It looks like all hope is not lost for The Dark Tower. After an uncertain week, with a cancelled shooting date and the halting of all pre-production, Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman’s adaptation of Stephen King’s meta-opus is back on at Universal. The film will not be shooting in September, as originally planned, but sometime later, most likely in 2012. There is no word on whether or not this will affect the film’s March 2013 release date, though with shooting pushed back at least six months, that seems likely. Goldsman is currently re-writing the script to the first film to accommodate the budget cuts.
This is a double-edged sword here. I’m ecstatic that Dark Tower gets this second chance, as Howard’s plan for a television supplement to a three-film franchise is inspired and ambitious. However, the budget cuts are an obvious concern. The first two books of the series can easily be done at cost. It’s a lot of Roland hiking around in the desert, stopping only to massacre folks in his gunslinger-y ways. The more mystical elements that pop up in the second book are also fairly plausible to do on a budget. However, as the story goes on, we’ve got men with horrible animal heads, a mad cyborg bear the size of a redwood, wolves carrying lightsabers, and even more. That‘s going to be difficult to pull off on the cheap. Here’s hoping that, whenever shooting starts, that we can get a good look at how all this is pulling together.
[Via THR]
