After many years, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is finally making it to the big screen. However along with the movies, a TV series accompaniment was in the pipeline. And although we haven’t heard much about it, producer Ron Howard recently stated that the TV series is still absolutely in development.
Speaking in an interview with Deadline about his upcoming Beatles documentary, Howard spoke about many facets of how The Dark Tower came together. He talks about how Akiva Goldsman told him of the series when they were making A Beautiful Mind but JJ Abrams had the rights at the time so they couldn’t do anything serious about it. However, they eventually met with King and pitched their ideas.
The main idea was that Roland would have the Horn of Eld. As Howard puts it “It was about introducing the Horn of Eld into the very first story. He [Stephen King] knew it would allow us to use elements of the novels in a new combination that would give us the latitude to be true to the essence of the novels, but also re-balance and refocus the narrative in a cinematic way.”
He reveals that MRC and Sony helped save the project because he was close to giving up, and how meeting them led to having Nikolaj Arcel as the director. Since Arcel is a fan he put his own twist to the characters and story and rewrote Goldsman original script.
He also discusses casting Idris Elba as Roland. In the books Roland resembles Clint Eastwood and in a previous attempt Javier Bardem was attached to the role. As Howard puts it Elba has, “coiled danger, quiet charisma, undercurrents of complexity and nobility, and a kind of timeless cool” and that’s what makes the character.
But the most interesting tidbit is that the ambitious plans haven’t changed. When Howard first got the rights the plan was making a trilogy of films, alternating them with TV miniseries. And at the end of the interview, Howard puts it as straight as possible – “We’re developing the television part, now. We don’t know what platform it will be on at this point, but we’re developing the content in hopes for more movies that will cover the epic and the characters involved.”
The first The Dark Tower movie has a release date of February 17, 2017.
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