A Mike Flanagan Project Is At The Top Of Stephen King's Most Anticipated List

Stephen King has published over 65 books and hundreds of short stories, which pretty much guarantees that there will always be some sort of Stephen King adaptation in the works at any given moment. Right now we've got another film adaptation of "Salem's Lot" on its way, as well as an "It" prequel series at HBO and a film adaptation of his 1980 short story "The Monkey."

But as for the adaptation King's most interested in? It's none other than Mike Flanagan's upcoming TV series, "The Dark Tower." In a recent interview with Dread Central, King listed the project as the one he's most excited about, and explained, "I think with 'The Dark Tower,' for anybody who is familiar with it, when you're on the path of the beam it's an incredibly long journey. But that doesn't mean we're not going forward with it. It just means it takes time."

There are a lot of reasons for King's excitement; for one, Mike Flanagan has already adapted plenty of King's stories over the years, like "Gerald's Game" and "Doctor Sleep." The latter in particular seemed like a big deal for King, as it was a faithful adaptation of the sequel to "The Shining," and King enjoyed it far more than Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the first book back in 1980. 

"Having watched [Doctor Sleep] it actually warms my feelings up towards the Kubrick film," King explained at the time. "[Flanagan] managed to take my novel of 'Doctor Sleep,' the sequel, and somehow weld it seamlessly to the Kubrick version of 'The Shining,' the movie. So, yeah, I liked it a lot." So hopefully King (and his fans) can rest assured that Flanagan's gonna treat the "Dark Tower" books with the respect they deserve.

Perhaps the main reason for King's anticipation is that the "Dark Tower" book series is easily the most ambitious project of his entire career. It's an epic seven-and-a-half-book saga, one that casually plays around with genre conventions and pushes the limits of what a book series is even allowed to do. The series' constant connections to other King novels, not to mention its growing willingness to break the fourth wall, makes it perhaps the most interesting of all of King's works. It's also the weirdest; the books include a giant evil spider, an evil sex demon, and an evil talking train who somehow got his own children's book based on him in the real world. 

The "Dark Tower" books were rarely instant bestsellers like "Carrie" or "The Shining" were, but King kept coming back to them anyway, and he had a strong, consistent following of fans who were willing to wait decades for the series' conclusion. He's talked a lot over the years about why he enjoyed writing these books so much, and a big part of it is just how much of himself (both literally and figuratively) he included in the story. Speaking of Randall Flag, one of the series' big villains who's also popped up in countless other King novels, King explained in a 2003 interview:

"I've had a lifelong relationship with Randall Flagg; that's right. He's probably all the worst things that are in me. The great thing about writing is that you can do that. You can do all these antisocial things and you get paid for them and nobody ever arrests you because they're all make-believe. Then that way if you were actually ever driven to do any of those things, the pressure's off because you'd have already written them down. It's therapy."

Flagg as a character has only really been portrayed on screen with the adaptations of "The Stand," by Jeremey Sheridan in the '94 miniseries and Alexander Skarsgård in the 2020 one. He's also been portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in 2017's "The Dark Tower," although this was hardly the most faithful depiction of the character. Flanagan's "Dark Tower" adaptation could be mainstream audiences' best chance to get to know one of King's most important characters; fingers crossed that Flanagan can pull the project off.