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Mike Flanagan has preached patience for his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. In addition to the fact that he has a slate of other projects including the next Exorcist movie and a new Carrie miniseries for Amazon, the process of actually making the western/fantasy/sci-fi requires a lot of behind the scenes gear-turning that necessitates lengthy development. That being said, it’s difficult to not be overwhelmingly excited for what he is cooking up, and that means that every update he provides instantly gets our attention.
With that in mind, this week’s edition of The King Beat is once again very Dark Tower-centric – with new quotes about his approach to casting the upcoming Stephen King adaptation and why he feels it’s important to launch the series with events from the first book, The Gunslinger. Between those two stories and an eyebrow-raising video that sees Mario crossover with The Shining, there is a lot to discuss in this column, so let’s dig in!
Mike Flanagan Has Clear Ideas About Casting The Dark Tower…But He’s Not Ready To Tell Any Of His Favorite Actors Yet
It’s no secret that Mike Flanagan has a tendency to cast his projects with frequent collaborators. When watching one of his movies or TV shows, it’s never surprising to see a number of familiar faces, including Kate Siegel (who is also his wife), Henry Thomas, Carla Gugino, Robert Longstreet, Samantha Sloyan, and Rahul Kohli. It was with this in mind that I wrote an edition of King Beat earlier this year fan-casting Flanagan regulars for The Dark Tower… but has the writer/director actually made any specific decisions regarding key roles in the adaptation?
CinemaBlend’s own Mike Reyes posed that question to the filmmaker during an interview, and the answer is a touch complicated. Mike Flanagan did confirm that he has put consideration into who among his favorite actors would be proper fits for certain roles in The Dark Tower, but with the adaptation still very much in the early stages of development, he hasn’t said anything to anyone about it. Said Flanagan,
I have not told anyone my plans because the last thing I want to do is get actors hoping or expecting things before I can tell them that it’s… My favorite version of things is to go to an actor and say, ‘This is what I see for you, and here’s an offer to do it.’ If I can’t do that, then I don’t; I try not to say anything.
This registers as both logical and kind. Working in the movie and television industry means constantly dealing with disappointment and rejection, so why get anybody’s hopes up? Delivering good news to a friend is a wonderful thing, but disillusioning a friend is terrible, and so Mike Flanagan has to keep both in mind when it comes to discussing potential parts with his actor friends.
Continuing, the writer/director admitted that he does mess up sometimes and lets people know a little more information than they should. It’s particularly difficult when it comes to collaborating with his wife:
I’m not perfect at that. Because sometimes I slip up, especially with Kate, who’s, I mean, she’s just so close to the whole process. She knows what I’m thinking for everybody. So I guess I have told, yeah, Kate Siegel knows my plans. She knows where I see [things], and she’s there when it changes and when it swings. And she’s always aware of it.
In addition to Kate Siegel and Mike Flanagan being married, she has been in nine of his film and television projects to date (including the upcoming The Life Of Chuck), and they have closely collaborated behind the camera. Siegel co-wrote the script for Hush with Mike Flanagan (in the notorious Room 217 of The Stanley Hotel, no less), and he wrote the script for her directorial debut (the segment “Stowaway” in the 2024 horror anthology V/H/S/Beyond).
Flanagan added that there have been cases where he has told some of his talented friends that he is considering them for parts in upcoming projects, but he makes a point of not making any hard promises:
Occasionally I’ve mentioned to like Sam Sloyan or to Rahul Kohli, ‘Hey, I’d love this for you, but I don’t know if I can guarantee it.’ But in general, I try not to promise things I can’t deliver. But I have a grid of kind of my actors that have names scribbled next to them for The Exorcist, for Carrie, and for Dark Tower. And that’s always really fun. I just never want them to see the grid too early.
The fact alone that Mike Flanagan is hoping to cast his favorite actors in The Dark Tower somehow makes the project feel more real than ever… but getting optimistic about the adaptation frequently also raises my anxiety, so the name of the game will continue to be patience.
