The Dark Tower Movie "May Upset Some Fans A Little Bit"
Stephen King warns the movie will deviate from the book.
The long-anticipated big screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower is at last underway - but the author already seems to be on damage control duty.
Any adaptation of a treasured text faces significant challenges. This is particularly true when taking on so vast a narrative as The Dark Tower - spread out over eight genre-blending novels, published over the course of 30 years.
This, it seems, may have called for some creative reinterpretation on the part of the filmmakers - and King himself seems at ease with that, although he's not unreasonably concerned that some fans will feel differently.
Speaking on an Entertainment Weekly podcast, King says there are some places where he has insisted on strict loyalty to his first Dark Tower book, The Gunslinger:
"I expect that the movie will start where the books start. Y'know, "The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed"... I've been pretty insistent on that, and I think everyone's onboard with it."
Beyond this, however, the movie will take some liberties with the chronology.
"It starts sort of in medias res, in the middle of the story instead of at the beginning, which may upset some of the fans a little bit. But they will get behind it, because it is the story."
It's sad but understandable that King feels the need to warn fans in this manner. Recent history has shown time and again in the recent past just how loudly fandom can throw all its toys out of the pram if something happens they don't like.
The Dark Tower has already experienced a degree of this, thanks to the casting of Idris Elba in the lead role of Roland Deschain - this despite King's endorsement of the casting, and his insistence that the character's ethnicity is never specified in the books.
Let's just hope this isn't the start of a bad buzz for the in-production movie from director Nikolaj Arcel, with supporting cast including Abby Lee, Jackie Earle Haley, Katheryn Winnick and Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey.