I admire Ron Howard's for his incredible ambition in trying to adapt Steven King's The Dark Tower series into a trilogy of films with a TV series as the connective tissue between movies.  I don't think he'll be able to pull it off because he's a bland director who thoughts that The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons needed to be humorless messes that retained all of the stupidity of the novels.But earlier in May, Universal considered pulling out of The Dark Tower due to budget concerns.  The following week, we reported that Universal was working to bring down the budget and had pushed back the film's start date.  Howard has now provided an update on the project's status.  According to Howard, they're now eyeing a spring 2012 start date but they're stilling waiting for the green light.  Hit the jump for the full quote from Howard where he also casts doubt on the involvement of Javier Bardem.Howard tells EW:

"We had to pull back to our September start date due to budget delays and ongoing story development and logistical issues, but Dark Tower is moving forward.  We're thinking of starting in early spring now...We’ll know by the end of the summer, when our flashing green light goes solid."

Javier Bardem had been heavily tipped to play the lead role of gunslinger Roland Deschain, but Howard has now cast doubt on that casting:

I can’t really say who’ll be in it yet, but Javier Bardem has shown a great deal of interest.

So while that positions Bardem as the frontrunner for the role, he's not officially on board yet.  While Universal had scheduled the first part of the trilogy for May 17, 2013, the rescheduling of the film's start date likely means the release date will also be pushed back.

Here's the synopsis for The Dark Tower:

In the story, Roland Deschain is the last living member of a knightly order known as gunslingers and the last of the line of “Arthur Eld”, his world’s analogue of King Arthur. The world he lives in is quite different from our own, yet it bears striking similarities to it. Politically organized along the lines of a feudal society, it shares technological and social characteristics with the American Old West but is also magical. While the magical aspects are largely gone from Mid-World, some vestiges of them remain, along with the relics of a highly advanced, but long vanished, society.

Roland’s quest is to find the Dark Tower, a fabled building said to be the nexus of all universes. Roland’s world is said to have “moved on”, and indeed it appears to be coming apart at the seams as mighty nations have been torn apart by war, entire cities and regions vanish without a trace and time does not flow in an orderly fashion. Even the Sun sometimes rises in the north and sets in the east. As the series opens, Roland’s motives, goals and age are unclear, though later installments shed light on these mysteries. [Wikipedia]