Anna Daniels
Amazon has made no public statement about why the plug was pulled on the series, but Deadline‘s sources indicate that it wasn’t just one thing. Of course, as one might have predicted, it was reported that Mazzara and company were having a tough time wrangling the material; it really can’t be overstated just how tough King’s novels would be to adapt. What works on the page doesn’t always work on the screen, and the Dark Tower novels serve as an absolutely splendid illustration of this truth. Some of their imagery would be near-impossible to depict, and some of it — if we’re being honest — would look incredibly silly, no matter how it was depicted.
Aside from these troubles, however, it was also reported that Amazon’s brass simply didn’t feel that the pilot was up to snuff, and that it would have suffered by comparison with other fantasy properties the streamer has cooking, such as Wheel of Time (itself based on a fourteen-novel series by Robert Jordan) and Lord of the Rings (which we have a feeling you’re perfectly familiar with).
While that’s certainly a bummer for fans (especially considering that we know the pilot exists, but we’ll never get to see it), there is a silver lining here. As the 2017 film proved, The Dark Tower is an extremely easy property to botch, and we submit that perhaps the powers that be at Amazon have saved us from another half-baked adaptation.
Written by: Looper
