Okay, so, this is a whole new, very ambitious thing. NBC Universal and Universal Pictures are teaming up to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, about the mystical gunslinger Roland Deschain and his search for the aforementioned tower, into three movies and at least two full seasons of TV. Imagine if in between each installment of Lord of the Rings, NBC had aired a Lord of the Rings TV show, with entirely new, more nuanced material in it, linking the movies, and you’re there. Ron Howard is onboard to direct the first film and the first season of the show, Akiva Goldsmith to do the same on the writing end, and Brian Grazer will produce. The project, based on seven books, will kick off with a movie, which will quickly be followed by a TV season of undisclosed length that will lead up to a second movie. That film will be followed by a second TV season that will be more of a prequel, focusing on Deschain as a younger man, before the third film finishes up where the second film left off. If that sounds like a lot of The Dark Tower, it is. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, the series is going take over movie theaters and your television in what will either wind up being a genuinely new, much bigger way of telling and selling stories or a hugely expensive fiasco.
