Finally, there’s some news regarding the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. It isn’t negative news, either, like another delay announced for the release date (something that has happened twice already). Instead, it’s good news about the Dark Tower trailer. Best of all, it comes from an extremely reliable source — the executive assistant to Stephen King himself.
Stephen King fans have been freaking out about the movie adaptation recently. When the movie was announced last year, a release date of February, 2017, was set. As the date drew nearer, a delay was announced: the movie would instead debut in July. maybe the post-production team just needed a bit more time than they had initially anticipated to nail down Stephen King’s vision. Then, in March, the release was knocked back a second time, this time to August. At that point, all they had seen were a few set photos and a Dark Tower poster, and fans started to get seriously worried. And add to that fact that we have not even seen a trailer for the film yet, even now? That’s legitimately worrisome.
Making the wait for a real glimpse of the film even more anxiety-inducing, at least for Stephen King fans, is that the Dark Tower series of novels is an extremely important part of the author’s body of work. The writing of the seven novels spans 38 years of Stephen King’s life and weighs in at 4,250 pages. In short, the series is the center of the Stephen King universe, and a lot of people have been dreaming of a Dark Tower movie for a long time.
Since the pushback to August was announced a month ago, there has been absolutely no word about the movie. No stills from the set, no posters released online, nothing. Until the other day.
Yesterday afternoon, the moderator of an official message board on Stephen King’s website gave a reply to an inquiry about the movie that made Stephen King fans sit up and listen.
“I wonder why it takes so long for a trailer to be released,” wrote the commenter. “It’s about three months now til release and still we’ve had no trailer. I suppose it takes them long to finish the visual effects, as a lot of that was clearly missing in the leaked trailer. Won’t it hurt the success of the movie if they wait so long with the trailer?”
The moderator came back with a very reassuring reply just five minutes later.
“It will be coming very soon. I have that on good authority.”
You may be wondering, and quite correctly, why a moderator from a Stephen King fan message board should be believed. Well, this specific moderator, according to senior Stephen King reporter Bev Vincent, happens to be King’s executive/personal assistant. There’s really no arguing with a confident declaration like this one from someone so close to the King of Horror himself when it concerns one of his movie adaptations.
Most Stephen King fans were convinced the trailer was coming out on April 19. As IBT notes, every major piece of Dark Tower marketing material has been released on the 19th of some month. That is not saying much since there hasn’t been a ton of marketing materials for the Stephen King-inspired flick, but Sony revealed a first look at the movie on December 19, some stills were unveiled on February 19, and the official poster was released on March 19. This phenomenon can be attributed to the number 19 being a very important recurring element in Stephen King’s series. Obviously, though, the trailer was not, in fact, released on April 19.
Now, as the IBT story muses, May 19 seems like a definite possibility. Is it soon enough, though, to fulfill King’s assistant’s promise that the trailer will be coming “very soon”?
What do you think? Is the “19” phenomenon to continue, or is the studio going to forego its King-centric symbology in order to push out a trailer for the movie as soon as it possibly can?
[Featured Image by Powerofforever/iStock]