The Dark Tower film adaptation seems to have been dragging on longer than the book series itself, with Universal passing on the three movies and two seasons of a TV show so they could lose scads of money on Battleship. (Smart!) Then Warner acquired but ultimately passed on the script for the first movie, which might have starred either Javier Bardem or Russell Crowe as gunslinger Roland Deschain. Then Media Rights Capital wanted to use their unexpected windfall from Ted to take over the project, with Ron Howard, Akiva Goldsman, and Brian Grazer still involved. No word on if Media Rights Capital would add a swearing teddy bear to repeat their success. It probably doesn’t matter, since it hasn’t moved forward since then. But wait…
Stuff recently interviewed Ted Sarandos, who is the Vice President of Content at Netflix and has led content acquisition there for 13 years. One question in particular had our curiosity. And then it had our attention.
Arrested Development creator Ron Howard has also been circling Stephen King’s The Dark Tower – any chance Netflix could pick it up?
“I spoke to Ron about it, actually. The last time we talked about it the thing was being kicked about HBO – but it’s no longer there. Once Arrested Development gets through we’ll keep talking about it.”
We doubt Netflix is going to fund a movie with a budget that size, but (as Collider points out) the TV episodes bridging the movies could be a good fit for Netflix.