The Dark Tower

Read some of the harshest reviews of the long-awaited attempt to turn Stephen King’s epic fantasy series into a big-screen franchise.

No, Frank Darabont is not taking aim at another Stephen King property, but close! The Dark Tower TV series is moving forward despite troubling reviews for the film, setting The Walking Dead’s second showrunner, Glen Mazzara, to run point.

The years-in-the-making adaptation of Stephen King’s epic fantasy series finally comes to the screen. But was it worth the wait?

This week’s The Dark Tower starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey is the first big-budget adaptation of a Stephen King novel in a while, but King’s books and short stories have inspired more than 30 years of great horror, sci-fi, and drama films. Even as The Dark Tower is designed to launch a new franchise based on King’s epic fantasy series, the film is littered with references, homages, and Easter eggs to previous King novels - and to the movies they spawned. In this new video from ScreenCrush’s Britt Hayes and Ryan Arey, we connect all the dots between The Dark Tower and the long history of Stephen King cinema.

Something fishy is going on with the two Stephen King movies coming out this year. At least, their runtimes aren’t exactly what you’d expect. It was recently revealed that The Dark Tower clocks in at a lean 95 minutes long, and now we’re hearing that Andres Muschietti’s It is considerably longer than two hours: approximately 135 minutes.

The Dark Tower, oddly enough, is not the 2.5-hour fantasy epic most people were expecting it to be when the movie version was announced. When news broke earlier this week that the movie is only 95 minutes long, we all kinda raised a brow (even though, given the modern blockbuster era’s love of movies that are way too long, the public now breathes a sigh of relief at anything under two hours). But director Nikolaj Arcel recently spoke about why his movie is so lean, and it makes a lot of sense.

When a big studio tentpole comes out, it’s common practice for the personnel involved to take their next jobs around the same time, riding the crest of publicity generated by the release. Usually, the offers start coming in shortly after the film in question hits theaters and proves successful or less-so, and the news will follow that. But when, say, the director of the upcoming Dark Tower adaptation signs a deal for his next project weeks in advance of his big premiere, it’s a sign foretelling one of two things. It’s either so good that a studio made him an offer too appealing to pass up, or so bad that he just wants to sign a contract before word gets out.

With movies seemingly getting longer by the second after Michael Bay and his ilk ushered in a new and exhausting runtime era, lights in the bloated darkness can come from the most unexpected of places. The Dark Tower, for example, is only 95 minutes long — for those of you who, like me, don’t understand what that means unless it’s in hours, that equates to an hour and 35 minutes. Which is less than two hours!

You know Stephen King as one of the world’s most prolific and beloved fiction authors. But did you know King spent years writing books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and that several of “Bachman”s stories have been adapted to the screen too? That list includes the likes of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man. That’s just one of the facts featured in the latest installment of You Think You Know Movies!

The world approaches a great cataclysm in the latest trailer for the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s fantasy novel The Dark Tower, but the specific nature of that cosmic upheaval, I know not what. Not having read the source novel, I’ve decided to go into the film cold when it premieres on August 4, and so far, I’ve done a pretty solid job of keeping myself unsullied by plot revelations. The new international trailer does me a favor, too, by playing all of its details of plot close to the vest. There’s a whole lot of ominous talking, stars Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey appear to have some manner of beef that could decide the fate of the known universe, but beyond that, I’m in the dark (tower).