Is THE DARK TOWER Movie Trilogy and TV series In Trouble?
Ron Howard's The Dark Tower film trilogy and TV show series is one of my most anticipated film adaptations ever. I've been incredibly excited to see this project brought to life. Unfortunately for all of the fans that got their hopes up, it seems like Universal Pictures bit off more than they could chew. The project they put together is extremely ambitious, of course they knew that going in, but now the doubts are starting to creep in and the studio is starting to freak out about it.
According to inside sources the epic film and TV adaptation of Stephen King's seven book series has run into budget problems that have caused the studio executives to rethink the original plan, which sucks, because now that I've heard the original plan I don't want to accept anything less. The studio executives will meet within the next few days to decide whether to put the project into turnaround, which means the film’s producer Imagine Entertainment could shop it to another studio, either to partner with Universal or take it over entirely.
Sources tell Variety that as of Thursday, Universal is moving ahead as if the project is going forward. The studio had no comment on any of this. However, there is obviously a chance that Universal will pull out of the project. Hopefully they can find another studio to share the risk with, because if it goes to another studio who knows how much the original plan will change. I guess it still could change regardless. Then there is always the chance that the project could fall through completely and never get made. Universal has a pretty good track record with that.
First there was Peter Jackson's Halo, then Gore Verbinski's Bioshock, then Guillermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness, and now this. Does Universal Pictures just like to kill the awesome movie projects that fans want to see? What the hell!?
Ron Howard unveiled the films plans back in September to adapt The Dark Tower series into three films, and between each film will be a TV series to bridge all the stories together. Javier Bardem will be taking on the role of Roland Deschain in the film, which is awesome, and Howard and Brian Grazer are producing through Imagine, while Akiva Goldsman is set to write the scripts.
There was a time when the team at Imagine and Universal felt confident they had a workable vision of the film ready to go. They even set the release date for the first film on May 17th, 2013. If this follows Universal's track record of killing off epic fan films, then The Dark Tower is screwed. Hopefully it makes it through the fears of the executives and gets the proper adaptation that it deserves.
What do you all think about this madness?