While IT is breaking box office records, it's easy to forget that it was barely more than a month ago that another Stephen King story was adapted for the screen, that wasn't received nearly as well. The Dark Tower was the first in, what was designed to be, a massive media franchise crossing film and television, but all that was put into question after the movie failed to find an audience. While the reviews were far from kind, star Idris Elba really doesn't give a damn. In his words...
Ultimately, everyone has an opinion and that's okay... Until one of the reviewers that had something to say adapts it and does a great job, well I don't want to hear what they have to say.
Idris Elba clearly has little time to dwell on the negative word of mouth that The Dark Tower had to deal with. It's absolutely true that few of the reviewers found much to like about the adaptation of Stephen King's magnum opus. However, Elba's comments to Mashable show that he appreciates the hard work that went into making the movie and he's not so sure anybody else, including the reviewers who bashed the film, would have done a better job.
Idris Elba makes a point to say that Stephen King's Dark Tower is such a massive piece of literature that it's a difficult work to adapt. He seems to be saying that he thinks the team that put together the recent movie did about as good a job as can be expected. The thing is, he may not be wrong. The Dark Tower series is seven books of utter insanity. It goes so many bizarre places that trying to do a faithful adaptation of the series might actually be impossible.
It also needs to be said, and I say this as a fan, the first book is pretty dull. Doing a direct adaptation of that story specifically would be incredibly difficult to do in a way that's going to keep the attention of a mass movie audience, and ultimately, a movie that's going to be as big as The Dark Tower would need to be overall, would need to capture that audience. That first book needs to be part of the story, but really it only exists to set up what comes after.
The film tried to overcome this issue by making a movie that was designed as a sort of sequel to the book series rather than a straight adaptation. However, doing so changed so much of the material that Stephen King's Tower Junkies ended up finding characters that were not the ones they knew from the books. It may have been difficult for fans to embrace them because of these changes.
From here, the focus shifts to the planned Dark Tower TV series which seems to be moving forward even following the film's lukewarm reception.
