The Dark Tower Clocks in at 95 Minutes

It looks like the group behind The Dark Tower movie really cut a ton of chaff from The Dark Tower books as the movie will come in at a brisk 95 minutes. Part of that could be because a significant portion of the movie is based the Gunslinger which is the shortest book in the series by far. More then likely they just went with the through line of good guy vs bad guy and cut everything else around that. Director Nikolaj Arcel later commented on the length:

“The good news here…the reason why many fans are worried about the run time is that they think we are trying to do everything in this film. Which we are not. This is ideally the first film. This is an introduction to the world and the characters. It’s not meant to be all the novels and we’re just trying to cram everything in there. So that’s one thing. And the script was really lean and tight. When I got on board, the script was very short, very lean. That’s one of the things that attracted me to it. I said ‘This is smart.’ You start with a lean, mean story and you don’t try to cram everything in there. You just build the basic ideas. And if people enjoy it and if they like this world and these characters, we can start expanding.”