It seems like people have been trying to turn Stephen King’s Dark Tower series into a movie for decades—and they probably have, at least on different levels of reality—but now director Nikolaj Arcel is actually making it happen. Seriously, there are set photos and everything. It’s really happening for real.
Of course, when a project has been in the works for as long as The Dark Tower has, it’s easy for the hype machine to get a little carried away and let people’s expectations get too high. From there, it’s also easy for that hype to swing back around to the internet’s traditionally cynical outlook. Obviously, it’s too early to say whether or not Arcel’s movie will be a worthy adaptation of King’s sprawling epic, but at the very least, star Idris Elba seems to be doing his best to keep fans on the optimistic side of things.
First there was this Twitter exchange Elba had with Matthew McConaughey—who is playing the villainous Man In Black—that was a specific nod to the first book’s opening line (“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”):