1. The Dark Tower (1982-2012)
Why It Should Be A Movie... What is often considered to be King's magnus opus, a gargantuan work, decades in the writing, is arguably his best and most accomplished venture, and one that perhaps best emphasises the author working at the peak of his creative powers, combining elements, characters, stories, ideas and concepts from a whole host of his other novels, and making it work as a sprawling narrative in its own right. Simply put, this is Stephen King's most Stephen King-like endeavour, an epic fantasy series that merges his influences and plays tribute to the idea of us, his Constant Readers. It's a series written entirely for King fans. The plot, which sounds simple at first, concerns a gunslinger whose destiny is to catch a mysterious man in black. But King uses this as starting-off point for a winding epic that unfolds dramatically over eight great books.
Why It Never Will Be... It's far too big. It's too big and too inherently risky for any major studio to undertake as a project, made especially true by the fact that this is arguably only accessible in its truest form to hardcore King fans, and because it doesn't have a young adult appeal in the same way that
Harry Potter and
The Hunger Games do. Fact is, to do this properly, in the way we all want it to be done, we're potentially talking billions and billions of dollars. There's no point making it to TV movie standard, after all. Recently, back in May 2013, it came closer than ever to being realised by Warner Bros., who passed on at the last minute. The risk, it seems, is too high.
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