Glen Mazzara Reveals His Plans for The Dark Tower’s Cancelled Series
Back in January, Amazon abandoned its live-action adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. However, that hasn’t stopped showrunner Glen Mazzara from sharing his plans for what could have been. Via SlashFilm, Mazzara expanded on his ideas for the show during a guest appearance on The Kingcast podcast. Additionally, Mazzara noted that the box office failure of The Dark Tower film gave him the chance to draw from all of the novels.
“When we realized that the [film] franchise was not viable, or not going to continue, we decided we could now lay out the entire epic,” said Mazzara. “Now we had a choice: do we go back and start with The Gunslinger? Do you start and tell the story in a linear way and then interrupt that narrative and have this large cutaway in your season 4 or season 5 to Wizard and Glass? That’s a viable option.”
Mazzara also noted that he and the other writers ultimately decided to start the series with the fourth book, Wizard and Glass. That would have allowed the first two seasons to focus on a younger Roland Deschain before the events of the first novel.
RELATED: Glen Mazzara Hired To Produce The Dark Tower Series
Apparently, Mazzara had already planned a few seasons ahead, and he revealed that the first season would have ended with the death of Roland’s love, Susan Delgado.
“If season 1 ended with the death of Susan…I felt that I needed a season to give me real estate so that [the death of Roland’s mother, Gabrielle] didn’t step on Susan’s and that it felt like an escalation,” said Mazzara. “Roland fails to save Susan, but he actually shoots and kills his mother. In the book, Gabrielle is not really a detailed character in a way that, say, Susan is…Gabrielle is really not fleshed out. She just doesn’t have as many pages attributed to her. I love that character. The actress we had for her was Elaine Cassidy, a fantastic Irish actress, and she did a really great job. So for season 2…[we were] maybe going to use the shapeshifter story [from Wind Through the Keyhole] as part of season 2 and get to the death of Gabrielle and either the fall of Gilead there or the fall of Gilead would be the season three premiere.”
While Amazon passed on The Dark Tower, there is still a chance that the series could find another home elsewhere.
Are you intrigued by Mazzara’s plans for The Dark Tower? Let us know in the comment section below!
Recommended Reading: The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
