I’m reading the Dark Tower series again, because it has been a while… I’m going through The Wastelands now and I’m thinking it would make a great movie! Maybe it could be made like the Lord of the Rings where it is cut up into different movies over time… Or a Mini-series where they meld the books over 4 different movies… I’d like to see Hollywood do it instead of a tv series for budgetary reasons… I’m picturing the scenes from the books and I’d like to see them on screen to see how they would look. Who could play the Gunslinger? Clint Eastwood would have been perfect in his time… Has King ever thought of making this into a movie? Has this already been discussed on the boards?
Personally, I wouldn’t like it, but I have a connection to the books and wouldn’t want someone else to sully my vision, if you know what I mean.
The graphic novel coming out should be good, though.
King raises the issue on his website. He mentions that he would prefer to see it as an HBO type miniseries. I think it would work better like that than as a movie myself.
From his FAQ:
“I’ve always resisted that idea because movies have a way of freezing characters and places in the audience’s mind whereas in books everybody has their own different idea of, for instance, how Roland or Susannah looks but if you do it as a movie, immediately that kind of gets frozen in place and you say ‘Oh, Billy Bob Thornton is what Roland Deschain looks like.’ Or you say ‘Brad Pitt, that’s what Eddie Dean looks like.’ You know what I’m saying, or you can say ‘Calla Bryn Sturgis from Wolves of the Calla looks like maybe the Universal back lot’, and I’ve always resisted that. The issue with The Dark Tower books is there’s so much story, so many incidents, that it couldn’t be done in one movie alone. It would have to be done at least as a trilogy the way The Lord of the Rings movies were done or it would have to be done as a TV series, probably on HBO because of the violence, the way The Sopranos was done. I haven’t entirely ruled that idea out but for the next two or three years while the books have their initial run, I think that if you want the story of Roland, you’ll have to get it at your bookstore rather than the local movie theater.”