Intrigue is afoot at Warner Bros., with someone somewhere inside that august organisation clearly having decided that yes, indeed, they'd very much like to be in the Akiva Goldsman business. For although once upon a time screenwriter Goldsman penned uber-dud Batman & Robin for the same studio, the last week has seen him signed up to both produce an I Am Legend sequel and also revise his script for The Dark Tower.
That latter move by Warners would strongly indicate that it is interested in resuscitating the whole Dark Tower project, which had previously fallen by the wayside last summer when Universal declined the opportunity to back a planned three moves and spin-off TV series, all based on Stephen King's series of source novels.
Back then, the plan was that Goldsman would team up on the project with the director-producer pair of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, all three of whom had previously won Oscars for their work on A Beautiful Mind. Much more exciting for the zealous fans of the novels though, was that the signature character of Roland Deschain, the enigmatic gunslinger, was going to be played by another Oscar-winner, Javier Bardem, who beat off the challenges of Viggo Mortensen and Christian Bale to secure the role.
Universal pulled the plug over budgetary worries, during the same process of painful decisions that also saw Guillermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness kicked to the kerb. But salvation has apparently now arrived, with the news that Warners has purchased Goldsman's script for the first Dark Tower movie, and hired the same writer to do a rewrite.
The studio is apparently interested in committing to just a single film first, rather than the full trilogy, although the part Arthurian/part Sergio Leone saga might still come to the small screen too, as Grazer has reputedly lined up a deal with HBO (another Time Warner company) to deliver the planned spin-off TV show. Howard, meanwhile, is currently busy with retro Formula One drama Rush, which is due in cinemas sometime in 2013.
Source: Deadline
