Matthew McConaughey was asked to play Randall Flagg in two movies.
A recent report says that Oscar Winner Matthew McConaughey has been offered to play a villain in Sony’s upcoming “The Dark Tower” adaptation. “The Dark Tower” is a book series by Stephen King. On the surface, these are fairly normal Hollywood proceedings except when one looks at which specific role he’s been asked to play; The Man In Black aka Walter Padick. Now for those who aren’t aware of the books, that may not seem all that interesting, but the character goes by a couple of different names, the most famous being Randall Flagg.
Flagg is Stephen King’s most reoccurring villain in his books and according to the author himself, he is his picture of pure evil. The other interesting thing about Flagg is he was first introduced (and is the main villain) of Stephen King’s earlier book, “The Stand.” Some may remember a few months ago when many articles came out about Matthew McConaughey being offered to play Randall Flagg in Warner Bros.’ 4 film adaptation of the book. Many of the articles made it seem like it was a done deal, but this new offer throws that into question. If you haven’t already guessed why, look back at the studio names. “The Stand” is to be made by Warner Bros. and “The Dark Tower” is set to be made by Sony, so remember this means he’s being asked to play the exact same character by two different studios. Some may not know this but most of Stephen King’s stories are all set in the same universe. Lot’s of characters mention connections to other books with Randall Flagg floating through a lot of them. In fact “The Dark Tower” interestingly bridges a lot of the connections.
So if this were some comic book casting this probably wouldn’t cause anyone to bat an eye but because it’s two studios, McConaughey may have to pick one over the other. When this was first reported by Variety, it prominently mentioned Walter Padick and his alias “The Man In Black” but only briefly mentioning Randall Flagg in passing. Could it be their way of getting around it? Again for those who don’t know, character rights go to whoever bought the rights to the book first. So let’s assume Warner Bros. bought the rights to “The Stand.” First, they have the rights to the story of the book and all of the characters, including Randall Flagg. Sony may have the rights to story and characters who originally appear in “The Dark Tower” but would have to change the name of Flagg’s character which in this case is simple since he has so many different aliases. However there is another possibility. Maybe the studios are planning to work together; Sony has done it before with Marvel. Connected film continuities that used to only be possible in printed works are all the rage in film now. It’s something to consider at least.
Hopefully we’ll find this out before January 3, 2017 when “The Dark Tower” is due to be released.
Do you think Matthew McConaughey would be fit to play the role?
This was first reported by Variety.