Quote:
Originally Posted by FWWM
What did you think of the Dark Tower movie?
I read somewhere that the standard for adapting a book into a movie is roughly one page per minute of movie, which may be why some of King's 90-150 page novellas have transferred so well to feature-length films.
Now, unless we're doing a rigorously faithful adaptation of the book--which is generally frowned-upon, given the obvious differences in how we process books vs film--the movie is going to skip or combine some events and characters, while adding others, and it's going to focus longer on different aspects of the story--usually the more cinematic ones--while giving shorter shrift to stuff like the character's interior moments: see, for example, Deckard's narrative internal monologues in Blade Runner, which were cut out in the Director's cut, to the benefit of the movie, according to a number of critics.
Still, in spite of all this, one minute per page seems to be a good rule of thumb.
The 8 novels in the
Dark Tower series take up 4250 pages. By our rule of thumb, that would require more than 70 hours of screen time to cover.
I'll admit that the minute per page standard is not fair for adapting longer works. Once you get past 300 pages or so, I think you can throw a limiting curve into the formula, make it minutes per pages2 or something for that leg, then increase the superscript to 3 for all the pages after that.
As an example, The Stand miniseries from the 90's was fine, though Randall Flagg's curly mullet and all-denim Canadian Tuxedo didn't age well, but that's forgivable. I heard there is a newer miniseries, but I haven't seen it.
Back to the
Dark Tower: from a reader's point of view, a 2 hour movie is egregiously short, and going into the movie, I knew that that was going to be the case, so I tried to have a baby mind and look at it purely as a film, without a literary history.
From that perspective, it was okay: decent popcorn movie, but forgettable in the long term.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 11-20-2022 at 11:41 AM.