The final blockbuster of summer 2017 to unveil its first trailer is the long-awaited adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower fantasy/western series. Starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey among others, this is an impressive first look at a series that has long been considered to be unadaptable for the big screen. Coming Soon has more below. Roland will follow The Man in Black into theaters on August 4, 2017.
The Dark Tower is the most ambitious and expansive story from one of the world’s most celebrated authors. Now the story comes to the big screen starring Idris Elba as Roland Deschain and Matthew McConaughey as Walter O’Dim (AKA Randall Flagg, The Man in Black, in the novels). The film is being directed by Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair).
Elba and McConaughey are joined in The Dark Tower by Tom Taylor as Jake Chambers, Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Neon Demon) as Tirana, and Fran Kranz (The Cabin in the Woods) as Pimli, the right hand man of Randall Flagg. The film also features Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen, A Nightmare on Elm Street), Katheryn Winnick (Vikings) and Claudia Kiim (Avengers: Age of Ultron).
The Dark Tower series tells the story of Roland Deschain, Mid-World’s last gunslinger, who is traveling southeast across Mid-World’s post-apocalyptic landscape, searching for the powerful but elusive magical edifice known as The Dark Tower. Located in the fey region of End-World, amid a sea of singing red roses, the Dark Tower is the nexus point of the time-space continuum. It is the heart of all worlds, but it is also under threat. Someone, or something, is using the evil technology of the Great Old Ones to destroy it.
Hmmm.
As a huge fan of the first four books, who is in the process of coming around and loving the rest of them just as much, I’m sold. But people who are unfamiliar with the books are not going to come away from this trailer on anything remotely resembling solid ground. The trailer starts out easy to digest, and even makes the movie look kind of formulaic, but you can’t wrestle Dark Tower into an easy encapsulation for very long.
And even though the approach the filmmakers have taken is a natural outgrowth of the way the last novel ended, the fact remains that this is NOT the way that the novels began, and a large contingent of the existing fan base is going to be ticked off. And considering that the novels are a cult phenomenon to begin with…
This movie is going to open fraught with baggage, and is not a slam dunk. If I were at Columbia, I would be praying that the critics fall in love with it.
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I will tell you I showed this trailer to someone who knew nothing about the books and they thought it was interesting but had no idea what to make of it. They need a smart marketing campaign. Badly. If you read the books, you know this looks pretty good, but yeah if you didn’t how you know what’s going on is beyond me.
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My sense right now (and I could always be off by a mile) is that they made this film too ambitious, that a potential franchise would have been better served by an introduction as straightforward and uncomplicated as they could possibly make it. But yeah, they need a smart ad campaign, and sadly it has now already begun, and is mystifying.
I wish they had gone down the road of a King shared universe, with Matthew playing Flagg in film versions of the Stand and Eyes of the Dragon. Works heavily connected to the Tower mythology, like Hearts in Atlantis, could have been a part of it too. Sad to see that opportunity lost.
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Hearts in Atlantis was a solid movie, really liked it
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It was a really good movie, but it only adapted part of the book (which was really an anthology) and dropped all the Tower references. The way so many of King’s books are wrapped around the Tower, they would make for quite an epic cinematic universe.
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