Sony’s DARK TOWER Franchise Puts A Director In Its Sights
Full disclosure: the Birth.Movies.Death. team loves Stephen King's Dark Tower series. We're excited about the prospect of a multi-film adaptation of said series. Hell, we're even onboard with this "several movies and an accompanying TV series" pitch that Imagine Entertainment's been pimping around for the last few years. Whenever Dark Tower updates occur, we are pumped.
And yet...this team has been reporting on Dark Tower updates for years. We've gotten our hopes up before, only to have them cruelly dashed (see also: Cary Fukunaga's two-film IT adaptation). We want to believe - to take each new report at face value, to allow ourselves to get excited all over again - but it's getting tough. Real tough.
With all of that said: about an hour ago, the internet learned that A Royal Affair director (and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo co-writer) Nikolaj Arcel is Sony's top choice to direct The Dark Tower. We also learned that he'll be rewriting the script Sony/Imagine were previously working with.
This update is more than a little flimsy. Arcel isn't officially signed onto the project, and we're not sure if they want him for the entire franchise...or just the first film. We also don't know what network the Dark Tower TV series is going to air on, or if Sony/Imagine is still gunning for Russell Crowe to play Roland. These are really important questions, the answers to which will directly impact just how excited we need to be about all this.
And so, after some internal debate, we arrived at this conclusion: the fact that Sony's looking at Arcel is newsworthy (if nothing else, it tells us where the studio's head is at in terms of the type of directors they're considering for the gig), and as such, we'll go ahead and put it in front of you. But we're going to continue taking all of this Dark Tower stuff with an enormous grain of salt until things start locking into place. Until then, we advise that you do the same.
By the way, anyone here actually seen A Royal Affair?
