Through your adventures through life and around the internet, you may have heard of a novel series entitled the Dark Tower. Written by master horror writer Stephen King, the series follows Gunslinger Roland as he embarks on an epic quest to travel to a mythical Dark Tower, and the series already has created various spinoffs and connections throughout all of Kings work (such as The Stand and Hearts in Atlantis), and even in a comic book series written by Peter David.
Now it’s going to be the most intense adaptation of all time. But rather than try to explain this myself, I’ll let the source article from Deadline do it for you:
The plan is to start with the feature film, and then create a bridge to the second feature with a season of TV episodes. That means the feature cast–and the big star who’ll play Deschain–also has to appear in the TV series before returning to the second film. After that sequel is done, the TV series picks up again, this time focusing on Deschain as a young gunslinger. Those storylines will be informed by a prequel comic book series that King was heavily involved in plotting. The third film would pick up the mature Deshain as he completes his journey. They will benefit from being able to use the same sets cast and crew for the movie and TV, which could help contain costs on what will be a financially ambitious undertaking.
Ambitious undertaking is putting it lightly!! Some of you may actually remember JJ Abrams and his LOST partners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse actually purchased the rights for this a while ago for $19, which is a number that has importance within the story (similar to the numbers from LOST in a sense). However, they never could quite figure out how to work the story and eventually decided not to try and do it anymore, despite their love of the work.
This is where Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman came in to take over, both committed to doing the first movie and series now along with partner Brian Grazer. You might recognize these names from such hit films as the Da Vinci Code and A Beautiful Mind. Da Vinci Code was a pretty close adaptation to it’s source material, minus some (admittedly odd) story changes. The team do have an outspoken love for the entire epic, though, so it should be interesting to see what comes of this.
Seriously though – a film, a TV show, a film, a TV show, and another film? That’s a pretty unique idea. It’ll be rather interesting to see exactly how this plays out.
(source)
