Saddle up, Dark Tower nerds. Just when you thought we were out, they're pulling us back in.
It's been roughly two years since the arrival of Sony's feature film adaptation of The Dark Tower, a film so disastrous that most of you probably assumed the property was well and truly dead. In the time since, there have been rumblings about the future of the series - possibly another book, possibly a series adaptation - but none of those rumors amounted to much. In fact, you may've even assumed all this rumormongering was all just wishful thinking.
The truth is, Amazon's been quietly tinkering away at series adaptation of The Dark Tower for some time. The entire project's being spearheaded by Glen Mazzara, former executive producer and showrunner (respectively) on The Shield and The Walking Dead. Scripts have been written. Big choices have been made. And today, Variety made it official: Amazon has hired relative unknowns Sam Strike and Jasper Pääkkönen to headline the series pilot. Should that pilot prove attractive to Amazon executives, well, we'll have ourselves a Dark Tower TV series.
Here's what I can tell you: Strike's playing the Gunslinger, Roland Deschain, while Pääkkönen will be playing Randall Flagg, otherwise known as the Man In Black.
Here's what they look like.
First up: Sam Strike. Dude's just 25 years old, and white, which is your first indication that this is very much not a spin-off of Sony's Dark Tower movie.
The fact that Jasper Pääkkönen is not Matthew McConaughey (to our knowledge) is further evidence that Amazon's Dark Tower isn't a spin-off, or prequel, or whatever.
This is, in fact, more an adaptation of the fourth book in the Dark Tower saga, Wizard and Glass. This isn't to say that the Dark Tower pilot won't feature familiar elements from elsewhere in the Dark Tower series; I'm just telling you not to expect a series that follows King's work chronologically.
We don't know who'll direct the pilot (though I can tell you Mazzara wrote the script) or when shooting may commence, or when it might pop up on Amazon. But rest assured that I'll be keeping you up to date on all the goings-on in Dark Tower Land. I know we've been through this whole thing once before (Ka is a wheel, after all), but this time I think they're doing it right.
Stay tuned.