Ron Howard Says His Dark Tower Film Should Have Been Horror

– Ron Howard has opened up about his disappointing Dark Tower movie and where it went wrong. Howard spoke with the Happy Sad Confused podcast and reflected on what he probably should have been. Howard told host Josh Horowitz that he believes they learned too hard into trying to make a film the market wanted instead of hewing to the source more closely.

“I think it should’ve been horror,” Howard said. “I think that it landed in a place, both in our minds and the studio’s, that it could be PG-13 and sort of a boy’s adventure. And I really think we made a mistake not — I mean, I’m not sure we could’ve made this movie, but I think if we could’ve made a darker, more hardboiled look and make it the Gunslinger’s character study more than Jake. I think that in retrospect, I think that would’ve been maybe more the exciting — we always felt like we were kind of holding back something. And I think at the end of the day it was that.”

Howard also addressed the plan to do the project as a combination of film and TV, saying, “The other thing might have been to just straight on tackle it as television first, I don’t know. [It was] disappointing, because I poured a lot of myself into it, and sometimes this happens on these projects where everybody [has the] best intentions, you’re all pulling in a direction, and then you sort of say, ‘Was that the right direction?’ And I wouldn’t say it was all a compromise, I do think it was just a sense of maybe you know, too much listening to what you think the marketplace is calling for instead of really the essence of what Stephen King was giving us.”

The Dark Tower film was ultimately a financial failure, failing to recoup production and marketing costs with just $113.2 million worldwide. The TV series is still moving forward, but will be a reboot rather than a continuation of the film.