Stephen King adaptations have had a whole lot of success in recent years but 2017’s feature film The Dark Tower is one project that didn’t fare so well, performing quite poorly at the box office and receiving very negative reviews. Ahead of King’s saga now coming to the small screen, producer Ron Howard reflects on the film, admitting it had its fair share of issues.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused Podcast, as reported by Collider, Howard pointed out a few of the mistakes that he blames for tanking the project’s endless potential.
“I think it should’ve been horror,” Howard admitted. “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.”
He continued, “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.”
Speaking with EW in 2017, Stephen King had similarly noted that the studio’s desire to make a tentpole blockbuster resulted in a PG-13 rating, which just wasn’t right for the film.
“The real problem, as far as I’m concerned is, they went into this movie, and I think this was a studio edict pretty much: this is going to be a PG-13 movie,” King had said. “It’s going to be a tentpole movie. We want to make sure that we get people in there from the ages of, let’s say, 12 right on up to whatever the target age is. Let’s say 12 to 35. That’s what we want. So it has to be PG-13, and when they did that I think that they lost a lot of the toughness of it and it became something where… it’s really not anything that we haven’t seen before.”