‘The Dark Tower’ TV Series to Explore the Gunslinger’s Origins

Hitting theaters in August is the long-awaited The Dark Tower film, based on the popular series of Stephen King novels. With the movie being a loose adaptation of the source material, this allows the announced TV series based on the books to explore the origins of one of the film’s main characters, Roland Deschain, with actor Idris Elba attached to explore the character’s origins.

When speaking with Deadline about a plethora of projects, producer Akiva Goldsman explained his plans for the upcoming TV series.

“The first episode of a show has been written, and we hope to retain Ron Howard’s original idea to mix platforms, something that seemed revolutionary 10 years ago but now is something that others have done,” Goldsman explained. “Idris for sure is part of this, and if the movie is Roland Deschain the gunslinger, the show is his origin story, based on the fourth novel in the series, Wizard and Glass.”

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The upcoming film is said to borrow elements from the original books, but has been described as both an amalgam of the books while also being a story set after the events of the last book. With the recent reveal that the film has a running time of only 95 minutes, many fans are disappointed about how much content will actually be featured in the film, expressing concern about the dense subject matter not translating well.

The good news about Goldsman’s comments are that it shows the creative team is still interested in giving fans as much Dark Tower content as possible, but the bad news is that there’s still no commitment from any network to go forward with the series.

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Earlier this year, Howard revealed to TV Guide, “Dark Tower is coming out this summer. It’s a terrific movie directed by Nikolaj Arcel. And we are working on the television component. That’s not a commitment on the television side, but creatively, it could work very well, hand in hand with what we’d like the movies to be.”

Considering The Dark Tower having been given multiple release dates that’s resulted in months of delays, clearly networks are apprehensive about the film’s success. Understandably, for as much faith as any network might have in the TV project, there needs to be evidence that fans will turn up to see the film before committing to sink money into such an ambitious TV series.

The Dark Tower hits theaters August 4.