Ron Howard

And now, the story of a big studio movie that lost its creative team, and the one director who had no choice but to keep it all together — it’s Han Solo’s re-hiring process.

We’re still reeling from the news that Phil Lord and Chris Miller have walked off (or been fired from) the Han Solo spinoff Star Wars anthology film, but this movie has a release date in less than a year, and it is coming to theaters, with Lord/Miller or not. Although the news that the directing duo was not finishing Han Solo was announced today, the search for a replacement was already underway. Deadline says that Lucasfilm’s top pick at the moment is Ron Howard, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of movies like Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and The Da Vinci Code:

The Dark Tower movie hasn’t even dropped a first trailer, let alone confirmation a TV arm of the franchise will ever come to fruition. Still, executive producer Ron Howard at least remains optimistic, saying “creatively, it could work very well.”

It was only a matter of time. The long string of biographical depictions of troubled geniuses, an ignominious tradition more recently carried on by the likes of The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, had to inevitably yield an Albert Einstein biopic...

Inferno marks the third movie from director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks based on the popular novels by Dan Brown about Harvard professor and symbologist Robert Langdon. They’re all vary degrees of bad — and Inferno is easily the worst of the bunch — but what’s particularly galling about this franchise are the years Howard and Hanks, two of our most dependable filmmakers, have wasted on it. Together they’ve made Splash and Apollo 13; separately their credits include Cinderella Man, The Paper, Saving Private Ryan, Captain Phillips and so many others. How many great movies could they have made, as a team or as individuals, if they hadn’t committed their talents to these cruddy thrillers?

Novels like The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned cemented F. Scott Fitzgerald’s status as a literary icon, but some bookish types (myself included) would argue that his wife, Zelda, was the more talented of the pair. Her creative contributions have certainly been less valued in comparison to her husband, but thanks to Ron Howard, she’s finally getting the biopic she deserves (or one would hope), with Jennifer Lawrence set to play the title role in Zelda.

About the only pop culture gag repeated as often as Trump’s Zapp Brannigan quotes would be Arrested Development narrator Ron Howard fact-checking the candidate. Now, we’ve finally gotten our wish, as the world’s worst election finally gets the Trump-rested Development it deserves.

There’s no stopping The Dark Tower from making its way to movie screens this time, but one still has to wonder if Ron Howard’s ambitious, multi-platform adaptation might have simplified its approach to finally go before cameras. Well, whether or not Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey succeed in bringing The Dark Tower to life, Howard says a TV tie-in series is still in development.

Fans of The Dark Tower have been speculating for a while about how the movie adaptation could be reshuffling the story around a little bit. Characters were cast that don't appear in the seven-book-long series until much later than the first installment, which hinted at some possible plot reconfiguration. A promo image of the Horn of Eld posted by Stephen King himself on his Twitter also suggested that this version of The Dark Tower might not take the same path as the one we’re familiar with. Later, for EW’s coverage of the film, director Nikolaj Arcel talked about taking the story in a slightly different direction from the books, utilizing plot elements but moving them around a bit to make the story more movie-friendly.

The latest trailer for Inferno is, unfortunately, not as intriguing as the last, but if you’re a big fan of exposition, then this one is for you. Tom Hanks and Ron Howard reunite for the third and final chapter in the Da Vinci Code trilogy, which sees our puzzle-solving protagonist Robert Langdon battling the apocalypse — at least it seems less painful than that one with the X-Men.