Welcome to my message board.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
Dark Tower series at Amazon
DEADLINE: What is the status of other high-profile genre projects that have been in early development at Amazon or stuck in deal-making limbo for a long time, The Wheel of Time (based on the fantasy books), and The Dark Tower, (based on the book and the movie)?
SALKE: Those are scripts that I haven’t gotten yet. I’ll be seeing those, that material, in the coming weeks. None of those things are dead. They’re very much alive.
SALKE: Those are scripts that I haven’t gotten yet. I’ll be seeing those, that material, in the coming weeks. None of those things are dead. They’re very much alive.
>>> Source
Comments
Marten Broadcloak will serve as the series antagonist and his affair with Roland’s mother, Gabrielle, will factor heavily into the plot. Her affair incites Roland to pick up his guns in a search for Broadcloak and sets his father, Steven, on a mission to find him. At this time, no offers have been made to talent, but the cast should begin to assemble quickly.
Amazon’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower book series has found its Gunslinger. Sam Strike (Nightflyers) has been cast as the lead, Roland Deschain, in the project, which I hear is nearing a formal pilot order at the streaming platform.
Jasper Pääkkönen (Vikings, BlacKkKlansman) will co-star in the drama, from executive producer/showrunner Glen Mazzara and MRC. The project had had a blinking green light for a couple of months, with casting quietly underway. It had been in development at Amazon for almost a year.
The Dark Tower TV series is independent from the film and is meant to be a more faithful retelling of the book than the movie was. I hear it will take place many years before the events depicted in the feature and will focus on Roland Deschain’s (Strike) origin story – how he first became a gunslinger and got his guns, his first conflict with the man in black, his first love and his first mission as a gunslinger.
Pääkkönen is believed to be playing Marten, the character Roland is out to kill.
The 2017 Sony/MRC feature The Dark Tower starred Idris Elba as Roland Deschain.
King’s eight Dark Tower books draw from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror, and Western.
Strike is coming off a series regular role on the Syfy/Netflix series Nightflyers, based on the novella by George R.R. Martin. The English actor launched his acting career with main roles on the British series M.I. High and EastEnders. He will next be seen in the HBO/Sky miniseries Chernobyl and will reprise his guest starring role on the second season of David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter. He is repped by Gersh, Circle of Confusion and UK’s The Artists Partnership.
Finnish actor Pääkkönen played Halfdan the Black on History’s Vikings and recently co-starred in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.
“’Game of Thrones’ has opened doors to some great stuff,” he told the site. I’m getting offered stuff I never would have.”
He will play a cowboy in the dramatization of Stephen King’s seven-book “Dark Tower” series.
Jerome says: “I’ve always said I’d like to play a cowboy – and now one has come along. I’m excited for that.”
Joana Ribeiro and Ana Padrão join The Dark Tower on Amazon as Susan Delgado and her aunt.
>>> Source
Michael Rooker has been cast in the Amazon Studios adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, currently filming the pilot episode on location in Croatia.
Rooker’s role in the series pilot is still being kept under wraps.
We finally know the director of Amazon’s ‘The Dark Tower’ pilot: Stephen Hopkins. Deadline snuck in this tidbit earlier today, in an article about the ‘Fugitive’ reboot from Quibi, which Hopkins is directing.
Hopkins recently directed the Focus Features film ‘Race’ and three episodes of the FOX spin-off ’24: Legacy.’ He also helmed 12 episodes of the flagship ’24’ series. Other film credits include New Line’s ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child,’ 20th Century Fox’s ‘Predator 2,’ and New Line’s ‘Lost in Space.’
Moreover, the cast members, that we know of, are below:
The series was originally going to tie in to the 2017 film of the same name, starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. But, the plan now is for the show to be a more faithful adaptation of the book series.
Meanwhile, Glen Mazzara (‘The Walking Dead,’ ‘Damien’) serves as executive producer and showrunner.
