Damon Lindelof leaves Dark Tower project

Since King’s announcement that he’d sold The Dark Tower film rights to J.J. Abram’s for $19, we’ve all been keeping our ears peeled for any news on when filming would begin.

We all heard how Abram and Lindelof we’re excited at the prospect of making the movie and how before they can start work on it they needed to finish the final season of LOST.

So what’s been happening?

Well, in what seems to be a 180° U-turn, Damon Lindelof has announced that he will not be involved in the making of The Dark Tower!

USA Today ran an interview with Damon and the reply on the status of his involvement was;

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a huger fan of The Dark Tower than me, but that’s probably the reason that I shouldn’t be the one to adapt it. After working six years on Lost, the last thing I want to do is spend the next seven years adapting one of my favorite books of all time. I’m such a massive Stephen King fan that I’m terrified of screwing it up.

I’d do anything to see those movies written by someone else. My guess is they will get made because they’re so incredible. But not by me.

That’s a pretty definitive statement, “But not by me”.

So the movie is dead?

Perhaps we shouldn’t give up hope just yet.

Regardless of what all the other websites are saying, it was Damon and not Jeff who said “not by me”. So until we hear from Abrams directly and until he says “not by me” then there’s still a chance he will make the movies.

Whether these two guys are involved or not, Lindelof is right when he says, “…they will get made because they’re so incredible.”

5 responses

Don’t really know what to think of this, I’m sad to hear that it may take a while, but i am a bit relieved that he is out, i never cared much for lost.

Vince – November 11th, 2009
Damon and JJ are already finishing their particular Dark Tower: it’s name is LOST. And this series is a complete copy of the Dark Tower cicle… so why back to this again?

Marcio – November 18th, 2009
Personally, A Dark Tower flim series made by Abrams and Lindelof would be a great thing, we would have to think about the scope of this assignment. While Lost is in its sixth and final season, Abrams and Lindelof have created a something completely new while bringing elements of previous shows and books (like Robinson Crusoe and Survivor) into the show. Making a film adaptation is very difficult considering that fans of The Dark Tower will pay close attention to accuracy to storylines and characters, from the way I’ve seen Abrams and Lindelof produce new shows and movies, they like to change things around and bring some new elements into the storyline. So in other words, while Abrams and Lindelof would make a great team for The Dark Tower Series, they might no be the right fit. Arguably the best book series to film made was The Lord of The Rings Trilogy by Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson took JRR Tolkiens world and put it into 3 very good movies and is still doing it with The Hobbit. While parts of the movie left seemingly important scenes (Tom Bombadil), it was still pretty damn good. So possibly we could leave a huge project like this to someone who has experience in creating vast worlds and characters from just one series of books, Peter Jackson.

Kevin – December 11th, 2009
Listen. If the future producers/creators of a DT movie series want carte blanche all they need to do is show Eld’s Horn with Roland in the first 90 seconds of the first film. The point of the horn’s mention at the end of 7 was to demonstrate the evolution of the story. In other words Roland’s story changes a little ever time he reaches the top. To this extent, they could make the films a trilogy and drop W&G and Wolves entirely.

Book 1 and the first half of 2 as film one, second half of 2 and 3 as film 2, skip W&G and WotC, and combine SofS and DT as film three. Still a daunting task but at least manageable.

Also, I’ve always envisioned the films being almost entirely CGI. The closest idea being Avatar.

Ted – February 24th, 2010
I think that The Dark Tower series would be a fantastic fantasy-movie. I f d o n e r i g h t! In order to make these movies good, you’d have to make them according to the books, for the most part, not adding or removing too much. These books are already very fit for making to a film as they are, because they are so describing about the environments, so you wouldn’t really have to change them a lot. But, it would require a highly dedicated team, that would take the time to make them, and not hurry themselves too much. And it would require a team, that wouldn’t make it into some pop-culture, sell-out crap. Therefore, I think they should use Peter Jackson for this movie.

It can easily be described how I think these movies should be like:

Best case: A lot like Lord of the Rings Worst case: A lot like Harry Potter

A movie told like Harry Potter would be worst-case-scenario, because it is so “compact”. It tries to take all (and I mean all) the events from a book and put them into one single movie without taking the time to tell the story properly. It just (seemingly) jumps randomly from scene to scene, with a sort of hurried attitude. It’s like they wrote all the scenes, and then stuffed them into the film later, not caring for the story itself. If that happened to the Dark Tower-series, it would just be a waste of time and money making the movies.

Therefore, they would need to cut out some stuff from the books, so that it would be a story, and not just an “oh-do-you-remember-this-scene-from-the-book” sort of thing.

Anton – March 1st, 2010