Skip to main content

The first trailer for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is here

The first trailer for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is here

/

‘Death always wins’

Share this story

Stephen King’s novel The Dark Tower has undergone a long and twisted path to become a movie. Now, just a few short months from release, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel: the first official trailer was added as an unlisted video on Sony Picture’s YouTube page two days ago. Now, it’s trickling out.

This is our first official look at the film. Last October, an early trailer for the film leaked, and was quickly taken down. This trailer shows young Jake Chambers (Legends’ Tom Taylor) explaining his visions of the Gunslinger (Idris Elba) and the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) to a child psychologist who tells him they’re just dreams. But nope! Suddenly he’s in the mysterious other dimension called Mid-World, and the Gunslinger is explaining that 1) he’s not a Gunslinger because there aren’t Gunslingers anymore, and 2) the Man in Black isn’t “like the devil,” he’s actually worse than the devil. There’s a quest to save mankind, and several chilling one-liners like “death always wins” and “I do not kill with my gun, I kill with my heart.”

Sony Pictures also released an international trailer for the film:

There have been numerous attempts to adapt the sprawling book series, first as a series of films and now as a film with an accompanying prequel TV series. A Royal Affair director Nikolaj Arcel is helming the project.

King revealed the first poster for the film on Twitter back in March, which features a clever use of negative space to create the titular tower.

While Stephen King wrote an eight-book series, this film isn’t actually an adaptation of those books: it’s sort of a sequel to the entire series. The novels follows Roland Deschain (aka the Gunslinger), through a fantastic feudal society, as he quests to discover the Dark Tower, which is said to connect various universes together.

The Dark Tower is scheduled to hit theaters on August 4th, 2017.

Update: an earlier version of this article stated that the movie is based on The Gunslinger (it’s a sequel to the novel series), and that the film was slated for a July release. Both have been corrected.