The Reason Amazon Just Gave Up On The Dark Tower TV Adaption
Amazon's journey to the Dark Tower is over.
Amazon Studios has opted to pass on its plannedadaptation of Stephen King's eight-novel opus after reportedly being dissatisfied with thepilot.
This comes a little more than two years afterthe feature film, starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey.
The streamer will shop its two completed scriptsto other studios, according to Deadline.
The news comes as a bit of a shock.
King fans were psyched for The Dark Towerto receive the serial treatment, which would have been a great fit for the extremely denseand profoundly weird material.
The novel series deals with Roland, the lastof a long line of near-mythical Gunslingers, and his quest to ascend the titular Tower, which is the nexus of all possible realities.
He's opposed by the mysterious Man in Black, as well as the Crimson King, an evil extradimensional entity who has featured directly or indirectlyin several of King's works.
While Amazon had made no official announcementsregarding the series' cast and crew, it had been widely reported that the series showrunnerwas Glen Mazzara, who had worked on The Walking Dead and The Shield; Sam Strike and JasperPääkkönen had been cast as Roland and the Man in Black, respectively, and Guardiansof the Galaxy's Michael Rooker and Jerome Flynn from Game of Thrones had also joinedthe series in undisclosed roles.
Unfortunately, unless the series is pickedup by another network or streamer, Mazzara's Dark Tower will never see the light of day.
Fans who were disappointed by the 2017 featurefilm, which attempted to cram several novels' worth of story into one film and.
.
.
well, failed, now have something else to be disappointed about.
“Jackpot!” Amazon has made no public statement aboutwhy the plug was pulled on the series, but Deadline's sources indicate that it wasn'tjust one thing.
Of course, as one might have predicted, itwas reported that Mazzara and company were having a tough time wrangling the material.
What works on the page doesn't always workon the screen, and the Dark Tower novels serve as an absolutely splendid illustration ofthis truth.
Some of their imagery would be near-impossibleto depict, and some of it, if we're being honest, would look incredibly silly, no matterhow it was depicted.
Aside from these troubles, however, it wasalso reported that Amazon's brass simply didn't feel that the pilot was up to snuff, and thatit would have suffered by comparison with other fantasy properties the streamer hascooking, such as Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time.
While that's certainly a bummer for fans, there is a silver lining here.
As the 2017 film proved, The Dark Tower isan extremely easy property to botch, and we submit that it's totally possible the powersthat be at Amazon have actually saved us from another half-baked adaptation.
Who knows? As to whether any other brave souls will pickup the Dark Tower torch, it's tough to say.
It's always possible that Mazzara's serieswill be rescued by Netflix or HBO, but it seems more likely that whatever problems Amazonhad with the pilot won't be overlooked by other potentially interested parties.
If indeed some intrepid creator decides tostart from scratch on a fresh adaptation, they would do well to heed the advice of RonHoward, who produced the feature film and also oversaw a planned tie-in TV series, whichnever materialized.
Speaking with Collider last year, Howard indicatedthat if he had it to do over again, he would have leaned into the weirdness of the sourcematerial rather than trying to shoehorn it into a mainstream-friendly package.
He told the outlet, “We always felt like we were kind of holdingback something.
Sometimes this happens on these projects whereeverybody's best intentions, you're all pulling in a direction, and then you sort of say, 'Was that the right direction?' And I wouldn't say [the movie] was all compromise.
I do think it was just a sense of maybe toomuch listening to what you think that the marketplace is calling for instead of theessence of what Stephen King was giving us.
” Hopefully, one day, we'll get the mind-blowingserial adaptation that The Dark Tower deserves, but it likely won't come from Amazon.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Looper videos about your favoritemovies and TV shows are coming soon
.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit thebell so you don't miss a single one.
Nhận xét
Đăng nhận xét