‘The Dark Tower’ Movie and TV Project Back On. HBO Gets The Show.
The Dark Tower wunder-project is back on! It lives again. Courtesy of budget cuts and such. Not only is it back on, but HBO is snagging the television rights.
Stephen King‘s fantasy Western series The Dark Tower has suffered numerous stops and starts in its slow road to the screen, but the adaptation seems to be inching ever closer to becoming a reality. Though Universal ultimately passed on Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Akiva Goldsman‘s ambitious plan to create a three-part film series and two connected TV seasons based on the books, Grazer sounded optimistic earlier this week when he revealed that he had trimmed $45-$50 million from the budget in an effort to get more companies interested. And today, he announced that while the film portion of the project has yet to find a home, the television part has just found one in HBO. More details after the jump.
Grazer first mentioned HBO’s involvement in a recent interview with MTV. “We’re going to do [The Dark Tower] with HBO,” he said. “We’ll do the TV with HBO, and we’ll do the movie with… to be determined. We’ll do it right.” The premium cable channel seems about as ideal a home as I can imagine for the series, given that HBO has few restrictions on violent or sexual imagery. There’s also the fact that ratings matter much less for HBO than they do for other networks, which gives them more freedom to make sure both seasons will play out as planned.
HBO seems a viable venue for the rather laborious task of translating some of this massive project to the smaller screen.