EXCLUSIVE: Amazon Studios has passed on The Dark Tower pilot. The adaptation of Stephen King’s book came from executive producer/showrunner Glen Mazzara and MRC. The production company is shopping the two original scripts that were the basis for the pilot pickup, sources said.

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The Dark Tower has always been considered very difficult to adapt to the screen, which explains the title’s lengthy road to being made into a feature by Sony and a pilot by Amazon. Largely because of the challenges translating the material, Amazon opted to go with a pilot vs. straight-to-series order, which is rare for a big-scale, big-budget production like The Dark Tower. In the end, I hear Amazon executives felt like the pilot was not on the level of other large-scope elevated genre series the streamer has in production/pre-production like Wheel Of Time and The Lord Of the Rings.

The Dark Tower TV series was designed to be independent from the 2017 film and was meant to be a more faithful retelling of the book than the movie was. It takes place many years before the events depicted in the feature and focused on the origin story of Roland Deschain’s (Sam Strike) – how he first became a gunslinger and got his guns, his first conflict with the man in black (Jasper Pääkkönen), his first love and his first mission as a gunslinger.

The cast of the pilot, which was never officially announced or confirmed, also is believed to have included Michael Rooker, Jerome Flynn and Joana Ribeiro.

King’s eight Dark Tower books draw from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror and Western.