Mike Flanagan says his THE DARK TOWER project was making “tremendous progress” before the strikes

Director Mike Flanagan has offered another update on its upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’S The Black Tower. This is a project that many King fans are incredibly excited about!

Flanagan, who is behind projects like The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, Gerald’s GameAND Doctor Sleepplans to adapt the books as a five-season series to be followed by two standalone films.

This is his dream project, and he and his creative team were making a lot of big and exciting progress on the series before the writers’ and actors’ strike hit. Now, it’s pretty much just a waiting game to start things over, but once things are sorted out, this project is top priority of him.

During a recent interview on The Kingcast, Flanagan said:

“I feel really good about where we are. Oddly, where we are at the moment is completely frozen, due to the strike, but we’ve had a wonderful spring with it and are making tremendous progress on it, and I have every reason to believe that since other part of the strike will be priority number 1.

He keeps talking about the progress made in the project but cannot provide any real information. One thing is clear though, he’s excited about how it’s all coming together:

“We have some amazing partners that I can’t talk about, and we have some really exciting actors spinning around it that I can’t talk about, and we have some potentially game-changing approaches to filmmaking that I just really can’t talk about…but what I can say is my fears that any momentum we had built up would be erased [by the strike]Well, I don’t really worry about that.”

It will be really cool to see how this epic western fantasy project comes together. When Flanagan first announced the project, he said the pilot script is “one of my favorite things he’s ever gotten to work on.” He shared at the time:

“I wrote a pilot, we see it as a series that will last at least five seasons. And having lived with this project for as long as I have, I have a huge amount of it processed in my brain. But I have a pilot script that I’m excited about and a very detailed outline for season 1 and a larger outline for subsequent seasons. I think eventually, if we’re able to make it work, there are other writers I want to get involved in that process that I’ve worked with before; I think they would be really fabulous for a really small, intimate writers room where we can keep breaking it up.

“I’ll tell you, more than half my life, I closed my eyes and was able to watch a lot of this game, I dreamed about it. That first shot that comes straight to the incredible first sentence of the first book, The Gunslinger, I’ve had that image buzzing in my head since I was a student. He’s got to get out of there eventually, I really need to get that out of my head.

“The pilot script is one of my favorite things I’ve ever gotten to work on. It was surreal to work on it. So we were blown away and grateful that Stephen King is entrusting us with such an undertaking, something so precious to him, and we hope to find the right partners to make it happen.”

Flanagan also said he’s looking to include characters from Doctor Sleep In The Black Tower. He explained how that would be possible by saying:

“The beauty of King’s universe is that it’s all connected. And the focal point of these connections is The Dark Tower. In the Dark Tower universe, there are all these other characters from the King world that come into play in different ways. When you make changes to the source material to introduce characters that could have played a very important role in that story… Doctor Sleep was written after The Dark Tower was finished.

He also went on to talk about the potential to add those characters to his own Dark Tower project:

“Abra Stone in the Dark Tower universe, like Breaker [telepathic agent], it’s really interesting. There’s a character in The Dark Tower called Dandelo, who I think is a cousin of the True Knot, who is this emotional vampire but who feeds on laughter instead of fear. But there’s room in that world for True Knot themselves, there’s room for Rose The Hat. There may be room for Danny Torrance. There are all kinds of things that could be surprising if we can get that property back on its feet. There are ways to put in other things from King’s universe, and I think the Shining universe – the Doctor Sleep universe – could fit right into that. Especially since, in our film, Dick Hallorann almost points to The Dark Tower in his last scene with Dan.

Stay tuned for more updates on The Black Tower adaptation. Are you enthusiastic about this project? Do you think Flanagan will be able to do it!?