Dark Tower gets film, TV treatment

MAINE MOVE: The team behind A Beautiful Mind are set to bring Stephen King's The Dark Tower series to the big and small screens.

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Stephen King's epic fantasy series The Dark Tower is being turned into a film and television franchise by the Oscar-winning team behind A Beautiful Mind.

The project is set up at Universal Studios, which is developing three films and a TV show based on the horrormeister's seven Dark Tower novels, short stories and comic books.

Ron Howard will direct both the first film and first season of the TV show, all of which will be written by Akiva Goldsman. Howard will additionally serve as a producer with business partner Brian Grazer. The trio won Academy Awards for their work on the 2001 Universal drama A Beautiful Mind.

The books chronicle a mysterious gunslinger named Roland as he travels across a desolate and vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape in his quest for a black tower. Portals along the way eventually allow contact with our own modern world. The books have sold more than 20 million copies in 40 countries.

The first film will be immediately followed by a TV series that will bridge the second film. After the second film, the TV series will show the adventures of The Gunslinger as a young man as a bridge to the third film and beyond.

"The worlds of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series are richly detailed, inter-locking and deeply connected," Goldsman said. "By telling this story across media platforms and over multiple hours - and with a view to telling it completely - we have our best chance of translating Roland's quest to reach The Dark Tower onto screen. We are proceeding with tremendous excitement, fidelity to the source material and, quite frankly, no small amount of awe at this opportunity."

For his part, King said he was confident the filmmakers would develop "an intriguing series of films and TV shows that respect the origins and the characters in The Dark Tower that fans have come to love."

- Reuters