Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey to star in film adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower
One of Hollywood's most ambitious (and longest gestating) projects is finally bound for the big screen. Stephen King has confirmed that The Dark Tower — an adaptation of his sprawling series of the same name — has formally entered production. Idris Elba will star as protagonist Roland Deschain, opposite Matthew McConaughey as his nemesis, the man in black. Nikolaj Arcel — best known for helming 2012's A Royal Affair, which landed an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film — will direct.
The Dark Tower is often described as King's magnum opus, but the series' length and density — it spans eight hefty novels, contains hundreds of characters, and is basically impossible to coherently summarize — has made it enormously difficult to translate to the big screen. A near-miss came in 2010, when director Ron Howard mounted an ambitious plan to adapt The Dark Tower as a more focused film trilogy, with a supplemental cable TV series to flesh out the franchise's other stories. In the end, King told Entertainment Weekly, "cold feet and money" got in the way.
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