By Anyone who saw The Dark Tower made a poor choice in seeing a movie. If you were a fan of Stephen King’s book series you were nothing but let down and if you weren’t then you just saw a rushed, uninteresting film that made little sense. Producers and directors know when they make a bad movie but he rarely admit what is at fault Ron Howard did on the latest Happy Sad Confused podcast.
“I think it should’ve been horror. 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… 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 hard-boiled look and make it The Gunslinger’s character study more than Jake. I think in retrospect that would’ve been more exciting. We always felt like we were kind of holding back something, and I think at the end of the day it was that.”
You think the film based on an incredibly weird, slightly disturbing book by an author known for his horror about a cowboy named Roland who finds a child in the middle of a desert and then basically encounters a bunch of cave dwelling monsters should have been horror? You don’t say. You also think you should have made it about the super cool cowboy/knight guy and not about the annoying kid? Revelations, Ron! True revelations.
Obviously, Howard might not have even been able to get the movie he wanted made ever made anyway. For a studio, the film he’s describing is really scary and no guarantee of a blockbuster. Remember the film came out before IT was such a major hit, and one can’t help but wonder if they’d waited just a little longer after waiting so long already if they could have made the movie Howard describes above and maybe we’d be in the original cinematic universe that was envisioned when he started planning this whole thing. The director lamented the loss of the franchise on the whole even though the TV show is still in the works.
“The other thing might’ve been to just straight-on tackle it as television first. Disappointing because I poured a lot of myself into it, and sometimes this happens on these projects where everybody’s 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 compromise. I do think it was just a sense of maybe too much listening to what you think that the marketplace is calling for instead of the essence of what Stephen King was giving us.”
What studios think the marketplace is calling for is almost always wrong. They routinely pump out copy and paste movies because something worked once one time and then turn and looked shocked when original content (outside of Disney) does stunningly well. Listen to your heart, Ron Howard.
Ron Howard Admits Mistakes in ‘The Dark Tower’ Adaptation [Collider]
