Mike Flanagan Developing Dark Tower Series

The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass creator Mike Flanagan is working to bring The Dark Tower back to life, developing a new TV project based on the property. Flanagan revealed in an interview with Deadline that he and his Intrepid Pictures partner Trevor Macy, who have left Netflix for Amazon Studios, are developing an ambitious take on the best-selling Stephen King novels.

Flanagan noted that the two acquired the rights to Dark Tower “predating” the deal with Amazon, noting, “if you know anything about me, you know it has been my Holy Grail of a project for most of my life. We actually have those rights carved out of our Amazon deal, which doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t get behind it at some point — you don’t know. But that’s something we’ve been developing ourselves and are really passionate about finally getting it up on its feet at some point.”

The Dark Tower was previously brought to life in a film from Sony Pictures that starred Idris Elba as Roland and Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black. The film was not well-received and had a disappointing gross, which led to planned sequels and an integrated TV project being cancelled. Flanagan noted that he has written a pilot script and season outlines for the series, which he envisions as potentially five seasons and two follow-up feature films, though he said he didn’t want “to put the cart too far ahead of the horse on such a challenging project.” He added that he’s spoken with King about it, noting:

“This happened because I sent him a very, very detailed outline of what I wanted to do with it. And it was in response to that, that he gave us the rights. A project like this, I wouldn’t want to be involved in it at all If we were taking it in a direction that was going to be blasphemous to the Stephen King material, but he’s been very, very supportive and very excited about what we’d like to do with it.”

Intrepid was previously under a deal with Netflix, where they produced The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club, with one more project still to be released in the modern adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.