JJ Abrams wants to be involved in all of your geek properties. He almost did a Superman movie, he’s one of the guys behind Lost, one of the biggest geek shows on TV, and he’s in charge of Paramount’s next Star Trek film. How can he follow this up? By getting into the Dark Tower business, of course.
For many geeks, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower cycle of books is great literature. Mixing elements of Westerns, sci-fi, horror and literary tricks done much better by writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Grant Morrison, the seven Dark Tower books follows Roland, aka The Gunslinger, and his band of friends as they travel across a strange world and duck in and out of other Stephen King books on their way to battle the Crimson King, now no longer just a record.
Abrams’ Bad Robot production company and King are currently in talks, and there’s no telling whether this is going to be a movie project or a TV series, although one has to assume that with seven books, TV series is the way to go. This is part of a current renaissance in all things Dark Tower – King started publishing the series decades ago, but worried that he would never finish them, a worry that intensified after he almost got killed by a speeding van. So the author cranked them out at a rushed pace and wrote a couple of installments that disappointed even the hardcore fans. Now there’s also a Marvel Comics series set in the world of the Dark Tower, although I don’t know if that’s a straight adaptation or a “Further Adventures of…” type of book.
By the way, this story originally broke on IGN, but The Hollywood Reporter ran it without giving a credit. They ran it on the same page where they talk about Gianni Nunnari’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s Ronin, without giving IESB credit. Fuck Hollywood Reporter as well.