Have you ever looked back at Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” and thought “Well, it’s OK, but I’d like it much more if it had cowboys in it, and was kind of mediocre?” Good news! Stephen King’s eight-book fantasy series “The Dark Tower” is finally on its way to the big screen, and from one of the worst creative teams in Hollywood!
Imagine Entertainment and Weed Road are in talks to pick up the screen rights, with Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman, who collaborated previously on “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Da Vinci Code” attached as writer and director, something that we’re sure fans of the book will be delighted with…Both Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter are reporting the news as ‘exclusives,’ with slightly differing takes; the former suggest that the adaptation will take the form of both a trilogy of a films and a TV series, while the latter say it’ll only be a single movie, which would serve as a kind of big screen pilot for the show.
It’s this second option which seems more plausible – we can’t imagine Howard and Goldsman wanting to tie themselves for half a decade, Peter Jackson style, with a trilogy of movies. The idea of a movie leading directly into a TV series has never really been done before (although the pilot of the original “Battlestar Galactica” did get theatrical distribution in some parts of the world), and it’s sort of an interesting idea, although we imagine it’ll limit Howard’s casting options somewhat.
The series is set in a desolate world similar to the American Old West, but with magical elements, and follows Roland Deschain, the last living member of an order of ‘gunslingers,’ on his quest to find the titular Dark Tower. There have been seven novels so far, from “The Gunslinger” in 1982 to 2004’s “The Dark Tower,” with an eighth book on the way, and a Marvel comics prequel series.
This feels like a sort of disaster waiting to happen, even for a series we have no real investment in. J.J. Abrams was previously set to adapt, along with “Lost” collaborators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, and if they couldn’t crack it, we think it’s unlikely that Goldsman can; he is, after all, the man behind not only the worst films of both the 90s and the 00s, “Batman and Robin,” and “The Da Vinci Code,” but also the producer of “Jonah Hex,” which promises to be an early contender for one of the worst films of this decade.
There’s no word yet on when this might get in front of cameras, and obviously production timelines depend on if the project will be a single film or a trilogy. We have a hard time believing any studios, especially in this financially conservative time, will be eager to to jump aboard this project. Why? Simply because westerns — not to mention magical realist westerns — are typically box office poison. And King’s name attached to a project doesn’t necessarily guarantee success; “The Mist” and “Dreamcatcher” being two prime examples.
Either way, with Howard set to start filming shortly on “Cheaters,” we would wager this is still a ways off from filming, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Howard eventually ends up executive producing and letting someone else take the reins.