We’re not here to bash on complex movies. Some of them are amazingly deep and entertaining, forcing us to reconsider the way we think about relationships, humanity and even our very reality. But let’s be honest for a moment — a movie can only be so long. The average movie is somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes long. Some movies even stretch to the 2.5-to-3 hour mark, but that’s about it. If the director needs more time than that, it’s time for a sequel (which is exactly what happened when Quentin Tarantino originally tried to make Kill Bill into a single four-hour film).
Sometimes that’s just not enough time to properly tell a story. Can you imagine if George R.R. Martin had allowed Game of Thrones to be a movie trilogy instead of en epic HBO television series? Could anyone really cram 70+ hours of show (by the time it ends) into roughly six or seven hours of film? We think not. For some subject matter, television is just a better choice. We think the following ten movies would have been better suited for the flatscreen in your living room than the big screen at your local cinema. Don’t get us wrong, though. We’re not saying these movies sucked. Sure, some definitely did, but others were really good or even great. But the stories told in these 10 movies would have worked so much better as a 10-hour television series.
10. The Dark Tower
We’re starting with the most recent offender, as the 2017 film adaptation of Stephen King’s epic novel series The Dark Tower left many fans feeling disappointed, including our own reviewer Riley Jones. Even though there were probably plans to make a few sequels, it performed poorly at the box office and was generally attacked by critics. The whole thing was doomed from the start, really. The book series spans eight novels (so far), but the movie picked up somewhere in the middle, trying to tell the story of the second book (The Gunslinger) and also act as a sequel to the seventh book (The Dark Tower). It all falls predictably flat, though, as the 95-minutes of film could never cover King’s colossal series.
While there is still a faint amount of hope for a Dark Tower TV series, the lackluster response to the movie definitely hurt its chances. Much like Game of Thrones, there is just way too much backstory, character building, and plot explaining to fit into a standard movie. If a television adaptation does eventually materialize, let’s hope they go back to the very beginning — the 1998 novel The Little Sisters of Eluria is technically the first part of the story, although it was the fifth book released.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/3/15528554/the-dark-tower-stephen-king-film-adaptation-explainer Via TheVerge.com