Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t seen The Dark Tower yet.

The Dark Tower has finally arrived in theaters and … the critics and the box office have not been too kind to it, neither at home nor abroad. While the tepid adaptation of Stephen King‘s vast and beloved mythology wasn’t exactly a bank-buster as far as its rumored $60 million budget is concerned, its inauspicious beginning is already casting doubt on the planned TV and feature franchise. The Dark Tower was supposed to be the foundation, but it looks like it could be crumbling before it even gets built.

Undeterred, Sony’s TV division is at last keeping up appearances when it comes to moving ahead with the series, one that takes inspiration from “Wizard and Glass” and has The Walking Dead‘s Glen Mazzara set as showrunner. Continuing that optimistic line of thought is the film’s director Nikolaj Arcel. CS sat down with Arcel to talk about the ending of The Dark Tower and, if there’s hope for a sequel, what fans might see next. Here’s your final spoiler warning.

On the presumed death of the Man in Black:

I think it’s fair to say that the Man in Black will return, yeah. He’s the main, he’s THE villain. If we had really wanted to kill him off for good, it would’ve been a bigger moment, and I think it was almost like, “Did he die? Did he not?” I don’t know. For me, he certainly didn’t. He is in the later installments of the novels, so yeah.

The Man in Black’s death is rather straight-forward in the film, and there’s no stinger or teasing nod to suggest to non-book readers that he survived a number of well-placed gunshots. However, this is one of the main antagonists of the entire series and he’s one slippery character, so it’s not a stretch for him to survive.

Is there a chance for supporting characters like Jackie Earle Haley‘s Sayre to return?

I think there is a possible future for him. We don’t see him actually die, right? But I think he’s definitely one of those characters that I felt wasn’t a big character in the script, but Jackie, I’ve always loved his work. I just told him, “Listen, it’s not a huge part, but it’s important, you know, a seriously important character.” And he was so game. He was cool. He was just like, “Yeah, I love the character, so let me do it.” But you never know what can happen.

Roland and Jake team up to leave Keystone Earth behind at the end of the film, so where will their adventures take them from there?

I can tell you that you can probably find a lot of that answer in book two, “The Drawing of the Three.” So that’s the best I can do.

Of interest, “The Drawing of the Three” would bring fan-favorite characters Eddie Dean and Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker into the mix, but Jake’s role in the story is much more complicated, at least in the books. Also interesting here is the order of the stories told since the TV series would presumably launch before the movie’s sequel even hits theaters. If the TV show just focuses on the prequel story without much of a frame story, this could still work, but it’s a real reshuffling of things.

As for The Dark Tower, Arcel also revealed the existence of deleted scenes from the film: