Massive Update on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower; Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey Confirmed
There was a time when it seemed that a feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower just wasn’t meant to be, as countless false starts have plagued the production over the years. But the first film in a planned franchise is finally headed our way, and today brings a substantial info dump.
For starters, Entertainment Weekly confirms that Idris Elba will star as gunslinger Roland Deschain, while Matthew McConaughey will play the villainous Man in Black in the Nikolaj Arcel-directed film. Shooting is set to begin in South Africa in seven weeks, and Sony plans on having it in theaters on February 17, 2017.
What can we expect from the hotly-anticipated film? According to King himself, the movie will open with the very same opening line as the first book in The Dark Tower series, though contrary to what we’ve all been reporting these last several months, the film isn’t actually an adaptation of that first book, The Gunslinger.
“[The movie] starts in media res, in the middle of the story instead of at the beginning, which may upset some of the fans a little bit, but they’ll get behind it, because it is the story,” King revealed.
“A lot of it takes place in our day, in the modern world,” Arcel added.
As for which books the first movie will cover, that information is being kept under wraps.
It’s official: The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. #DarkTowerMovie @McConaughey @IdrisElba
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 1, 2016
.@McConaughey you have one new follower. #DarkTowerMovie https://t.co/5fSKF02C7I
— Idris Elba (@idriselba) March 1, 2016
.@idriselba come and get me, I look forward to it. #DarkTowerMovie https://t.co/4gxqm2GPo3
— Matthew McConaughey (@McConaughey) March 1, 2016
Speaking about the casting, King noted that Idris Elba is the perfect man to bring Deschain to life.
“I love it. I think he’s a terrific actor, one of the best working in the business now,” the author says. “I visualized [Clint] Eastwood as Roland. I loved the Spaghetti Westerns and all those widescreen close-ups of his face, especially the ones where he’d been left out in the desert and was all covered with blisters and sunburn. I thought, ‘That’s my Roland.’ As the years went by, [the character] became a more particular individual in my own mind. He wasn’t Eastwood anymore. He was just … Roland.”
“For me the character is still the character. It’s almost a Sergio Leone character, like ‘the man with no name,’” King added. “He can be white or black; it makes no difference to me. I think it opens all kind of exciting possibilities for the backstory.”
Nikolaj Arcel will share screenwriting credit with Anders Thomas Jensen, Akiva Goldsman, and Jeff Pinkner; and Goldsman’s draft served as the foundation for the film. Sony’s plan, as we recently learned, is to bring King’s epic story to screens both big and small, and the film will pave way for that.
“They’re still holding on to this idea that they can do a TV series, and they’ve got it pegged for that,” King says.
The Dark Tower books tell the story of the fallen land of Mid-World through the eyes of Roland Deschain, a sort of frontiersman knight whose primary weapon is not a sword but a pair of revolvers. He’s on a quest to save his decaying world by reaching the tower that stands at the nexus point in time and space.
Producers of the film will be Akiva Goldsman and his Weed Road company; Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Erica Huggins of Imagine Entertainment; and Jeff Pinkner as executive producer. Stephen King is also a producer.
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