History of Stephen King's The Dark Tower

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" … but, boy, did it take a while for the Gunslinger to find his way to the big screen. The Dark Tower has been a monumental effort of will, both for author Stephen King and for filmmakers.

King started his epic in 1970, inspired by his love of movies. Staring up at Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, the writer realized what he wanted to do: He'd combine these gunslingers with the weird tone of the novels he'd been reading and re-reading -- J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

However, he didn't so much burn through the first novel, The Gunslinger, as crawl. "The Gunslinger," the first section of the eponymous novel, was completed about eight years after King began it. The second section, "The Way Station," was published two years after the first. All told, it took King 12 years to finish the first novel in the saga. The next installments didn't come much faster. He continued at a glacial pace, writing one novel every five years, which might be normal for other novelists, but for King, who publishes at least one book a year, it was certainly out of the ordinary.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s, shortly after King was struck by a car while walking down the road, that he decided to put his head down and finish The Dark Tower, knocking out the fifth and sixth book in one year, and the seventh the next.

But if the journey of The Dark Tower took a long time in book form, the road to theaters proved even more arduous. Development of an adaptation began more than a decade ago, initially with J.J. Abrams (Mission: Impossible, Lost) attached to produce and direct. However, by 2009 the project had stalled. In April 2010, Oscar winner Ron Howard emerged to spearhead an ambitious adaptation of King's epic, one that called for a film trilogy, with interlocking television miniseries.

Although The Dark Tower seemed to speeding along, with Javier Bardem closing in on the starring role as Roland Deschain, the Gunslinger was soon confronted by an opponent more fearsome than the Man in Black: "budgetary complications" that led Universal Pictures to first delay development and then, in 2013, withdraw from The Dark Tower entirely, forcing Howard's Imagine Entertainment to search for a new home for the project. By April 2015, it had landed at Sony Pictures, and soon after found a director in Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair).

More than two years later, The Dark Tower is at last arriving in theaters, with Howard still producing, a connective TV series still in play, and Idris Elba starring as the Gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey as the villainous Man in Black. Now fans can finally journey back to the Tower.

Of course, a lot of us -- including King himself -- never actually left it.

Even after the release in 2004 of Book Seven, titled simply The Dark Tower, King continued writing in that world. He published another novel eight years later called The Wind Through the Keyhole, which function as Book 4.5. In addition, he's served as creative director of the prequel comics published by Marvel telling the untold tales of the Gunslinger and his world. But more than that, virtually every story he writes continues the narrative of the Gunslinger.

Its roots have spread so wide that they even encompass your world -- yes, you, reading this. You’re a part of The Dark Tower mythos as well. After King was seriously injured in 1999, he wrote the accident into his series as a bit of dark magic intended to keep him from finishing the story. He became a character who saved the heroes during one moment by leaving an author’s note in the bathroom of a villain’s house; he wove his world and life into the narrative of The Dark Tower.

Of course, that isn’t anything new. King has been incorporating worlds into The Dark Tower forever. IT, Cujo, Salem’s Lot and more are connected to his universe. Heck, the Man in Black, played Matthew McConoughey in the new film, is also Randal Flagg, the villain of The Stand.

Almost all of King’s works are one -- and that one is the Tower. That’s because, in the series, The Dark Tower is the linchpin of all possible realities -- and there are endless ones. It’s the thing that holds everything together, and if it falls, so does everything else. Using that concept, he can add characters from any world.

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The Dark Tower is a Weird, Convoluted Mess - And That's Fine!

It’s not only King's own stories that he brings in, either. He does it most prominently in Wolves of the Calha, the book that has Harry Potter’s sneetches (by name!), lightsabers, doombots and flying broomsticks. However, he did it before then, too. Half of Book Four, Wizard and Glass, takes place in a ruined realm, explicitly the world of The Stand, and the second half takes place in Oz.

King, in writing his opus about all of reality, has brought all stories into it -- his own, most often, but others as well. He created a shared universe of all of fiction. And, of course, of our world as well. Heck, even this new adaptation has a part to play in the story of The Dark Tower, being not a direct adaptation but a sequel.

Oh, yes, his books ended with this new movie being perfectly set up as a sequel. As a matter of fact, without the movie, the series still wouldn’t actually have an ending. Without getting too spoilery, at the end of Roland’s journey in The Dark Tower there was yet another task left undone, and this film will deal with him finishing that, once and for all.

The series is a weird, convoluted mess, but now is the time for that. Audiences are demonstrating more that hey’re ready to be challenged. Twin Peaks is back and more esoteric than ever, The Leftovers is a critical darling that left more questions than answers, and shared cinematic universes are all the rage. If ever there was a time for a The Dark Tower movie, it's now.

While reality and other fiction are added into King's stories, the ones he draws from most heavily are other things he’s written. For instance, in The Dark Tower there’s a character from his somewhat-forgotten Insomnia, the broken priest from Salem’s Lot makes a major return, and even IT gets a heavy reference. With all of those Easter eggs and appearances of other characters, the new adaptation/sequel is looking more and more like a cinematic universe. And why not? Everyone else is doing it, and King’s stories have as much cross-continuity as any Marvel comic. Heck, it seems almost impossible for the series to not deal with at least some crossovers given that the ending of the series pits the Gunslinger against a character from another book.

But of course that isn’t actually the ending. This series -- this film and its television series -- will be the actual ending, which makes the weight it must bear even greater. Unlike other adaptations that can be easily ignored or forgotten, The Dark Tower is an integral piece of the saga, being the only sequel to the events of the bookss. Due to the overtly meta nature of the series, having the films fail would most likely mean the end of the story … forever.

Who knows what will happen when we sit in the theater, the darkness rising as Idris Elba’s face fills the screen -- just as wild and proud as Clint Eastwood’s in King’s college days. Who knows what stories will be born, or end?

Opening Friday nationwide, The Dark Tower also stars Abbey Lee, Katheryn Winnick, Fran Kranz, Claudia Kim and Jackie Earle Haley.