Warner Bros took the easy out and has passed on The Dark Tower, the ambitious multi-platform adaptation of Stephen King’s novel series. After getting an overhauled script from Oscar winning scribe Akiva Goldsman, the studio just balked on the project that Ron Howard wants to direct with Brian Grazer, Goldsman and King producing, and with their A Beautiful Mind star Russell Crowe being eyed to play the gunman Roland Deschain. Warner Bros follows Universal, which also bailed on making the project.
It’s something of an odd move for Warner Bros, given all the talk out there that with Harry Potter and the Chris Nolan-directed Batman movies over, the studio badly needs some franchise blood and keeps swinging and missing with its attempts to mint franchises out of its DC Comics stable of characters like Green Lantern and Jonah Hex. I just interviewed the author; King knows his way around a good story, and here is how he described what is waiting for whoever steps up to fund this movie: “The Dark Tower, to me, and I’m not unbiased because I’m the writer on this thing, but to me it looks like gold on the ground waiting to be picked up.” You need guts to find gold in this precarious time in the film business, and Warner Bros ultimately didn’t show any here. Peter Jackson is lucky that Bob Shaye ran New Line when he was down to his last chance to get The Lord Of The Rings made. If he was out pitching that movie today, I doubt that Jackson would have been able to persuade Warner Bros to say yes to what became a billion dollar franchise. I hope that Howard and his posse reload and try again, but this is a major setback for them.