Stephen King’s The Institute Eases Wait for Mike Flanagan’s Dark Tower

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Horror fans were disappointed to hear Mike Flanagan’s news about the Dark Tower TV series. However, Stephen King’s upcoming project in 2025 should help make the wait a little easier.

Both Mike Flanagan’s work and adaptations of Stephen King stories had a strong year, despite somewhat disappointing box office numbers. Most of the films received excellent reviews from both audiences and critics. Plus, 2025 saw the start of a promising trend: more successful TV adaptations of Stephen King’s novels.

Mike Flanagan shared that adapting Stephen King’s The Dark Tower into a TV series will be a lengthy process, disappointing many fans. However, a new Stephen King show that debuted in 2025 is helping to soften the blow of that delay.

Mike Flanagan’s Dark Tower Isn’t Coming Out Soon, But Stephen King’s The Institute Eases The Wait

Chris Reardon / ©MGM+ / Courtesy Everett Collection

At first glance, both The Institute and The Dark Tower share common ground with many of Stephen King’s stories, depicting the contrast between typical small-town life and a more sinister, hidden world. However, The Institute actually feels quite similar to The Dark Tower, borrowing many of its ideas and themes.

Stories like The Institute and The Dark Tower both explore the dark side of psychic powers. In The Institute, a school kidnaps children with telepathy and telekinesis, training them for secret and morally questionable missions. Likewise, in The Dark Tower, people with telekinetic abilities, known as Breakers, are held captive and forced to use their powers in a place called Devar-Toi, where they damage mysterious structures called “Beams.”

Similar to the children in The Institute, the Breakers in The Dark Tower are also given drugs and controlled. This keeps them obedient and focused on the purpose for which they were brought together. While this is just one part of the much larger story in The Dark Tower, it’s hard not to notice some interesting similarities between the two.

Mike Flanagan’s planned adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series will be much larger in scope than his previous King adaptation, The Institute. Even as Flanagan develops The Dark Tower, The Institute’s TV series can still successfully engage King’s audience. The fact that The Institute has been renewed for a second season makes it an ideal introduction to Flanagan’s vision for The Dark Tower.

The Institute Could Directly Tie Into Mike Flanagan’s Dark Tower Series

Stephen King doesn’t explicitly link his novel The Institute to The Dark Tower series. Still, fans have long wondered if Firestarter and The Institute could serve as background stories leading into the world of The Dark Tower.

Mike Flanagan’s planned adaptation of The Dark Tower could connect to his series The Institute, which many fans have long suspected were related. It would be interesting to see these two separate Stephen King shows share connections and references with each other.

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2025-11-19 17:48