saying it would start with the opening words from the first book in "The Dark Tower" series, "The Gunslinger," set against a cruel desert wasteland.
"We would build it out from there, in order, to the end," Flanagan said with considerable emphasis. "The way not to do 'The Dark Tower' is to try and turn it into something else," he went on, saying that an adaptation of the storied Stephen King series would be his professional Mt. Everest.