It seems that the journey to get Stephen King’s epic fantasy series The Dark Tower to the big screen in one form or another is proving just as tumultuous as Roland Deschain’s journey to reach the damn thing itself. News from Variety reports that Warner Bros. has decided to pass on Ron Howard’s ambitious trilogy adaptation and an interlinking two season television series.
This is yet another major setback in the long gestating project for Ron Howard and Brian Grazer who, along with writer Akiva Goldsman, having been trying to get this project off the ground for a while now. It seemed to many Hollywood insiders that Warner Bros. was the project’s best chance as HBO would have likely been the TV partner (which is owned by TimeWarner) and would have served in bridging its sequels.
Producing through their Imagine Entertainment banner, the ambitious adaptation was initially set up at Universal with Javier Bardem set to star, before the studio decided to pass on the project in July 2011 citing budgetary concerns. It then appeared things were picking up again when Warner Bros. took the reigns with Russell Crowe in talks to take over the lead role of Roland Deschain.
To be honest, this project was always going to be a hard sell to any studio. It would’ve been tricky enough to successfully make a trilogy of movies based on an ambitious series of fantasy novels, let alone a trilogy of movies along with television series linking the films. It’s tough to justify especially if the first film fails to be a hit, not to mention it’s a lot to ask of audiences to follow a story between film and TV.
It seems that we may have to wait just a little longer to see if The Dark Tower (in whatever format) will ever hit our screens at some point. The Dark Tower it seems is not nearly as close as we thought.