The road to “The Dark Tower” has been just as epic as the saga itself.

Mike Flanagan’s The Dark Tower TV series still ‘very much on the table’ — here’s where it stands (exclusive)

The road to “The Dark Tower” has been just as epic as the saga itself.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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September 15, 2026 2:30 p.m. ET

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Mike Flanagan’s ‘The Dark Tower’ TV series still ‘very much on the table’. Credit:

Manny Carabel/Getty; Scribner

- Mike Flanagan explains the state of his *The Dark Tower* TV series.

- The title is still “very much on the table,” he tells EW.

- He explains the “epic” development process: “To do it the way I wanna do it requires an enormous commitment from a studio.”

Amazon’s announcement of a *Carrie* TV series from Mike Flanagan (*The Haunting of Hill House*, *Midnight Mass*) came as a surprise to the “Flans,” those who closely followed his ascent through the business as a horror hit-maker.

For years, Flanagan seemed far more interested in getting another Stephen King adaptation off the ground: a long-brewing idea for a television epic based on *The Dark Tower* book series. That, the showrunner vows, is still “very much on the table” but lays out the clear challenges with making that a reality.

King’s saga — a Western-fused fantasy-horror about gunslinger Roland Deschain, his cat-and-mouse game with sly sorcerer Randall Flagg, and his mission to find the titular Dark Tower, a nexus point for the author’s multiverse — spans eight novels, beginning with 1982’s *The Gunslinger*, plus a couple literary offshoots.

Adapting this expansive story still proves to be a head-scratcher for Hollywood. The only effort that made it to the screen, 2017’s truncated feature film with Idris Elba as Roland and Matthew McConaughey as Flagg, didn’t quite hit. The size, scope, and, candidly, the expense of pulling it off are all puzzles that Flanagan still has to solve.

“To do it the way I wanna do it requires an enormous commitment from a studio,” he tells ** during an interview for our latest digital cover story on his upcoming *Carrie* adaptation. Then there are the rights to consider. Whilst Flanagan was at Netflix, the streamer spent “a year and a half” working out the kinks, he says. “It didn’t make it easier by moving to Amazon.”

Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey in ‘The Dark Tower’ (2017).

Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures

In a splashy move, Flanagan made Amazon his new streaming home in 2022 with an overall TV deal, after spending years making hits for Netflix. A visual timeline exists inside the “Flanaplex,” his nickname for his home theater in Los Angeles, filled with relics like the Bent-Neck Lady costume and Red Room door from *The Haunting of Hill House*, as well as Samantha Sloyan and Hamish Linklater’s religious garb from vampire miniseries *Midnight Mass*. Despite what it may have looked like from the outside, Flanagan calls the jump to Amazon all “pretty copacetic” for everyone involved, including Netflix.

He credits much of that deal to the shifting dynamics of the business, which includes changes in executive regimes and mandates. “My time at Netflix yielded some incredible work,” he says. “Hollywood was different on the other side of that deal. Everything, the whole world was different. Streaming was different. Overall deals were different.” Amazon, he says, became a way “to start a new chapter.”

As it happened, his new bosses already tried their hand at *The Dark Tower*, with a take from Glen Mazzara (*The Walking Dead*). They went as far as filming a pilot, but it was not picked up.

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Flanagan’s main struggles now are the rights. “The way the *Dark Tower* universe is connected, you’ve got characters in there that are all over the place when it comes to studio ownership,” he explains. “So the development process on it has been epic. It, of course, has taken much longer than I’d like it to, but I work on it all the time. It’s never stopped moving. It just moves at its own oil-tanker pace.”

However, Amazon already had a show in mind for Flanagan’s kickoff project: *Carrie*.

Summer H. Howell as Carrie White on ‘Carrie’.

Summer H. Howell (*Hunter Hunter*, *Spirit in the Blood*) stars as the titular teenage girl with telekinetic powers. In a true reimagining of King’s first full-length novel of 1974, this Carrie White enters public school for the first time, full of optimism and eagerness to experience the world. But her inherent kindness makes her a target for online bullying as a series of events — beginning with a scarring moment around her first period in the locker room — leads to the tragic events of prom night, when Carrie unleashes her psychic powers on her tormenters.

The eight-episode first season will premiere on Oct. 7 on Prime Video.

“*The Dark Tower*’s big,” Flanagan says. And along with another fantasy property he’s cooking up, *Warhammer 40k* with Henry Cavill, “Those will take their own time and they set their own schedule,” he adds.

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Given the nature of *The Dark Tower* and the interconnected realities of King’s works, could *Carrie* maybe one day turn into a backdoor to that show? “I may have asked this very question several times along the way,” Flanagan admits. “It’s certainly not impossible. There are characters in the *Tower* canon who would serve a very specific purpose in that story, who audiences wouldn’t necessarily recognize because they only exist in certain books.”

*Insomnia*, King’s 1994 tie-in, is one title that comes to mind. “Carrie White could achieve the same narrative purpose pretty cleanly,” he continues. “You could say the same, though, of Abra Stone [from *Doctor Sleep*], you could say the same about Danny Torrance [from *The Shining*]. How the various Stephen King worlds can connect is always on my mind.”

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Source: “EW Sci-Fi”