Mathew McConaughey in 'The Dark Tower.'Image via Sony Pictures
By
Hannah Hunt
Published 34 minutes ago
Back in 2021, Hannah’s love of all things nerdy collided with her passion for writing — and she hasn’t stopped since. She covers pop culture news, writes reviews, and conducts interviews on just about every kind of media imaginable. If she’s not talking about something spooky, she’s talking about gaming, and her favorite moments in anything she’s read, watched, or played are always the scariest ones. For Hannah, nothing beats the thrill of discovering what’s lurking in the shadows or waiting around the corner for its chance to go bump in the night. Once described as “strictly for the sickos,” she considers it the highest of compliments.
Sign in to your Collider account Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recapStephen King adaptations come and go on streaming, but The Dark Tower being set to disappear from Netflix on December 1 hits differently. The film has been mocked and largely forgotten since its 2017 release, yet it remains one of the most fascinating entries in the long and uneven history of bringing King’s imagination to the screen. Netflix cycles titles all the time, but this one is worth flagging before it vanishes. The Dark Tower is not a faithful adaptation, nor is it a definitive version of the saga. What it is, however, is a strange and deeply watchable attempt to translate one of the most notoriously unfilmable stories in modern fiction. That alone makes it a curiosity worth revisiting while it is still easy to stream.
This is also the moment to watch it with fresh eyes. Mike Flanagan is developing a new adaptation that aims to follow the books far more closely, which means the 2017 film is about to become a time capsule for a very specific era of fantasy filmmaking. Before the next version arrives and resets the cultural memory, there is value in seeing how Hollywood once tried to solve the puzzle fans insisted could not be solved in a single movie.
'The Dark Tower' Was Doomed by Expectations, Not Ideas
When The Dark Tower premiered, the pressure on it was enormous. King’s saga is a hybrid of fantasy, horror, western, science fiction, and metaphysical mythmaking, told across eight novels that reshape themselves with every volume. Trying to distill that into a 95-minute film was never going to satisfy readers. The studio approach focused on the blockbuster model. They wanted an accessible introduction and a streamlined way to launch a multiverse without overwhelming newcomers. That combination produced a film caught between eras. At times, it leans into the moody, mythic energy of Roland’s (Idris Elba) story. At others, it shifts into a brisk contemporary adventure aimed at viewers who had never heard of Mid-World. It splices together characters and arcs from several books while rearranging King’s timeline. The studio’s priority was approachability above fidelity.
And yet the movie has an appeal that has grown with time. Elba plays Roland with a gravity that honors the gunslinger’s loneliness and grief. Matthew McConaughey turns the Man in Black into something serpentine and theatrical. Tom Taylor’s Jake anchors the film with unforced earnestness. The result is a movie wrestling with the limits placed upon it. It never achieves the scale it attempts, but it constantly reminds viewers how big that scale could have been. In retrospect, that tension is more interesting than it was in 2017. The film is a mismatched collection of ideas, drawn from one of the richest fantasy worlds King ever built, and watching Hollywood struggle to bottle that lightning has a strange pull.
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Posts 1 By Jeremy Urquhart Feb 17, 2025‘The Dark Tower’ Is the Rare King Adaptation That Improved in Retrospect
Most King adaptations either stick the landing immediately or fade. The Dark Tower has taken a different path. Its reputation has softened because viewers now understand the context surrounding it. Genre storytelling has shifted dramatically since 2017, and studios no longer chase shared universes with the same fervor. Audiences have become more open to complex, layered adaptations. In that landscape, The Dark Tower feels like a relic of a transitional moment, and that actually makes it more compelling. You can see the film trying to serve too many masters. You can see hints of the grimmer, stranger version that might have existed with fewer commercial constraints.
It is also a reminder that fidelity is not the only measure of worth. The film’s action still has a kinetic punch. Its visual language borrows from Sergio Leone westerns, modern fantasy landscapes, and apocalyptic fever dreams. The movie swings big, even when it misses, and that is more interesting than a risk-averse adaptation that never tries.
Watch 'The Dark Tower' Before Flanagan’s Version Arrives and Rewrites the Conversation
Matthew McConaughey in 'The Dark Tower.'Image via Sony Pictures
Flanagan’s upcoming adaptation is generating excitement because it promises the faithfulness many fans wanted the first time. His passion for The Dark Tower is well documented, and his version may become the definitive one. But that makes the 2017 film more important to revisit right now. Once Flanagan’s series arrives, the cultural conversation will shift. Most viewers will treat that as the “real” adaptation. The 2017 film will fade even further into the background. Watching it before December 1 gives you a chance to form your own relationship with this oddity. It offers a warped mirror of what The Dark Tower could be under different creative philosophies. It shows the tension between ambition and compromise and captures actors doing strong work inside a story that cannot contain everything it wants to say. For all its flaws, it never feels lazy. It feels like a movie trying to honor a mythos too big for the box it was placed in.
Netflix losing The Dark Tower is not the end of the world, but it is the end of the easiest window to revisit a misunderstood piece of King history. If you have been curious, now is the time. If you wrote it off, now is the moment to check your memory. And if you are a King fan, consider this the last call. You have until December 1 to revisit The Dark Tower on Netflix. After that, go then — there are other worlds than these.
The Dark Tower
Like PG-13 Fantasy Sci-Fi Horror Release Date August 4, 2017 Runtime 95 Minutes Director Nikolaj Arcel Writers Anders Thomas Jensen, Jeff Pinkner, Nikolaj Arcel, Akiva Goldsman Franchise(s) The Dark TowerCast
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Matthew McConaughey
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Tom Taylor
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