Glen Mazzara, who is best known for his work as executive producer and showrunner to The Walking Dead, has been confirmed by Deadline as the showrunner for the upcoming Sony Pictures television series The Dark Tower. The television series, while independent from The Dark Tower film that premiered on Friday, is also to act as a prequel, with its events occurring before the recently released Dark Tower movie.
Mazarra began working on The Walking Dead after Frank Darabont’s departure and stayed on from 2010-2013. Since then, he has worked as the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of the A&E series Damien. The Dark Tower will be his next television project.
Nikolaj Arcel’s recent film adaptation of The Dark Tower has met a wave of sour reviews by critics and did not perform as well as expected this weekend at the box office. Still, the television series is moving forward, with Idris Elba (who plays Roland in the film adaptation) reportedly locked to star in the television series as well.
The television series will pull the majority of its material from the fourth Dark Tower book, Wizard and Glass, with the occasional flashback to book one, The Gunslinger. The series will unveil the backstory of gunslinger Roland Deschain, covering his journey to becoming a gunslinger and how he first came to encounter the Man in Black.
Plans for the series were first announced back in April of 2015 as Sony and MRC broke news of their partnership to co-finance the ambitious project of adapting Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, which would be done through a feature-length movie and complementary television series.
Mazarra spoke about the project with great excitement. “I’ve been a Stephen King fan for decades and the opportunity to adapt The Dark Tower as a TV series is a great honor,” he said. “[The books] need a long format to capture the complexity of Roland’s coming of age – how he became the Gunslinger, how Walter became the Man in Black, and how their rivalry cost Roland everything and everyone he ever loved. I could not be more excited to tell this story.”