After a long gestating series, Stephen King‘s The Dark Tower is on its way to becoming a film. After Universal and WB passed on the project, Sony Pictures picked it up, and now they have signed a director to helm the film, getting The Dark Tower that much closer to production.

A new report says that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo writer and A Royal Affair director and writer Nikolaj Arcel has been hired to write and direct the adaptation of the series of novels that center on gunslinger Roland Deschain. More on the story below.

Deadline was the first to report on the news. According to them, a series of films will be made, and a complimentary TV show will also be released by Media Rights Capital. This was initially the plan when the rights were originally at Universal. The ambitious plan was to have a trilogy of movies and a companion TV series with Ron Howard directing and Akiva Goldsman writing the first movie and first season of the show.

This would be the first major franchise under Sony Pictures CEO Tim Rothman. Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer and Howard, Weed Road’s Goldsman, and Erica Huggins are producing. King is also producing.

The current draft of the film has been co-written by Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner.

Arcel, who is reportedly a big fan of The Dark Tower series, and had to teach himself the English language in order to read the books in his native tongue. This was enough to convince studio execs that he was the right person for the job. He also presented the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as a pitch to show that he can handle dark material. Again, the studio was impressed with his work, as The Dark Tower will have “a mix of horror and fantasy.”

The series of novels center on Roland Deschain, a gunslinger reminiscent of the old west, who is on a quest to find the Dark Tower, a fabled building said to be the nexus of all universes.

Now that Sony has settled on a director, the next job is to find an actor to play Roland Deschain. Javier Bardem and Russell Crowe were attached to play Deschain at one point in time, but it is unclear if Sony is willing to explore those options still.

Arcel is currently attached to direct an adaptation of Don Winslow’s best-selling novel The Power of the Dog, and DreamWorks and Working Title adaptation of the Daphne Du Maurier novel Rebecca.

[Source: Deadline]