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Mike Flanagan tends to be the person you call when you want to adapt Stephen King these days. He's done Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game, and the upcoming Life of Chuck starring Tom Hiddleston. However, even the biggest Flanagan fans can't be blamed for being nervous about Flanagan's adaptation of The Dark Tower series in the works. That's not a diss on the Midnight Mass creator at all; it's just that The Dark Tower series has proven itself hard to adapt in the past. But at New York Comic Con 2024, Flanagan himself provided a reason to hope.

Mike Flanagan was a guest on NYCC's Fall of the House of Usher panel, also attended by Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, and Carla Gugino, and hosted by Happy Sad Confused's Josh Horowitz. At just about the half-way point of the panel, host Horowitz asked Flanagan how he captured the scale of The Dark Tower series.

"These are the questions that keep me up at night," Flanagan began, "I think the only way to do it is, you just do the books."

I gotta say, The Dark Tower fans in the room seemed to like that response. But exactly what did the Doctor Sleep director mean by that?

"The thing about The Dark Tower that's so incredible," he says, "is that Stephen King builds an astonishing universe that's huge and is populated by such a richness of characters and scale... eventually. But he starts that story with one person following another person in a barren desert. It's one of the greatest opening lines to a novel of all time."

In case you need to know, that famous line is, "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Chills, right?

"And that's how you do it," Flanagan continues, "You start with two people in that simple story. One is trying to catch the other; that's it. And everything else is gradually added to it. That's how you do The Dark Tower; you build it one brick at a time. I understand the gravity of it has pulled people into, 'Oh, let's jump in at the middle,' or we try to jump ahead to show the scale of this thing. But you can't start with that." 

"Fortunately," Flanagan concludes, "Stephen King is a master storyteller who has constructed a magnum opus, an epic that begins very intimately and ends very intimately, even though its set in this gigantic world. I think that's how you get into it. So that's what we're gonna do."

Sounds like you've got a handle on it, Mike. We never doubted you.

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