It’s been a while since we’ve heard about an actor being up for a role in The Dark Tower, the long in development adaptation of author Stephen King‘s popular book series. Previous names attached to the adaptation have included Russell Crowe and Javier Bardem.

Both of those actors previously won an Academy Award, Crowe for 2000’s Gladiator and Bardem for 2007’s No Country for Old Men. Now comes word of a new actor who might star in the adaptation, and he’s also got an Oscar. It’s being reported that Matthew McConaughey, who recently won the Best Actor award for his work in Dallas Buyers Club, has entered into early talks for a role in The Dark Tower. But unlike Crowe and Bardem, who were up for the lead role of Roland Deschain, McConaughey is looking to play the film’s villain, a certain man in black.

A movie adaptation of Stephen King‘s popular book series The Dark Tower has been set up and developed at multiple movie studios over the years before being eventually dropped and moving on to the next studio willing to give it a shot.

The latest studio to take on the ambitious adaptation is Sony, who seems to have a lot of faith that it could be one of their next big franchises after we found out back in April that the first movie was being fast tracked by the studio.

Now comes word that Sony has found the spot they want to release the first movie on, setting a release date of January 13, 2017.

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.

Sony Pictures has found what they hope will become their next big franchise, and it’s one that other movie studios have tried to take on in the past before ultimately passing on. According to reports, Sony is teaming with Media Rights Capital to co-finance an adaptation of Stephen King‘s book series The Dark Tower, and they want to fast-track the production.

Universal was the first studio to try to adapt the books along with NBC Universal Television back in 2010 in what was going to be 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. It was so ambitious it was unbelievable, which is why it wasn’t all that shocking—just disappointing—when Universal dropped it. Then in 2012 Warner Brothers looked close to adapting the books, but they too decided it wouldn’t be worth it.

Yesterday we reported that Warner Bros. had passed on Ron Howard’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. Howard, who has been courting Russell Crowe (who previously starred in Howard’s A Beautiful Mind) for the role of the Gunslinger, a role that was previously bestowed to Javier Bardem when that project was being shopped at Universal. So with two studios having already passed on The Dark Tower, some might think that this project may be too much to handle.

After all the deal does call for the adaptation to start off as a film, then switch over to the small screen for a short televised series run, then turned back into a movie finale. The financial implications would hurt the distributing studio if the first part of the planned adaptation failed. So it’s really no surprise that the studios didn’t want to take the risk. Well you might think that other studios might not want to even touch this project with a 10-foot pole, but Media Rights Capital has stepped in as the next studio hoping to make Howard’s dream come true.