Mike Flanagan’s new television series adaptation of Carrie has drawn speculation and discussion about how some of the changes made to the narrative, including new characters, sets it up to connect with other Stephen King stories. For instance, Emaline, a new character who helps protagonist Carrie White hone her telekinetic powers as she experiences the trauma of navigating American high school, has a similar power herself, referred to in the season finale as a “shine,” one of several words King uses for telepathy and telekinesis across several novels and short stories beginning with The Shining. The finale also introduces a group of new characters who are hunting Carrie, leading to fan speculation they are from an organization like The Institute, from the novel of the same name, or the Shop, from Firestarter, both studying humans with special telepathic and telekinetic abilities.

            Perhaps more interestingly, these characters could also potentially be Berserkers, gifted individuals who are turned into assassins by the Trans Corporation in The Dark Tower, which Flanagan hopes will be his next King adaptation. And this is where the confluence of Amazon’s corporate ambitions in an era defined by conglomerate ownership and corporate consolidation overlap with Flanagan’s work. The Dark Tower is a sprawling dark fantasy series that provides a connective tissue between much King’s work through the construct of the Tower, which holds entire worlds on its different floors. In an interview with TV Line, Flanagan says that he thinks of Carrie as existing on one level of the Tower, pointing to his own way of thinking about a shared universe. In another recent interview with The Process Unlocked, he also discusses his thoughts on adapting King very broadly, as well as how he thinks of his process in terms of narrative structure.

            This vision fits nicely into Amazon’s corporate strategy. In a recent interview on Variety’s “Strictly Business” podcast, Mike Hopkins, the head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM studios, discussed the company’s strategic emphasis on franchises, noting the company’s acquisition of MGM in 2022 provided the company with a deep catalog of intellectual property they are eager to exploit. This emphasis is also fully in line with media production of the past twenty years, with Tino Balio noting Hollywood’s shift toward franchise filmmaking in the 2000s as increasing and ongoing corporate consolidation created conditions where studios were seeking more-or-less surefire hits in order to mitigate the financial risks of production.^[1] Significantly, Prime Video’s emphasis on established IP is evident in its list of existing franchises on the platform, especially those based on bestselling series of novels. The company already has established franchises in Bosch, The Terminal List, and Reacher, each of which have a successful mainline series with several spin-offs and prequels. The Dark Tower may well fit into the company’s plans by providing it with its first horror and fantasy-based franchise opportunity.

            While The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power have been big hits for Amazon, they have unique problems for franchise-ability. The Wheel of Time is pretty strictly based on a lengthy saga focused on a narrative featuring numerous characters which can quickly get unwieldy if the books themselves aren’t followed. And The Rings of Power suffers from the fact that Amazon only holds the license for certain aspects of Tolkien’s larger world, without the ability to directly reference or even overlap with some of the more popular characters and events in The Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Hobbit, whose rights are held by Warner Bros. The Dark Tower is thus an opportunity to create spin-offs, prequels, and interconnected series, feature films, and other media that its other major fantasy adaptations are more complicated in achieving.

            With his track record adapting King’s work and with other literary horror like The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher for Netflix, Flanagan is an attractive investment for Amazon MGM Studios. And with Carrie performing well in terms of both viewership data and critical appraisal, it seems likely that Flanagan’s creative vision for some sort of interconnected Stephen King universe will come to be, fifty years after King’s first novel was first adapted to film.

^[1] Tino Balio, Hollywood in the New Millennium, (London: BFI, 2012), 33.