Stephen King's THE DARK TOWER Film Moving Forward with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer
Stephen King's The Dark Tower has been talked about being adapted into a film series for years! It's been so close so many times, but nothing had ever materialized. It's just been a lot of talk, no action. The last couple years the film rights have been with J.J. Abrams production company Bad Robot, and it seemed like a perfect film production for Abrams and the Lost producers to tackle. But, they didn't think they would be able to do the ambitious story any justice so they ended up giving the film option back to Stephen King.
What happens now? Well, it looks like Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Akiva Goldsman have picked up the right to the book series, and they've got some pretty ambitious plays for adapting these incredible books.
It is being reported from a couple different sources that Akiva Goldsman would write the script for the film, Ron Howard would direct it, and that Goldsman and Brain Grazer would produce. Now there's a little difference between the two sources... THR reports that there will only be one feature film, and Deadline reports that it will be a Dark Tower film trilogy as well as a TV series.
Holy crap! I gotta roll with Deadline on this one because thats what I want to see. You can't do the Dark Tower series as one feature film, it's such a huge story and they have to tell it as completely as possible. One film just wouldn't do the film any justice. The fans want more!
The Dark Tower is one of my favorite book series of all time, and I was excited when Abrams, Cuse, and Lindelof were going to adapt it, I thought they were perfect for it. And as much as I think Ron Howard is a fantastic director and story teller, I wasn't a big fan of how they ended up adapting The Da Vinci code and Angels and Demons. It worries me that they will take the story in a direction the fans won't be too pleased with. I'm still extremely excited that the series is finally going to get its big screen adaptation. I just hope Howard, Gazer, and Goldsman put everything they got into bring these stories to life.
Here is a brief description of the book series,
The series incorporates themes from multiple genres, including fantasy fiction, science fantasy, horror and western elements. They describe a “Gunslinger” and his quest toward a tower whose nature the books call both physical and metaphorical. King has described the series as his magnum opus. Besides the seven novels that compose the series proper, many of his other books relate to the story, introducing concepts and characters that come into play as the series progresses.
In the story, Roland Deschain is the last living member of a knightly order known as gunslingers and the last of the line of “Arthur Eld”, his world’s analogue of King Arthur. The world he lives in is quite different from our own, yet it bears striking similarities to it. Politically organized along the lines of a feudal society, it shares technological and social characteristics with the American Old West but is also magical. While the magical aspects are largely gone from Mid-World, some vestiges of them remain, along with the relics of a highly advanced, but long vanished, society. Roland’s quest is to find the Dark Tower, a fabled building said to be the nexus of all universes. Roland’s world is said to have “moved on”, and indeed it appears to be coming apart at the seams—mighty nations have been torn apart by war, entire cities and regions vanish without a trace and time does not flow in an orderly fashion.
King is currently working on an eighth novel, one that doesn't change the ending, but deals with characters and a storyline that falls midway in the series.
So what do you think about Howard, Gazer, and Goldsman adapting the books for the big screen?