UPDATE: Bad news. Deadline is now reporting that pre-production staff on The Dark Tower has been put on hiatus as the budget issues are worked out. Read more after the jump.
Just when things seemed too good to be true for fans of Stephen King‘s The Dark Tower, that just might be the case. Last year, Universal announced an ambitious plan to adapt the popular series of novels beginning with a film version directed by Ron Howard and followed by multiple theatrical sequels and television events covering the seven current books. The series tells the sprawling and epic tale of Roland Deschain, the last in a mythic order of men called The Gunslingers, who is on a quest through a magical western world to find the Dark Tower, where all answers will be revealed. Brian Grazer was set to produce, Akiva Goldsmith was writing the script and Oscar-winner Javier Bardem was all but set to play Deschain. Things were looking good.
Now Variety reports that Universal is beginning to have second thoughts on the epic production and, in the coming days, could decide to put it in turnaround. That could result in another studio taking over or the project dying a slow death. Read More »
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Briefly: Young screenwriter Max Landis (being contemplative at left above) has steadily been making bigger and bigger deals. He’s got Chronicle in production at Fox and recently sold his action/comedy script Good Time Gang, called “a cross between The Bourne Identity and Jackass.” Now he’s teaming with producer Brian Grazer and attached director Ron Howard for a film called Amnesty.
We don’t have a plot recap at this point, but in the announcement of the deal Deadline relates that the script “blends Robert Ludlum and JRR Tolkien.” I have no idea what that would actually be on the page — the combo suggests any number of possibilities. Oddly, it also suggests the sort of genre-bending that is the core of Ron Howard’s current big project, The Dark Tower. Akiva Goldsman is writing the first feature installment of that, but I wonder if we’ll see Max Landis in the writing credits for the planned Dark Tower series somewhere down the line.
The plot is decidedly un-Disney. In the near future, with the Earth’s surface inhabitable, a small group of survivors pick one man to travel back in time to try and stop the event that caused the devastation. Once he arrives in the past, however, the man forgets about humanity and selfishly tries to save the love of his life. That’s the pitch Disney has just purchased called The Runner, which will be written by Dave Andron (Knight Rider, Justified) to potentially be directed by Marc Forster and produced by Brian Grazer. Read more after the jump. Read More »
In the past week, as Ron Howard starts to promote The Dilemma, I’ve seen a couple threadbare sets of quotes in which the filmmaker talks about his upcoming adaptation of Stephen King‘s sprawling fantasy/horror/’unified field theory of genre’ series The Dark Tower. I say ‘threadbare’ because he hasn’t opened up at all about how he, Brian Grazer and Akiva Goldsman actually plan to put the books on screen.
But now Ron Howard has opened up a little more — but only a little. Read More »
A movie version of Stephen King‘s The Dark Tower series has been in the works for a few years now, and for most of that time, it was expected that J.J. Abrams would be directing. Those plans fell through though, and the rights to the project were handed off to Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Akiva Goldsman.
It’s been months since we’ve heard anything about the proposed multi-platform experiment, which would interweave a trilogy of feature films and a network TV series, but now they’ve finally closed the deal. Universal and NBC landed the features and TV show, respectively, and the studios will be working closely together alongside Howard, Grazer and Goldsman to bring the filmmakers’ vision to both the big and small screen.
Read what the trio had to say about their unprecedented, risky undertaking after the break. Read More »
Back in March, a bunch of news came out about a biopic of founding FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Milk‘s Dustin Lance Black wrote the script, and it was at Universal before the studio passed. The film ended up at Warner Bros. and Malpaso Productions, with Clint Eastwood set to direct. There was a rumor that Leonardo DiCaprio was poised to star as Hoover, and that casting is now confirmed. Read More »
OK, here’s a great idea. We’re going to take The Brothers Grimm and mash it up with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. You know, have ‘dark fantasy’ versions of Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer and Hansel and Gretel teaming up to solve a murder mystery. Who says there is no longer any reverence for the true good stories?
Legends: The Enchanted sounds like an expansion pack for Magic: The Gathering, but it is also a graphic novel by Nick Percival and now, possibly, a film from Brian Grazer and Ron Howard‘s Imagine Entertainment. Read More »
We don’t usually do news posts anymore about filmmakers who have recently joined twitter, as it is such a common thing now-a-days. But I just received an e-mail informing me that Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard and producing partner Brian Grazer have joined the social web. And while their accounts are verified, they don’t have more than 190 followers between the two of them.
Follow Ron Howard at @realronhoward, Follow Brian Grazer at @RealBrianGrazer
A lot of filmmakers have their hands tied when it comes to social media, and aren’t allowed to tweet much about the production. Even Jon Favreau wasn’t allowed to twitpic from the set of Iron Man 2. Ron Howard seems to be above those rules, giving us a behind the scenes look at his latest film Cheaters. Thus far he’s been twitpicing photos from preproduction of his 20th feature film, including a look at his notes on the shooting script, a look at the script reading, and even some video from location scouting.
Read More »
