Every once in a while a project arises in Hollywood with the aim of becoming the beginning of a long and lucrative franchise that ends up failing. One of the most prominent in recent years is ‘The Mummy’ and that Dark Universe that finally came to nothing, but today we are going to focus on another case that seemed to have it all in the face and punctured in a big way. I mean ‘The Dark Tower’.
For years, attempts were made to bring to the big screen the saga of novels written by Stephen King. Names as important as JJ Abrams or Ron Howard considered directing them, but the project was finally left in the hands of Nikolay Arcelfilmmaker who had caught the attention of Hollywood thanks to ‘A real affair’, which was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film.
One problem after another
With Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey At the head of the cast, those involved soon began to think about a sequel, but the problems came long before the critics destroyed ‘The Dark Tower’. It was when Arcel presented the first montage that it became clear that things were not working, to the point that the producers seriously considered signing another filmmaker to completely rebuild it.
The idea was discarded because it was going to cost a lot of money, but the test passes that were made were disastrous, so it was invested another 6 million dollars in reshoots. Some new scenes were added and others were removed in order to make it clearer and to better explain the link between the two main characters.
Tensions remained during the editing phase, to the point that many people had a say in different aspects of it. That led to having a movie that barely reaches 90 minutes in length and with holes everywhere, both narratively and visually.
King himself commented months after its premiere that ‘The Dark Tower’ had committed two big mistakes. First “was to make a movie based on a series of books that is really long, over 3,000 pages. The other part was the decision to make a PG-13 film adaptation of books that are extremely violent and deal with violent behavior in a very graphic way”.
All in all, he was not completely unhappy with the result, but by then it seemed impossible that the film would have a sequel. His unquestionable failure at the box office – it cost 66 million dollars and entered 113 – ruled out more deliveries on the big screen, but previously there was talk of a television series that was also going to have Elba and that initially seemed to go ahead.
Elba himself stated shortly after that he did not see anything clear about the future of the series, which was finally left aside. However, everything was tried to resurrect after a short time with another television series that would serve as a reboot and that would have Sam Strike and Jasper Pääkkönen in the lead roles instead of Elba and McConaughey. Amazon was briefly interested in her, but ended up discarding it from her. The franchise had died after languishing for a few years.