The adaptation of The Dark Tower fled across the desert, and Ron Howard followed. Despite its many starts and stops, the long-gestating project is back on track—for now, anyway—and in addition to a new studio and a new script, the project now has a new director in its sights. Deadline reports Danish director Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) is being offered the job of helming the first installment in a massively ambitious translation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. Hopefully, this news will last long enough to once more get our hopes up, before the whole thing falls apart for the umpteenth time.
Arcel, who also write the screenplay for the original The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, would oversee a rewrite of the script, and shoot the first in what would be a series of films. The initial movie will feature a story adapted from The Gunslinger, focused on “establishing the relationship between Roland and young protege Jake Chambers.” Arcel supposedly impressed the studio by being an actual fan of the books, which gives you a sense of just how low the bar is set in Hollywood for impressing executives.
A complementary TV series is still being developed in tandem with the films, so we can have multiple things to be bummed about all at once when this thing goes belly up. Next on the agenda en route to collapse is finding a star to anchor the project. Javier Bardem, Russell Crowe, Aaron Paul—they’re all probably still in the mix, if not all for the same role, though it might be fun to have each one play Roland, Palindromes-style.
The adaptation of The Dark Tower fled across the desert, and Ron Howard followed.