Roland Deschain, the Dark Tower awaits.

Deadline New York reports that a deal is "coming together quickly" between Stephen King, Imagine Entertainment and Weed Road to forge a film trilogy and television series out of King's The Dark Tower series. A Beautiful Mind collaborators Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are directing and writing the project respectively, while Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment will produce alongside Goldsman and King. Universal is reportedly in talks to acquire the full package, apparently beating Warner Bros. to the punch.

King's epic The Dark Tower novel series tells the tale of gunslinger Roland Deschain and his quest to find the Dark Tower, a fabled structure that holds the key to the nexus of all universes. An adaptation was previously in development through Lost collaborators J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, but seeing as the ABC series already has so much in common with The Dark Tower and King's other works, I'm not too disappointed that the Lost team is off the project.

But I'm also not sure that Howard is the right pick for the series. His heart is certainly in the right place and it's hard to fault the guy that helped bring Arrested Development to television screens around the world, but I just loathe The Da Vinci Code so much that it's hard to get excited about his involvement on The Dark Tower.

It also bears repeating — the permanent, forever and forever kind of repeating — that Akiva Goldsman wrote Batman & Robin. All the solid work he's done on Fringe and other properties since then still hasn't washed that terrible taste out of most people's mouths.

All that said, I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic, if only because a Dark Tower television series sounds pretty rad. Let's just hope these guys know what they're doing.