Ron Howard’s Adaptation Of The Dark Tower Isn’t Dead, Just Sleeping

We’ve only been covering the trials that the team behind The Dark Tower has been forced to endure since 2010, but the process has in reality been going on for much longer. One day, an extremely prolific horror author will write a series of novels based around the events surrounding the adaptation, a series that will chill the reader to the bone. Until then, The Dark Tower series fills the gap pretty well, but when will the darned thing go ahead?

Ron Howard spoke to Empire magazine on the promotional trail for his recent release Rush, and dropped a few information bombs on the proceedings:

The Dark Tower is something that we’re still working on. We’ve all taken a vow of silence about the progress, the headway, what we think our timetable is, because I don’t think I realised how much media interest there was in the title and how much excitement there was… It’s a fascinating, powerful possibility and even Stephen King acknowledges it’s a tricky adaptation, but to be honest, from a financing side, it’s not a straightforward, four-quadrant, sunny superhero story – it’s dark, it’s horror.

The whole process may find itself speeding up a little pretty soon – the recent success of Under the Dome and the upcoming big-budget adaptation of Carrie means people still most definitely want Stephen King adaptations – but then again the project has lived and died so many times at this point that nobody is holding their breath, not even Ron Howard himself.

…it got delayed, it’s never gone away. We’re working on it, and Stephen is very patient with us, and Akiva’s just gone off and directed a movie, I’m continuing to work, but the Dark Tower dreams – fever dreams, rather – are still there, but we’re not going to give it a timetable.

There’s probably more chance of a television adaptation of The Dark Tower, what with the ongoing world-conquering success of Game of Thrones which, while not really treading similar themes, is also an ambitious adaptation of a sprawling series of novels.

We hope that’s cleared everything up.