Though the situation looked bleak for Ron Howard, Akiva Goldsman and Brian Grazer’s ambitious plan to bring Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series to life as a set of films and TV shows when Universal shut down development, the three main players have not lost faith in their attempt to get the project on its feet. And now, talking to MTV, Grazer has explained that the priority will be the TV section, with US cable channel HBO stepping in to pick up the slack.
"We're going to do The Dark Tower with HBO," Grazer says. "We'll do the TV with HBO, and we'll do the movie with… to be determined. We'll do it right."
Just a couple of days ago, Grazer had dropped mention to The Playlist that they’d managed to slice a chunk of the budget off,which means we’ll get to see the film – or films – eventually. And he confirms the new, thriftier cost to MTV: "We're going to do that movie. We've lost $45 million out of the budget. When people say no to you enough, then you have to lose money, which we've done without harming the scope of the film."
We’d note he only mentions one film at this time; chances are the other two proposed movies will have to wait until the box office figures come in.
But this is an interesting development: HBO can certainly pull off something like this with the right talent aboard (see: Game Of Thrones) and while it has other big commitments floating around, such as Tom Hanks’ take on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, it would seem to be the most logical home for Dark Tower. Particularly since Grazer believes the move could mean that Javier Bardem stays attached as Roland Deschain…