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Frank Darabont explains why he turned down Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, calling it a “diabolically difficult” epic.
Posted in: Movies, Sony | Tagged: frank darabont, sony pictures, The Dark Tower
Frank Darabont Reveals Why He Passed on The Dark Tower
Frank Darabont explains why he turned down Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, calling it a “diabolically difficult” epic.
Article Summary
- Frank Darabont reveals he turned down directing Stephen King's The Dark Tower despite a personal offer from King.
- Darabont found The Dark Tower's scope "diabolically difficult" and feared it could take a decade to adapt right.
- The director praised King for his support but admitted the story was too vast and internalized for him to tackle.
- The Dark Tower's complex universe challenges many filmmakers, as seen in the 2017 film adaptation's struggles.
Frank Darabont is clearing up the record on why he never took a swing at Stephen King's The Dark Tower, and his answer makes it sound more like self-preservation than a missed opportunity. But first, let's start from the beginning.
The Dark Tower first began with The Gunslinger in 1982, the first entry in King's long-running fantasy western saga about Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, on a quest to reach the Dark Tower that binds multiple realities together. Over time, the books expanded into eight main entries and tied into other King works, turning Roland's journey into the backbone of a larger interconnected universe. In 2017, the story finally reached theaters as a loose, condensed adaptation starring Idris Elba as Roland and Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black, directed by Nikolaj Arcel. The film tried to compress major beats from the series into a single PG-13 movie and landed with weak reviews and less than thrilling box office numbers in comparison to its budget, leaving some fans underwhelmed.
Frank Darabont Talks The Dark Tower
In a recent interview, Darabont explained why he once turned down King's offer to take it on. He said that King personally called to ask if he was interested in The Dark Tower, and that he was deeply flattered, but ultimately felt the material was "so internalized" and "this massive, endless story" that could swallow a decade of his life and still miss the mark. He recalled telling King, "Steve, I love you… Thank you for asking, but I gotta not do this," and later joking that by the time he reconsidered, King had already moved on with someone else. Darabont stressed that these were casual conversations between friends and said he owes his entire directing career to King.
It is easy to imagine a version of The Dark Tower guided by the filmmaker behind The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, and genre fans will probably always wonder what that might have looked like. At the same time, his hesitation feels justified given how hard the material is to crack, even for someone with a proven track record of adapting King's work. At the very least, The Dark Tower did make it to the big screen, and with so many King properties still being revisited in new forms, the saga's blend of fantasy, horror, and meta storytelling remains wide open for reinterpretation when Prime Video eventually moves forward with its "multi-season" series adaptation.
With all that in mind, do you think Darabont would have been a solid fit for The Dark Tower?
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