Considering how many times the work of Stephen King has been adapted for film and TV over the past 40 years, it may seem surprising that it’s taken this long for The Dark Tower to make the jump. As can happen with some titles, The Dark Tower has been through various filmmakers’ hands and studios in the last decade alone; in 2007, a film adaptation was going to be directed by J.
J. Abrams and written by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof of Lost, and a few years after, Ron Howard was going to take the helm. The just-released feature film, directed by Nikolaj Arcel, suggests this much, unfortunately: The Dark Tower may not work as a movie.It was always going to be a challenge to tackle the series of books that King wrote between 1982 and 2012. Eight novels being translated into films potentially could have been successful, if the franchise followed in the footsteps of massive hits like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, the latter of which serves as one of many cultural reference points within Dark Tower. The core conflict of the story — the forces of good and evil fighting each other with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance — is plenty familiar to audiences worldwide. But King’s version of this battle doesn’t unfold without jumping back and forth in time, introducing characters before removing them unexpectedly, and so on; it zigs where other franchises zag, which is admirable to experience as a reader, but becomes an obstacle in the adaptation process.
There are four credited writers for the final cut of The Dark Tower: Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Arcel himself.
Goldsman was involved in the project since Howard was first attached in 2010, with Pinkner helping him rework the script a few years later, before Jensen and Arcel joined. There is an unavoidable sense of too many cooks in the kitchen when considering the script for Dark Tower, even…The post ‘The Dark Tower’ Really Might Be Unadaptable appeared first on FeedBox.