Stephen King’s Dark Tower series finally heading to big and small screen

DHD and EW report that The Dark Tower. Stephen King’s beloved seven book series, is finally on the verge of coming to both the big and small screen. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer (the team behind A Beautiful Mind and Angels and Demons) are finalizing a deal at Universal to make both a feature trilogy and a TV series. According to their current game plan, Howard will direct a film adaption of the first book in the series, The Gunslinger, to be written by Goldsman. There will be three movies total, and a TV series that will run concurrently.

The Dark Tower series – often compared with The Lord of the Rings – is an epic battle of good versus evil in a crumbling Old West world filled with ominous landscapes and macabre menace.

Book Jacket (from the first book in the series, The Gunslinger):

In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces readers to one of his most enigmatic heroes, Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland pursues The Man in Black, encounters an alluring woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the Kid from Earth called Jake. Both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike, The Gunslinger leaves readers eagerly awaiting the next chapter.

Critics say:

…the whole project eludes description — it’s a double-black-diamond ski run for fantasy nerds.

– Michael Agger for the New York Times

An impressive work of mythic magnitude. May turn out to be Stephen King’s greatest literary achievement.

– Atlanta Journal-Constitution