Troubled movie production heading to the small screen

The Dark Tower project has been plagued by budget and other issues ever since the ambitious plans for a series of movies to be made out of Stephen King’s fantasy series was announced about a year ago.

Now comes the news that Dark Tower is moving to HBO. Here’s what producer Brian Grazer told HBO Watch:

“We’re going to do [The Dark Tower] with HBO. We’ll do the TV with HBO, and we’ll do the movie with . . . to be determined. We’ll do it right.  We’re going to do that movie. We’ve lost $45 million out of the budget, he said.  When people say no to you enough, then you have to lose money, which we’ve done without harming the scope of the film.”

Grazer also said that Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men) will probably still star as the lead character named Roland Deschain and Ron Howard will still direct it.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series consists of seven novels written over a 22-year period and was inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Except for the prolific author’s shopping list it is probably the only major King work which hasn’t been filmed yet!

The fantasy story describes the quest of the gunslinger, a man in tattered black, who passes back and forth through a door leading to two parallel worlds.

Considering the amount of money and effort that went into HBO’s Game of Thrones series (an adaptation of the celebrated George R.R. Martin novels which has been described as “fantasy for people who don’t like fantasy”) it would seem that HBO would be the perfect fit for a work this epic.

Read the news article here: http://hbowatch.com/new-series-dark-tower-coming-to-hbo/