The Dark Tower is experiencing its darkest hour in Hollywood as the highly anticipated fantasy adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, which was over a decade in the making, is suffering a double failure at the box office and in word of mouth.

For Sony Pictures, which spent $60 million on star Idris Elba and Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, this was a chilling result on a hot summer’s day, even though the cost of the film was significantly lowered.

But even so, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is still in its summertime in Hollywood. The Mist, a drama adaptation of his novel of the same name, is currently playing in the summer schedule, and just shortly before the release of The Dark Tower, a new trailer for the horror film adaptation of his novel, The Return of the Joker, was revealed, while another film, Resurrection, starring Samuel L. Jackson, is also in production.

Stephen King Jr. has long been hailed as America’s Golden Age. The most widely read American novelist in the world today, he is known as the “modern master of horror”, having sold more than 350 million copies of his works over the decades, and over 150 film and television adaptations of his works, setting a Guinness World Record. He has also made a fortune, becoming one of the leading billionaires in the author community.

How did the film adaptations of Stephen King’s novels become good business for Hollywood? What kind of in-depth fiction writer other than the horror writer Stephen King is behind the “sell-out” Stephen King?

How did “The Dark Tower” go badly? North American critics say it was made into a homage to the novel

The Dark Tower is Stephen King’s most ambitious work, a story about the last Gunslinger, Roland, who travels through the wilderness to track down his nemesis, the Man in Black, which took him over thirty years to complete.

The Dark Tower was once seen by Hollywood as the most unlikely adaptation of a Stephen King novel because of its ambitious scope, and it turns out they may have been right this time. The rights to the film bounced between Universal and Warner, with Javier Bardem and Russell Crowe rumoured to be involved, but none of them came to fruition, and the director went from J.J. Abrams to Ron Howard before finally landing in the hands of Denmark’s Nikolai Asser, the writer of the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with all the Hollywood studios swooning over it, but shying away from the huge budget and commercial risks. So much so that the film gradually became a Hollywood legend for over a decade.

Ron Howard had planned to make it in three films + a TV series, and today there is only one film, and it is only 95 minutes long and cost only $60 million to make. Before the film’s release critics had expressed their disapproval of the adaptation, and after its release they were even more vocal in their criticism.

One review mentioned that “my friend who saw the original said that the movie is connected to the novel – there are some characters from the novel, some locations from the novel, but otherwise, nothing, the story is completely different.” Critics have also criticised the film for deviating from the unique worldview and setting of the original, which makes the film lose its personality in a sea of fantasy films, “mixing the futuristic western of Firefly with the weirdness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, while foreign media outlet metro has bluntly stated that the film “feels like The film was described by metro as “a free adaptation + reworking + homage to the original novel”.

While critics and fans alike were unanimously critical of the film’s adaptation, the performances of the two leads were unanimously praised by the critics. Idris Elba’s Roland the Gunslinger was described by Nerdist as “clearly the best part of the film”, and fans have commented on review sites that he brings to life the tired, world-weary, tragic post-apocalyptic hero of Stephen King’s novel.

Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey’s performance was said by cinemablend to be the MVP of the film, but in contrast to Idris Elba’s hail of approval, there was also thewrap, a contrarian outlet, saying “Watching Matthew’s awful but enjoyable performance …… this Man in Black feels like RuPaul is playing Clint Eastwood.”

In any case, the film is far from a success in Hollywood, but the film’s $60 million budget is not exactly a mega-blockbuster, so the industry still believes Sony is on track to recoup its costs, depending of course on whether the film will end up in the Chinese market, the prime location for all North American blockbusters.

American gold standard Stephen King and Stephen King who ‘brought the National Book Award into disrepute’

But none of this detracts from the status of Stephen King’s novels in Hollywood, and any new novel by him will still be a hot commodity for studios and the rising streaming media to compete with.

What has made Stephen King so influential is the widespread film and television culture his novels have created through the numerous film and television adaptations, and in a sense, film and television adaptations have even been a major boost to Stephen King’s creative career.

In 1970, at the age of 23, Stephen King graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in English. Unable to find a job, he chose to contribute to magazines to support his family. After a couple of years of semi-unimpressive writing, Stephen King finally wrote his life-changing young adult horror novel Carrie the Witch, which not only sold well, but was adapted into a film by Hollywood director De Palma and became a huge success. It was after this that Stephen King entered his golden age of creativity.

The Shawshank Redemption, which is regarded as a masterpiece by film fans, The Shining, which was directed by Kubrick, and the heartfelt Stand by Me, as well as Carrie, The Miracle in the Green, and Ten Days in Danger, were all written by him. The name Stephen King has become a gold standard in the North American film and television industry in its own right.

One review jokes that Stephen King is second to Shakespeare in terms of the rate of adaptations of his original works into film and television. Because of this, Stephen King wielded great power in Hollywood, to the point of bargaining and negotiating with Hollywood studios for directors. A famous case in film history is that of Stephen King’s displeasure with the all-time classic The Shining and its director, Kubrick.

Despite his prominence in Hollywood, Stephen King has always been excluded from mainstream American literature.

In 2003, Stephen King received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. The award was given to King for his narrative skills, his promotion of new talent, his generous donations to schools and libraries, and the large readership his works have attracted. However, this caused great controversy in the literary world, with some critics even saying that his work was “a cheap thriller with little literary or aesthetic merit, and no thought-provoking ideas”, and that Stephen King “should not be in the pantheon of American literature, which is a disgrace to the National Book Award “.

Stephen King pushed back against this view, saying that “the American literary community should not ignore him” and calling for a bridge to be built between so-called popular fiction and serious literature.

Stephen King beyond the master of horror: the best-selling and most critically acclaimed are not horror films

Stephen King has always tried to break the stereotype of him as a ‘horror writer’. Although his work is mostly horror and thriller, and he has been awarded the International Horror Writers Association Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been described by the New York Times as “the modern master of horror”, he wants to prove that he can also write works that reflect human nature. But he was more interested in proving that he could also write works that reflected human nature.

If you take a look at Stephen King’s film and television adaptations, you will see that none of his films are horror films, whether they are the biggest or the most critically acclaimed.

The most critically acclaimed Stephen King film is the Frank Darabont-directed masterpiece The Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, which is ranked number one on Douban with a score of 9.6. The Shawshank Redemption is a testament to Stephen King.

Stephen King’s biggest hit in North America was not a horror film such as The Shining or Ten Days to Die Hard, but the drama The Green Mile, also directed by Frank Darabont and starring Tom Hanks, which opened in 2,875 cinemas and became Stephen King’s only blockbuster of the year to gross over $100 million.

Another Stephen King film that became a film and television classic was the heartwarming and nostalgic teenage literary comedy Stand By Me, the Stephen King film that did not have any supernatural elements in its top ten box office hits. Both the final film and the eponymous theme song became all-time classics and once again shattered Hollywood’s image of Stephen King as just a horror writer.

What is the appeal of Stephen King’s work? According to the National Book Foundation, “Stephen King’s works carry on the great tradition of American literature that focuses on plot and atmosphere, embodying the moral truth of the human soul in all its beauty and tragedy”.

The great appeal of Stephen King’s film adaptation is not the horror itself, but rather its penetrating insight into human nature. In The Shining, although the evil spirit is at work, the root cause is the fear within Jack, the hero.

With works such as The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me and The Miracle in the Green, it is hard to think of Stephen King as a mere horror novelist, but rather a brilliant painter of humanity, with his novels and film adaptations becoming his brushstrokes.

This is perhaps the fundamental reason why Stephen King’s films have become such good business in Hollywood – fear always fades, but humanity endures for all time.