The Dark Tower Is Dead

At the start of this summer arrived word from Variety things were looking shaky on The Dark Tower, from director Ron Howard and his producing-partner Brian Grazer based on the Stephen King book series with Javier Bardem attached to play the lead character "Gunslinger" Roland Deschain.

When reporting the original item, I said:

"Let's put it this way, when a 'safe bet' for Universal is making a Jason Bourne movie with the character's name flashed all over the title but he’s not actually in it, then you know where something like Dark Tower stands there. My guess is they let it go, and in the event of a rival studio grabs it ASAP, their game plan gets changed big time."

In that time between that publication and today, Howard has committed himself to helming Rush, the biopic on UK Formula One drover James Hunt with Chris Hemsworth, Bardem appears to now be locked for the next James Bond film for next November and Universal quietly slotted Fast & the Furious 6 for May 2013, a release intended for The Dark Tower. 

So the evidence was all there and as much as this sucks for fans to hear, nobody should truthfully be surprised by this news from Heat Vision. The ambitious plan, including a film trilogy with two short-run television shows to be produced and air in between installments, is a thing of the past as Universal has killed the project.

Before anyone falls back on them being "chicken-shitted," remember how much that studio got behind equally ambitious projects like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Land of the Lost, Drag Me to Hell and Bruno, among others. So they've definitely taken risk the last few years with no cha-ching payoff. If that were the case, then Dark Tower and Guillermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness would be filming and getting ready for their big Comic-Con panels this weekend.