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Mike Flanagan first announced he’d be adapting Stephen King’s fantasy series “The Dark Tower” back in December 2022, but there have been precious few updates on the project since. Concerning fans further is that Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation, his 8-episode miniseries “Carrie,” was announced in 2025 and already releases on October 7, 2026. Why did Flanagan finish “Carrie” so quickly while so little progress on “The Dark Tower” seems to have been made?
In a recent interview with ScreenRant, Flanagan explained that a big issue with making “The Dark Tower” for Amazon is the complicated rights situation. “‘Dark Tower’ takes, and I’m not exaggerating, more than a calendar year just to move rights around because it involves so many other studios and so many characters who were spread out all over town,” Flanagan said.
As many of King’s readers already know, “The Dark Tower” is a series filled with references to other King novels, many of which have been adapted by other film studios or TV networks. The fifth book heavily features Father Callahan, a “‘Salem’s Lot” character most recently seen on screen in the 2024 HBO Max adaptation.
Carrie was Amazon’s first priority, not The Dark Tower
“[The series] moves at its own pace for all these factors that have nothing to do with me or the story or anything,” Flanagan explained further. “The legal logistics of that thing are beyond intimidating. It’s a wild thing. But yeah, one of these days.”
Flanagan also revealed that, although Amazon greenlit his “Dark Tower” adaptation early on, it was the not the Stephen King adaptation they were most excited for. “Amazon, very quickly, when I got to the company, already had ‘Carrie’ in mind,” Flanagan explained. “Carrie,” an early King novel of only around 200 pages, was a fairly small-scale project in comparison.
With the production of “Carrie” now wrapped up, Flanagan still hasn’t provided an expected timeline for when “The Dark Tower” will release on Prime Video, but he has assured fans the project has not been forgotten about: “We’re still pushing forward. It’s an oil tanker of a project,” he said. With eight books to adapt, the “Dark Tower” series could very well be the hardest, most time-consuming adaptation Flanagan will ever work on, but he’s declared himself up to the challenge. “It’s my dream adaptation.”
This story originally appeared on TVLine
