Dark Tower TV Series: 9 Things It Must Do To Save The Franchise

Making a sequel to a 4,250-page epic comes with its own set of problems, and chief among them is requiring your audience to have done more than a bit of light background reading beforehand.

The Dark Tower film tried to tell its own story, but prior knowledge of the source material, its characters and lore was advised given that it made a pig's ear of that.

Part of the problem was that the movie's promotion campaign offered no clarity on the subject of what Dark Tower even was. At first, it was touted as an adaptation, then teased as a direct sequel when images of the Horn of Eld appeared on social media, but the end product was more of a loosely-inspired reboot.

The TV series needs to make it clear that Wizard and Glass is almost a self-contained story with a clear beginning, middle and end. It's a jumping-on point for fans old and new that will work almost as well for those who didn't see the film.

A straight prequel would allow the show to do this, but if its creative team attempts to reinvent the source material again and splice bits of it together in Frankenstein fashion, it has failure written all over it.