Production Watch: Dark Tower, Bigelow's Bin Laden, Reeves, Fukunaga

- Ron Howard has dropped a few nuggets about his planned Stephen King Dark Tower adaptation, for which Javier Bardem is still unconfirmed.

"I can’t really say who’ll be in it yet, but Javier Bardem has shown a great deal of interest. We’ll know by the end of the summer, when our flashing green light goes solid.” Producer Ron Grazer previously said that Bardem was "psychologically locked in," whatever that means. Rumors of the project being dead are just that, as Howard insists: "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.” Here's more from EW.

- Kathryn Bigelow's timely Osama bin Laden film with her Hurt Locker scripter Mark Boal has gone to Sony's Columbia Pictures. The film will focus on the black ops mission that in actuality ended with Bin Laden's death in May 2011. Sony's Amy Pascal says of the film, for which production will kick off late this summer:

"Kathryn and Mark have an outstanding perspective on the team that was hunting the most wanted man in the world. Mark is second to none as an investigative journalist, and Kathryn will bring the same kind of compelling authenticity and urgency that distinguished The Hurt Locker and made that film so memorable and special.”

A late 2012 release is planned.

- If Cary Fukunaga's Sin Nombre put the director on Hollywood's hot-directors list, Focus Features' Jane Eyre ratcheted him up a few more notches. Now he's keeping it interesting by taking on the Civil War heist genre, reports Variety. Focus has Fukunaga directing No Blood, No Guts, No Glory as well as writing the script with Chase Palmer (he wrote the original script which landed on the Black List in 2009).

- Even though Simon & Schuster's This Dark Endeavor: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein, the first in a series of novels from Kenneth Oppel, won't hit shelves or tablets until August 2011, it's already being adapted for the screen by Summit Entertainment. Matt Reeves (Let Me In, Cloverfield) will direct, and Jacob Aaron Estes is writing the screenplay. Here are more details. Reeves is also lined up to direct The Invisible Woman, vampire flick The Passage, 8 O'Clock in The Morning, and is rumored to be linked to a Cloverfield sequel. Here's our interview with Reeves.