It's been an interesting week for Mike Flanagan and his partner Trevor Macy. After the duo announced their Netflix departure, the streaming service announced it was canceling their new series, The Midnight Club, an adaption of the Christopher Pike YA horror book series.

　　However, talking to Deadline about the departure, the duo revealed that they are in the midst of developing a Dark Tower series for Amazon and its Prime Video service, based on the Stephen King fantasy book series. Now, if that project sounds familiar, it's because of a pilot helmed by The Walking Dead's Glen Mazzara, was shot but right before the pandemic hit, it was announced that production was not moving ahead and the pilot remains unaired, offering a huge what could have been scenario. It sounds like Flanagan and Macy had the right pitch idea and vision for the project.

　　“I'm floored by what they did with The Lord of the Rings on a scale that we’ve never gotten close to," Flanagan said. "It represents, I think, a very innovative approach to an iconic IP with the full weight of studio support behind it, their confidence they put in a show, the resources they poured in the show. I think we both find that very exciting because it's long been on our list of goals to try to stretch into some of that event genre space. And that’s something that we're optimistic we may be able to accomplish there."

　　Stephen King's The Dark Tower has been adapted into comics but has never reached the small screen. The duo is planning for a five-season show, in addition to two feature films. Flanagan revealed that he has written a pilot script and season outlines for The Dark Tower, which he has described for years as his "dream project." In the past, he's described how he'd open the movie: a black screen with the words "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed," leading to a landscape with a silhouette in the distance.

　　The Dark Tower has been considered a holy grail property by studios, in the same vein that Lord of The Rings was over 20 years ago when Peter Jackson, coming off of The Frighteners, was announced to run the features. The Dark Tower was made into a movie back in 2017 starring Idris Elba as the Gunslinger Roland, and Matthew McConaughey as the sorcerer Randall Flagg, who went by his alias Walter Padick in this adaption. However, the movie made just over $113 million worldwide with a $66 million budget. It received generally negative reviews, with criticism focused on its compression of the multiple-novel source material into a single film, which muddled the plot for King purists and movie-goers alike.