Adapting Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series of books has proven to be problematic. The film version released by Sony Pictures in 2017 failed to engage moviegoers and now a television take has officially hit a wall. It has been announced that Amazon Studios has passed on The Dark Tower pilot.
Adapting the source material has become a daunting task for anyone that has tried. This is largely due to the fact that there a challenges to adapting such a sprawling story across a series of books. Amazon opted to go with a pilot vs. straight-to-series on a big-scale, big-budget production like The Dark Tower and in the end, Amazon executives felt like the pilot was not on the level of other large-scope elevated genre series the streamer has in production/pre-production like Wheel Of Time and The Lord Of the Rings.
The TV series was set to be independent of the 2017 film which starred Matthew McConaughey & Idris Elba. The show was to take place many years before the events depicted in the feature and focused on the origin story of Roland Deschain’s (Sam Strike) – how he first became a gunslinger and got his guns, his first conflict with the man in black (Jasper Pääkkönen), his first love and his first mission as a gunslinger. Despite not being officially announced, the cast also included Michael Rooker, Jerome Flynn and Joana Ribeiro.
