Director Mike Flanagan recently spoke on the Script Apart podcast about his possible serial adaptation of ‘the dark tower‘ by Stephen King, and the difficulty of making the series. The ‘Midnight Mass’ director has begun working with Amazon Studios on new television projects, hoping to create an adaptation of Stephen King’s epic, but he also spoke of lost projects, such as his ‘The Shining’ prequel. ‘.
The series, in trouble?
Flanagan acquired the rights to adapt King’s great work last year, but told the podcast that he believed the film’s failure may have torpedoed his chances of getting to do a series of ‘The Dark Tower’:
“My adaptation couldn’t be more different from the film, which had the wrong approach to the material, across the board, and was so wrong that I think it has salted the earth for anyone else who wanted to plant something under the Tower’s banner. Dark, for who knows how long. They were able to outdo it for an Amazon series that took a different approach again, which is very different from what I’m proposing, and that didn’t take off. So that has directly impacted as well… and I’m in Amazon!”.
Flanagan, who has successfully conquered the streaming horror genre in recent years, had less success with his film work, including “Doctor Sleep,” whose box office flop cost him a prequel to “The Shining” centered on Halloran’s character, who could have recounted the encounter of the novel ‘It’ with the charactersince he was in Derry while he was stationed in the army and helped build the “Black Spot”, witnessing the fire with Mike’s father around 1930.
According to Flanagan, his film about the character would have recounted his life since that meeting:
“In canon, little Richie Halloran has a run-in with Pennywise when he was young. Then it was going to be this whole other thing where he joins the military and ends up trying to work law enforcement in New Orleans in a department Heavily segregated police officer and he’s up against sort of a cousin of the real thing, a killer who specifically targets people who shine, and there was a big battle there.”