One Stephen King Adaptation That Was a Total Mistake, According to Ron Howard
Oddly enough, it's not Maximum Overdrive.
The Dark Tower, released in 2017, was immediately met with criticism.
The adaptation of Stephen King 's work received poor reviews from critics and viewers, failed at the box office and all talk of a possible sequel died down.
Filming the saga of Roland Deschain's adventures based on the novels of horror king Stephen King always seemed like an impossible mission.
Too epic, too big, too many storylines. Studios were simply afraid to take on a project this ambitious.
When the studios finally decided to make the movie, found a director and screenwriters, the fog over the future project did not dissipate.
The reason was an unexpected casting. Stephen King has always said that he wrote the image of the shooter with Clint Eastwood, but the role of Roland was taken by Idris Elba, who definitely no one expected to see in the movie adaptation.
The viewers admitted that the story turned out to be boring, having lost its charm and lingering King atmosphere of hopelessness from the first minutes.
The movie did not reveal any mythology, parallel worlds or even the character of Roland himself. How to do it when the movie is only one and a half hours long?
Ron Howard, director of such movies as A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code, explained in a podcast Happy Sad Confused why the movie adaptation of The Dark Tower turned out to be so unsuccessful.
"I think it should've been horror. I think that it landed in a place […] that it could be PG-13 and sort of a boy's adventure… I really think we made a mistake," the director said.
Stephen King said the same when trying to explain why the movie did not work.
"The real problem, as far as I'm concerned is, they went in to this movie, and I think this was a studio edict pretty much: this is going to be a PG-13 movie. […] Аnd when they did that I think that they lost a lot of the toughness," the author shared in his interview with Entertainment Weekly.
As a result, what Stephen King fans feared the most happened: the ambitious seven-volume Dark Tower movie project was just ruined.