Below are some plot details of the Stephen King adaptation:
Additionally we know Deschain’s “ka-tet” will comprise of Cuthbert Allgood, Alain Johns, Ileen Ritter and Jamie De Curry, as well as his girlfriend, Susan Delgado.
If the show nabs a series order, the season will comprise of 13 episodes.
However, there is no decision from Amazon as of now, as the pilot is still in post-production.
>>> Source
Amazon Studios has passed on The Dark Tower pilot. The adaptation of Stephen King’s book came from executive producer/showrunner Glen Mazzara and MRC. The production company is shopping the two original scripts that were the basis for the pilot pickup, sources said.
The Dark Tower has always been considered very difficult to adapt to the screen, which explains the title’s lengthy road to being made into a feature by Sony and a pilot by Amazon. Largely because of the challenges translating the material, Amazon opted to go with a pilot vs. straight-to-series order, which is rare for a big-scale, big-budget production like The Dark Tower. In the end, I hear Amazon executives felt like the pilot was not on the level of other large-scope elevated genre series the streamer has in production/pre-production like Wheel Of Time and The Lord Of the Rings.
The Dark Tower TV series was designed to be independent from the 2017 film and was meant to be a more faithful retelling of the book than the movie was. It takes place many years before the events depicted in the feature and focused on the origin story of Roland Deschain’s (Sam Strike) – how he first became a gunslinger and got his guns, his first conflict with the man in black (Jasper Pääkkönen), his first love and his first mission as a gunslinger.
The cast of the pilot, which was never officially announced or confirmed, also is believed to have included Michael Rooker, Jerome Flynn and Joana Ribeiro.
King’s eight Dark Tower books draw from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror and Western.
Amazon's cancelled Dark Tower TV show would have had an epic and exciting three-season story arc following The Gunslinger from youth to adulthood.
Despite the series stalling at the pilot stage, Mazzara has revealed on The Kingcast, a popular podcast for King-obsessed fans, that he had already planned out the first three seasons of the show. Taking a more linear approach to the story than King does with the books, Mazzara would have spent season 1 exploring Deschain's youth, as seen in the fourth novel, Wizard and Glass. "Season 1 ended with the death of Susan. In Wizard and Glass very quickly you go from the death of Susan to the death of Gabrielle, (Deschain's) mother. I felt that I needed a season to give me real estate so that Gabrielle's death didn't step on Susan's and that it felt like an escalation." Mazzara goes on to say that season 2 would have covered material that is not explicitly seen in King's novels. "For season 2, the war with Farson was building. I was maybe going to use the shapeshifter story as part of season 2 and get to the death of Gabrielle and either the fall of Gilead there or the fall of Gilead would be the season 3 premiere." Finally, Mazzara says, the third season would have adapted material from the first two books:
“After we realized that the franchise was not viable, or not going to proceed, we determined we might now lay out the complete epic,” mentioned Mazarra. “Now we had a selection: can we return and begin with The Gunslinger? Do you begin and inform the story in a linear means after which interrupt that narrative and have this huge cutaway in your season four or season 5 to Wizard and Glass? That’s a viable possibility.” Nevertheless, they finally determined to start out with Younger Roland in order that the viewers could be invested in his journey somewhat than beginning with Guide 1, The Gunslinger, after which having to return and clarify that origin later.
As for the pilot, right here’s what followers of the books might have anticipated:
By way of making an attempt to stability adaptation versus staying devoted to the books, Mazzara felt that it was necessary to not mess with the key moments from the novels. “I had a rule with the writers that if one thing was actually, actually necessary that we had been going to attempt to make canon work,” explains Mazzara. “There was by no means going to be a model the place Roland didn’t shoot his mother. There was by no means going to be a model by which Susan lives. There was by no means going to a model by which Roland doesn’t drop Jake.”
Sadly, this can all stay an important “What if?” which is a disgrace, since The Dark Tower is clearly a wealthy and beloved sequence of books that simply wants the proper strategy for an adaptation. Whereas the failed film could have soured the effectively for a bit, I anticipate we haven’t seen the final of makes an attempt to provide The Dark Tower the adaptation it deserves.