THE DARK TOWER Collapses

Universal has passed on the wildly ambitious three film, two TV season plan to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. According to Deadline the scope and cost proved too much for the company, who was only willing to greenlight the first film and not the rest of the stuff. Apparently Ron Howard and his boys wanted to shoot the first season of the TV with the same sets and actors at the same time as the first film, so this wasn’t going to work for them.

The good news (?) is that Howard et al can take the project elsewhere. Warner Bros had made some noise about being interested, but with something this huge there are very few other possibilities.

This is, of course, the second major ambitious nerd project Universal has dumped lately. They also killed Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness because of budget problems. All of this stems from Universal spending the last few years taking really interesting chances on cool filmmakers making interesting genre films and finding them tanking one after another.