The one movie Ron Howard will always regret: “I think it should have been a horror”
Ron Howard is one of the more accomplished directors and producers knocking around the dark corners of Hollywood. The filmmaker spent his childhood years as a huge star of television before he turned his hand to making motion pictures instead of starring in them. This has developed further in recent years as he has also taken on the producing role for many pictures. But not all of them have been a success.
While horror novelist Stephen King has captured the imaginations of fans all over the world for years now, he has also piqued the interests of many filmmakers – ranging from Brian De Palma to Stanley Kubrick. As a result, there have been many fantastic adaptations based on King’s highly engaging horror stories, but on the flip side, there have also been a lot of duds. The 2017 version of The Dark Tower is definitely among the latter.
The Dark Tower book series is an interesting part of King’s oeuvre because it plays around with several genre frameworks, including sci-fi and fantasy, while also drawing inspiration from westerns. Creating an intertextual network between many of his other fictional creations, The Dark Tower revolves around the allegorical journey of a gunslinger who has to make his way to the titular tower – a destination that takes on added layers of meaning as his adventure progresses.
Directed by Nikolaj Arcel, the 2017 version stars Idris Elba as the gunslinger, while Matthew McConaughey appears as the antagonist, The Man in Black. Despite Elba’s competent performance, the film received widespread criticism for its attempt to fit the narratives of several books into one film. Although the film’s reputation took a serious hit due to backlash from critics and audiences, it managed to gross $113million on its $66million budget.
In an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast, producer Ron Howard explained why the film didn’t work. He said: “I think it should’ve been horror. I think that it landed in a place—both in our minds and the studio’s—that it could be PG-13 and sort of a boy’s adventure… I really think we made a mistake not—I mean, I’m not sure we could’ve made this movie, but I think if we could’ve made a darker, more hard-boiled look and make it The Gunslinger’s character study more than Jake.”
For Howard, that switch in direction would have been the key: “I think, in retrospect, that would’ve been more exciting. We always felt like we were kind of holding back something, and I think at the end of the day, it was that.”
Howard added: “The other thing might’ve been to just straight-on tackle it as television first. Disappointing because I poured a lot of myself into it, and sometimes this happens on these projects where everybody’s best intentions—you’re all pulling in a direction, and then you sort of say, ‘Was that the right direction?’ And I wouldn’t say it was all compromise. I do think it was just a sense of maybe too much listening to what you think that the marketplace is calling for instead of the essence of what Stephen King was giving us.”
Due to these various contradictions and compromises, the 2017 film version inevitably disappointed King’s fans, but there’s a new project on the horizon. According to the latest reports, Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan is currently working on a brand new TV series that will properly explore the nuanced fictional universe of The Dark Tower.
