The Long Road of Adapting Stephen King's 'Dark Tower'
On August 4, the 3-D fantasy-action-horror flick The Dark Tower—starring Idris Elba as the Gunslinger, a dimension-hopping loner, and Matthew McConaughey as his semi-immortal adversary—arrives after one of the most tortured development processes of any film in recent memory. Over the course of 15 years, some of the biggest names in Hollywood vied for the rights to adapt Stephen King’s series of books. A brief timeline:
King publishes , the first installment of what will, which follows a 30-generation descendant of King Arthur (turned High Plains drifter) attempting to defend a fabled tower, the nexus of a multidimensional universe. King later calls the series, which has now sold roughly 30 million copies worldwide, his “magnum opus.” Inspirations include the Robert Browning poem “Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came,” Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti Western character Man With No Name and the fantasy multiverse of J.R.R. Tolkien’s.
