Why 'The Dark Tower' movie failed, according to Stephen King

Sony Pictures

Stephen King has had a huge year for adaptations of his written works, with "It" becoming one of the highest-grossing horror movies of all time, and with two Netflix movies ("Gerald's Game" and "1922") still on the way. 

However, one movie, the sci-fi western "The Dark Tower," stands out as an abject critical failure — with a 16% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and King spoke to Vulture about why he thinks the film tanked. 

The 70-year-old author described the difficulty of condensing a book series into a 95-minute film, and referred to the upcoming TV series adaption of "The Dark Tower" as a "complete reboot" of the film:

"The major challenge was to do a film based on a series of books that’s really long, about 3,000 pages. The other part of it was the decision to do a PG-13 feature adaptation of books that are extremely violent and deal with violent behavior in a fairly graphic way. That was something that had to be overcome, although I’ve gotta say, I thought [screenwriter] Akiva Goldsman did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I thought was a pretty good movie. The TV series they’re developing now … we’ll see what happens with that. It would be like a complete reboot, so we’ll just have to see."

Though "The Dark Tower" suffered critical panning, the film did earn an worldwide total of $110.2 million against a $60 million production budget. 

Production for the TV series adaptation of the book is slated to begin in 2018. 

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