Mike Flanagan promises a faithful Dark Tower — fans already know which character won't survive the adaptation
The man behind Carrie and The Haunting of Hill House says his Stephen King mega-adaptation will change almost nothing. Readers of book two know why that's a promise he can't fully keep.
Mike Flanagan went on The Process Unlocked this week and described his Dark Tower series in the plainest terms he's used yet: "remarkably faithful" to King's books, with only "little changes" to make the story work as television. He'd start with The Gunslinger and adapt the novels in order, building the mythology one brick at a time.
"My adaptation was that. It was just doing the books, and doing them in order."
— Mike Flanagan, on The Process Unlocked
His argument is about the audience, not purism. "You can't throw an audience face-first into this huge universe. It's overwhelming," he said, crediting King for walking readers in "starting with two people and nothing else." The 2017 film did the opposite — it blended several books into 95 minutes and bombed with critics and audiences alike.
The character fans brought up immediately
The top reply in the r/television thread, at 133 upvotes, went straight to the test case:
"I have serious doubts that a faithful Detta will ever appear on-screen. (That's a good thing)"
— a commenter on r/television, 133↑
For non-readers: Detta Walker is one personality of Odetta Holmes, the woman Roland's ka-tet pulls into Mid-World in The Drawing of the Three. King wrote her in 1987 as a violent alter ego who speaks in an exaggerated, racially charged dialect — on the page she's a product of her era, and a word-for-word screen version is something no studio would shoot today. She is also not a character you can cut: Susannah, the person Odetta and Detta become, is one of the series' four leads.
So "remarkably faithful" runs into its first wall in book two of eight. Flanagan will either soften Detta and break the promise, or keep her and break the show.
The other problem: there is still no show
The second-most-upvoted reply asked the question the headlines skip:
"Just to clarify, this has yet to be greenlit, right? I have a very hard time seeing any streamer in the current environment commit to that kind of vision."
— a commenter on r/television, 20↑
That read is correct. Flanagan and his Intrepid Pictures partner Trevor Macy picked up the rights back in 2022 and carved the project out of their Amazon deal; the plan is five seasons plus two standalone films, season 1 scripts are finished, and King has read them and approves. What nobody has given them is a series order — on October 5 Flanagan told Page Six "we need the green light," and ten days later he described the project's progress as moving at an "oil-tanker pace."
The 2017 Dark Tower movie failed by changing everything. The series pitch is to change nothing — and four years in, no streamer has said yes to it.
The 2017 film sank because it abandoned the books. But a fully faithful Dark Tower — eight novels, a tower at the center of all realities, crossovers into half of King's bibliography, and Detta Walker — is exactly the version executives look at and see no mainstream ceiling. Somewhere between those two failures is the show Flanagan says he's figured out, and the fans who want it most are the ones pointing at the gap.
Previously we wrote: Dune: Part Three bent the book to fit Anya Taylor-Joy — I'm not sure it was worth it