With The Dark Tower’s release date just two days away, some media outlets are starting to drop some grim predictions on the film, citing both its strangely short run time and its surprisingly scant marketing. Only time will tell if the movie can make back its modest $60 million budget. However, according to director Nikolaj Arcel, plans to continue the gunslinger’s journey on the small screen are already underway.
“It’s being written,” Arcel said, in an interview with Indiewire. “I was part of writing the pilot, like the first season ideas and the pilot and the second episode. It’s gonna be awesome. What was exciting about that, whereas with the film, we were really trying to create an introduction and make a standalone film that could sort of live in itself, but what was also exciting, working on the TV show at the same time, is that is totally canon.”
He added, “We’re going back in the past. It’s very, very closely adhering to the ‘Wizard and Glass’ novel and parts of ‘The Gunslinger’ novel. That was exciting to be even more like, ‘Okay, now we’re going to be able to even lift lines directly, or like [write] characters exactly as they are. Which, as a fan, was exciting in a different way.”
Stephen King fans have been waiting 35 years to see the gunslinger’s journey across time and space brought to the screen. It’s already been hinted that the movie will actually take place after the mind-bending twist at the end of the book series. So if the movie is a hit, we can expect some truly awesome installments of the journey that will bend the rules of what mediums a story can be told across.
