10 Great Movie Ideas Let Down By Their Budget
1. The Dark Tower
The Dark Tower - Stephen King's eight book epic book series following Roland Deschain, the 'gunslinger', on his quest to find The Dark Tower - found itself in developmental hell for years, with everyone from J.J. Abrams to Ron Howard attached to direct the fantasy adventure.
After a near ten year wait for the movie to finally find a home, Nikolaj Arcel was brought in to direct the Sony Pictures project, with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey cast as Roland and the Man in Black, respectively.
The project had cast two stars at the peak of their powers, but in attempting to cram the density and richness of King's world into an unfathomable 95 minute runtime, the film instead opted to use Sony's riskless $66 million budget to create a dull, kid friendly film.
If the studio had invested anywhere near the amount of say a Lord of the Rings ($281 million over three films) and taken more time to bleed out a series that possessed enough visceral brilliance and devout fans to stick around for the duration of the story's arc, it would have at least been better than this poor attempt to throw a project with a bit of money at the wall in the hope it stuck.
The film was panned and now a TV series is in the works. Here's hoping fans finally get the faithful visual realisation of the story they fell in love with all those years ago.