The word epic gets tossed around a lot these days, but one series that truly earns the word is Stephen King's The Dark Tower. It's a massive, sprawling, complex, funny, tragic, horrifying and heroic story of gunslinger Roland Deschain's quest for the fabled Dark Tower. It's got a killer ensemble of characters, some stunning imagery, and a very special brand of fantasy that is a unique combination of the old west, magic, technology and interdimensional travel.
So of course it's ripe for a big-screen adaptation. The trouble is, however, that the book series is so epic, it's going to take a massive commitment to the source material to really pull it off, and so far no studio has pulled the trigger on the production. But now it seems that Sony has decided to revive the project with producers Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Akiva Goldsman and Erica Huggins. And not only are they planning to make the movies (Goldsman and Jeff Pinker wrote a new version of the first script that King himself apparently loves), they're also still planning to do a side TV series that explores material that wouldn't work in the movies.
That last part is an inspired decision since the fourth book in the series (Wizard and Glass) is primarily a flashback to when Roland Deschain was a youngster first learning the ways of being a gunslinger. That part of the story would require a completely separate and much younger cast than the rest of the movies, so doing it on TV makes perfect sense. Plus, Roland's early days are actually some of the best material in the entire series and could easily sustain a show on their own.
Of course the big question that comes up every time The Dark Tower inches toward becoming a reality (and it happens often enough that fans have gotten used to it falling apart every time) is who should play Roland. In the past names like Javier Bardem and Russell Crowe have been linked to him, and we've even made the argument for a couple actors, but we're going to throw a new name into the mix: Pedro Pascal.
Pascal may not be a huge name on the big screen yet, but last year he earned a devoted fan base thanks to his role as Oberyn Martell, aka The Viper, on Game of Thrones. And while Oberyn is a more boisterous character than the gunslinger, it showed that Pascal has got the same effortless confidence, commanding presence and inherent trust that is going to be essential to Roland.
That's our current top pick. Who would you cast?
