A new quest for The Dark Tower

Two sites today are claiming exclusives on the same story but their accounts vary as to the form it will take. Stephen King’s fantasy quest series The Dark Tower is up for another shot at adaptation, after JJ Abrams returned the story rights to King. Imagine Entertainment and Weed Road are to combine forces to develop the story of gunslinger Roland Deschain and his quest to save his fragmenting world.

But will it arrive as a film, a TV series or both?

Deadline is reporting that King, Imagine Entertainment and Weed Road are in discussions to make a big-screen three-picture series and a TV serial out of the epic seven-strong collection of novels. Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot, I Am Legend, Da Vinvi Code) is set to write the script, Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, The Missing, The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons) will direct and Brian Grazer will produce, alongside Goldsman and King. Universal is in talks to acquire the books and the team but may find competition from Warner Bros.

Heat Vision Blog has its own account of the story. After JJ Abrams’ attempt to turn the Gunslinger into a TV series failed and he returned the rights to King (the rights that he purchased from King for $19, a number central to the story’s plot), a new team is planning to give the fantasy another go: Howard, Grazer and Goldsman. Heat Vision’s story differs from Deadline’s in that Heat Vision reports that the adaptation will begin as a movie that would lead on to a TV series (and that Universal will be the studio to release it). Either way, this could be exciting, if they can get it right.

The Dark Tower is based on a poem by Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came and is the journey of Roland Deschain of Gilead, the last remaining member of a knightly order of gunslingers, the last in the line of “Arthur Eld” (or King Arthur). He is on a quest to save the world, travelling through an otherworldly place with magical undertones and an Old West feel to find the Dark Tower, the key to all of the universes. Along the way he picks up travelling companions which form a ka-tet (a group of beings brought together by ka, a word for fate in the fictional language High Speech): Jake, Eddie, Susannah and Oy the billy-bumbler (a creature that looks like a combination of raccoon and woodchuck with a little dachshund thrown in). As their journey progresses it becomes evident that the world is deteriorating around them, with cities and regions vanishing without a trace, time flowing in a disorderly fashion and the sun no longer rising in the east and setting in the west.

King has also written a prequel graphic novel to the series and is currently working on an eighth novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole, that’s set between the fourth and fifth books, Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla.