10 Things The Dark Tower Movie Should Have Done Differently
8. An R Rating
R-rated blockbusters are in fashion these days. People like their heroes edgy with a side helping of hard-boiled grit, but the latest Hollywood trends have nothing to do with why The Dark Tower needed this certificate.
The movie we got was a tonal misfire which replaced the darkness of the novels with an atmosphere more befitting of superhero fodder, for the most part.
For all of its efforts to meld genres together, a PG-13 Dark Tower was never going to capture the horror undercurrents and adult overtones of Stephen King's books.
If Sony had any ambition to reflect the novels in its adaptation, they would have slapped it with at least a 15. There's a scene several pages into the first book where Roland bloodily guns down an entire town, and later in the series, readers are introduced to a New York diner where vampires chow down on human infants.
That's the source material The Dark Tower was dealing with, so going PG-13 was only ever going to force the director to pull punches when bringing it to screen.