Past Dark Tower Adaptation Attempts Have Skipped The Gunslinger. Mike Flanagan Promises He Won’t Be Doing That
While attempts have been made, Hollywood has not yet managed to develop a properly faithful adaptation of The Dark Tower. Obviously that pertains to the awful 2017 Nikolaj Arcel-directed film, but even the pilot script written by Glen Mazzara for the planned Amazon Prime Video series that never came together didn’t start from the proper beginning of the books; the teleplay instead puts an emphasis on a young Roland Deschain from the big flashback in Wizard And Glass (a.k.a. the fourth book in the series).
Needless to say, the developments have been disappointing – but you can rest assured that Mike Flanagan knows that any proper adaptation of The Dark Tower needs to start with The Gunslinger.
Mike Flanagan, Kate Siegel, Carla Gugino and Rahul Kohli are featured as guests in the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast (recorded at New York Comic-Con), and while discussing his approach to The Dark Tower, Flanagan emphasized the necessity of starting the story from the true beginning and being as faithful to Stephen King’s work as possible. Said the filmmaker,
These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I honestly think the only way to do it is to just do the books. I think the thing about the Dark Tower that’s so incredible is Stephen King builds an astonishing universe. And it’s huge and it’s populated with such a richness of characters and scale and scope eventually. But he starts that story with one person following another person in a barren desert. It’s one of the greatest opening lines of any novel of all time. That’s how you do it.
That opening line, of course, is “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” and it very much sets up The Gunslinger to be the relatively simple story that it is. While the second Dark Tower book, The Drawing Of The Three, sees protagonist Roland Deschain meet the friends who will eventually become like family, the seminal novel in the series launches centers on Roland Deschain as he treks through a vast wasteland searching for the villainous Walter O’Dim a.k.a. Marten Broadcloak a.k.a. Randall Flagg. (He does meet young Jake Chambers for the first time in the story, but things don’t work out well).
Mike Flanagan added that he understands the impulse from Hollywood to start somewhere in the middle of The Dark Tower when things start to get wild and science-fiction/fantasy elements start taking over, but Flanagan doesn’t think that’s the way to sculpt a proper adaptation:
You start with two people in a simple story: one is trying to catch the other. That’s it. And everything else is gradually added to it. And I think that’s how you do The Dark Tower. You build it one brick at a time. I can understand the gravity that has pulled people into being like, ‘Oh, we’ll jump in in the middle,’ or ‘We’ll jump in over here,’ or ‘We’ll try to jump ahead to show the big scale of this thing.’ You can’t start like that. You can’t.
Reflecting on The Dark Tower from a macro perspective, Mike Flanagan made an important point about the structure of the series and why it’s so important to start at the start:
Fortunately, Stephen King is a master storyteller who’s constructed a magnum opus and an epic that begins very intimately and ends very intimately, and in the middle, expands into this giant world. And I think that’s the only way to do it, and that’s how we’re gonna do it. But yeah, we’ll see. It’s taking forever. So I’m sorry about that.
With Flanagan’s Exorcist movie scheduled to arrive in theaters on March 13, 2026, that’s a project that the filmmaker will be prioritizing in the coming year, but fingers are tightly crossed that Dark Tower can be his epic follow-up.
And Now For Something Completely Different: Mario Crossing Over With The Shining Is Stupendously Odd
The internet is full of people who get strange creative impulses. This here is a perfect example. If one were to make a Venn Diagram with both “Mario” and “The Shining,” it would be an exceptional challenge to come up with things to put in the center space, but that clearly didn’t stop filmmaker Mark Cannataro from creating an ultra-weird mashup video that sees everybody’s favorite digital plumber take a trip through the Overlook Hotel:
From Princess Peach morphing into Toad during an encounter in the Room 217 bathroom to King Boo spending time with Luigi in a Tanooki suit a la Roger The Dog Man, I’m willing to bet that you haven’t seen an odder video on the internet today (or possibly this week). I suppose on some level it speaks to just how iconic Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is: just when you think that you’ve seen every possible new take on the greatest Stephen King movie of all time, a creation like this appears online to let us know that the surface has only been scratched.
That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of The King Beat, but I’ll be back next Thursday here on CinemaBlend with a brand new round up of the biggest news from the world of Stephen King.