Probably the only Stephen King novels not to made into a movie and / or a TV series, this series of seven books was written by Stephen King over a period of 22 years as his answer to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

The plot involves a gunslinger named Roland Deshain who roams an Old West-like landscape in search of a dark tower, which is rumored to be a magical portal to other worlds.

The sheer scale of the various books have always proved daunting to film makers and throughout the years several film-makers’ names have been attached to the project, the most recent being J.J. Abrams.

Now Universal Pictures have announced their wildly ambitious plans for a movie trilogy to be directed by Ron Howard (Da Vinci Code, Beautiful Mind) and scripted by Akiva Goldsman (I Am Legend, Batman & Robin), which will be followed by a TV series. No doubt there is enough material in King’s novels to warrant to all this attention, but the question remains whether it will all actually happen.

The other issue is that while the Dark Tower books have a dedicated following they are hardly Harry Potter-sized since Stephen King’s name no longer has the draw it had during his heyday in the 1980s.