Ron Howard, director of films such as The Da Vinci Code, Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, has signed on to tackle a movie trilogy based on Stephen King's seven-volume Dark Tower sequence. According to the source, there is also the possibility of a spin-off television series being developed simultaneously.
The series, which sees a gunslinger named Roland making his way to the forbidding Dark Tower, is the unifying cosmological link between much of King's other work, although its sales have not been at the same level as his other, more stand-alone books. King is currently writing a new Dark Tower novel that falls earlier in the books' timeline.
J.J. Abrams and the writing team behind Lost, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, had previously discussed adapting the series as a seven-season TV series, but had changed their minds given the desire to have a break after the conclusion of the six-year Lost project.
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...J.J. Abrams and the writing team behind Lost, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, had previously discussed adapting the series as a seven-season TV series, but had changed their minds given the desire to have a break after the conclusion of the six-year Lost project.
It would be a cinematic miracle to pull this off, even if each movie were three+ hours long. I think a 133 episodes (19 per year...come on, that's pretty clever!) could pull it off, especially if Abrams and crew are at the wheel.
Lindelof and Cuse have more recently said that they simply felt that the project was too ambitious for them, and Lindelof was apparently bricking it that he might screw his favourite book up. Plus they've put a few references to THE DARK TOWER in LOST (such as 'The Man in Black'), so maybe they thought it was redundant to pursue the project straight away.
Maybe if it wasn't going to happen for five years or so, they might come back and do it, but Howard seems keen to move on it ASAP.
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The best screen adaptations are the ones of stories that focus almost exclusively on the human condition, with no supernatural elements (Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption come to mind); or ones that never attempt to define the arguably ancillary supernatural device of the story, which is used solely to advance the tale as one concerned with the human condition (The Green Mile and The Dead Zone are good examples here).
When I read a King novel it's not only characterization and dialogue (for which he is renowned) that grab me, it's processing--what the character sees and thinks and feels about what he sees and thinks. Unfortunately, when the method is horrific or grotesque, that method is all that gets translated to screen, and none of the process.
Just my opinions.
hmm ;that is intersting; hope he does a good job; loved the trilogy.