After many years, and many attempts, a film version of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is finally getting underway with Idris Elba as the gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey as the mystical foe known as the man in black.
The Dark Tower movie is being adapted from a series of books written by Stephen King, which incorporates themes from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror, and Western. It describes a "gunslinger" and his quest toward a tower, the nature of which is both physical and metaphorical. King has described the series as his magnum opus. In addition to the eight novels of the series proper that comprise 4,250 pages, many of King's other books relate to the story, introducing concepts and characters that come into play as the series progresses. A series of prequel comics followed the completion of the novels.
The series was chiefly inspired by the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning, whose full text was included in the final volume's appendix. In the preface to the revised 2003 edition of The Gunslinger, King also identifies The Lord of the Rings, Arthurian Legend, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as inspirations. He identifies Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" character as one of the major inspirations for the protagonist, Roland Deschain. King's style of location names in the series, such as Mid-World, and his development of a unique language abstract to our own (High Speech), are also influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien's work.
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