10 Stephen King Adaptations The Author HATES

For years it was the project on the top of any King fan's adaptation wish list: an epic fantasy western spread across eight novels and with a web of connections to many of the writer's most beloved other works. But nevertheless The Dark Tower movie came and went in 2017 with barely a flicker of audience or critical interest.

At the time, King had nothing but praise for the efforts of director Nikolaj Arcel and writer Akiva Goldsman, suggesting that its only flaw was that perhaps the series was just too complex to condense into a movie.

By the time of an interview with Entertainment Weekly at the end of that year, however, he had some less positive things to say about the whole experience.

King complained about the "studio edict" from Warner Bros. that The Dark Tower be a PG-13 blockbuster tentpole. "When they did that I think that they lost a lot of the toughness of it ," he said, "and it became something where people went to it and said: Well yeah, but it’s really not anything that we haven’t seen before."

King went on to highlight how he had advised the team behind the movie against starting in the middle of the story, but that trying to prevent this potentially confusing storytelling choice was "a little bit like hitting your fist against hard rubber, you know? It doesn’t really hurt, but you don’t get anywhere. It just sort of bounces back."

The Dark Tower, however, shows no sign of bouncing back itself, as Amazon recently canned the proposed TV adaptation.