Ron Howard's life may have just got slightly easier, with the news that Mark Verheiden has signed up to co-write the massive adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. 

The project is set to cover a trilogy of films and a concurrent TV series, but Verheiden doesn't think it too much. He was a supervising producer on Heroes, a writer and executive producer on Battlestar Galactica, and he's most recently been exec producing the upcoming Falling Skies. So he's used to negotiating huge undertakings, although admittedly, The Dark Tower is more ambitious than most.

He's also a prolific comics writer, contributing runs for Superman, Batman and The Phantom, and at one point penning a great Aliens series which, pre-Alien 3, continued the adventures of Hicks and Newt.

In other words, he's a strong pair of hands for the property, and he'll be working very closely with Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman, presumably for rather a long time. Javier Bardem is all-but signed on to play existential gunslinger Roland Deschain, and the first film is currently set for release on May 17, 2013.