Stephen King, Imagine Entertainment and Weed Road are in talks to create a movie trilogy and TV series based on King's "The Dark Tower" series. Universal Pictures is in talks to distribute.

Ron Howard will direct from a script by Akiva Goldsman. Howard's Imagine Entertainment partner Brian Grazer will produce with Goldsman and King.

At the age of 19, Stephen King decided he would like to write an epic similar to "The Lord of the Rings." The "Spaghetti Westerns" of that time and a poem written by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," became the inspiration for his magnum opus. The series written and published separately over a period of 22 years consists of seven books and the short story, "The Little Sisters of Eluria" published in his short story collection, "Everything's Eventual."

The first book, "The Gunslinger," introduces Roland Deschain of Gilead as he pursues the man in black to the mountains that separate the desert from the Western Sea. Along the way he rescues the boy, Jake, who is from a different time and place, and soon they become ka-tet in spite of Roland's single-minded goal of reaching the man in black at all costs.

The book series was once developed by J.J. Abrams and his "Lost" team of Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.