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Posted

Staying quickly on the topic of books being made into movies I read a long time ago there was serious effort being made into a Foundation series of movies. Think it was Sony Entertainment that was involved. There are two ways it can come out.

One as good as the LOTR adaptations were or two it could be the Queen of the Damned all over again and that'll just be as bad or worse as iRobot's film adaptation.

Posted

Those books don't get made because people in Hollywood don't read unless the book is currently making a ton of money and even then they don't read it themselves. They have people that do that, and those people don't get to choose what to read either... it's sent to them by another group of people... and then we pay $13 for movies that we already saw...

Posted (edited)

Staying quickly on the topic of books being made into movies I read a long time ago there was serious effort being made into a Foundation series of movies. Think it was Sony Entertainment that was involved. There are two ways it can come out.

One as good as the LOTR adaptations were or two it could be the Queen of the Damned all over again and that'll just be as bad or worse as iRobot's film adaptation.

Roland Emmerich's gonna direct the Foundation movie. It'll suck.

Edited by Gubaba
Posted

Going on what Graham and >EXO< have kinda said there are so many great no scratch that excellent books both from Sci Fi and "normal" subjects that would make excellent films. JK Rowling has done all right out of Harry Potter and I'm sure that the Tolkien estate have made a couple of dollars from LOTR more recently. Just to add to the list you have so much from the likes of Fredrick Pohl and Arthur Clarke and Issac Asimo alone they could keep Hollywood going for years, and thats without going into the normal everyday type stories that other authors have produced.

Day of the Triffids, along with the Tripods and The Midwich Cuckoos have all been done before mostly very badly.

Triffids has been done at least four times the BBC did it in the eighties my friends dad was in it. Nowadays it sucks in the same campy low budget way that original BSG and Original Dr Who does. Don't get me started on the 50's film. recentlky they re-did it for T.V as a two parter type thing updated the story a little but it still missed the mark.

Tripods was also done by the BBC in the Eighties great designs of the Tripod vehicles but everything else was 99p store low budget. see Dr Who, Blakes 7 etc. Midwich has been done by Hollywood in Black and white (1960's) and more recently a radio play by the BBC and then a film which had a couple of big names in it. It sucked.

The point of this is we have proved a million times over remakes rarely work, In Sci Fi BSG is about the only exception.

When they had the writers strike they could have just binned them all and used books as source material.

Posted

Enh, I still dislike the notion that books only exist so that movies may be made out of them. Most good books are intensely non-cinematic.

Books are generally good when they're interior, that is, they convey the characters' thoughts, feelings, and impressions. But thinking is difficult to convey in a film. For me (and I know I've mentioned this before), a good example is the banquet scene in Dune, where EVERYTHING each character says carries an intended double or triple meaning. The book follows Jessica's thoughts as she interprets what everyone is REALLY saying. It works beautifully in the book, but would be impossible to film successfully.

Posted

Enh, I still dislike the notion that books only exist so that movies may be made out of them. Most good books are intensely non-cinematic.

Books are generally good when they're interior, that is, they convey the characters' thoughts, feelings, and impressions. But thinking is difficult to convey in a film. For me (and I know I've mentioned this before), a good example is the banquet scene in Dune, where EVERYTHING each character says carries an intended double or triple meaning. The book follows Jessica's thoughts as she interprets what everyone is REALLY saying. It works beautifully in the book, but would be impossible to film successfully.

So true, sometime though it works with a narative although in the case of Dune that would be as difficult as trying to get it in to celluloid form in the first place.

Posted

Agreed, not evey book would work as a film, or even needs to be made into a film, but there are a huge number of books that would make excellent movies.

I'd certainly prefer Hollywood try to mine books, rather that just make endless remakes.

Graham

Posted

I'd rather see film makers make long adaptations of books, like an HBO series type thing. I know it'll never or rarely happen and if they did, it wouldn't follow the book but trying to squeeze all that story into 2 hours is just kind of a disservice to anything worth reading. Short stories or single arc comic books are probably more of an ideal source for films. Unless it's something like LOTR and they make 12 hours out of each book. But I still feel like the LOTR wasn't a good source, it moved way too slow for me (or maybe it was Peter Jackson's version that made it seem like it took forever.) The BBC seem to be more capable of such things, but in the U.S (Hollywood) all the producers want the 2 hour version of every story or the trilogy of it.

Posted

Agreed, not evey book would work as a film, or even needs to be made into a film, but there are a huge number of books that would make excellent movies.

I'd certainly prefer Hollywood try to mine books, rather that just make endless remakes.

Graham

Yeah, I'd agree with that.

I'd rather see film makers make long adaptations of books, like an HBO series type thing. I know it'll never or rarely happen and if they did, it wouldn't follow the book but trying to squeeze all that story into 2 hours is just kind of a disservice to anything worth reading. Short stories or single arc comic books are probably more of an ideal source for films. Unless it's something like LOTR and they make 12 hours out of each book. But I still feel like the LOTR wasn't a good source, it moved way too slow for me (or maybe it was Peter Jackson's version that made it seem like it took forever.) The BBC seem to be more capable of such things, but in the U.S (Hollywood) all the producers want the 2 hour version of every story or the trilogy of it.

No, the books moved slowly, too. I'm totally NOT an impatient reader (having read a good percentage of "the classics" and especially relishing post-WWI European Modernists like Proust, Joyce, and Mann, who generally wrote huge books (Proust is 3000 pages plus) that have no plot to speak of), but I find the first half of Fellowship of the Ring to be INCREDIBLY tough to get through. The second half is only marginally better. The last time I read the books, it took me more than a month to read Fellowship, but only three weeks to read The Two Towers AND Return of the King, appendices included.

And yeah...most of the time, a miniseries or something would be better. And then you've got weird situations like The Neverending Story, where the first movie only adapted the first half of the book, but the second movie wasn't based on the second half... :wacko:

Posted

They filmed Dragonriders of Pern in some way, didn't they??

From what I know, Pern is one of those properties that has been optioned but never come to the screen. R.D. Moore was going to bring it to the WB as a series at one point, but that failed. Someone probably still has the film rights, but nothing's in progress that I've heard about.

Posted

I really don't know if Pern would ever translate well into film... In order to stop the dread space thread they bio-engineer giant psychic, teleporting, fire breathing dragons they have to ride on... some stuff really only works in books.

Posted

I really don't know if Pern would ever translate well into film... In order to stop the dread space thread they bio-engineer giant psychic, teleporting, fire breathing dragons they have to ride on... some stuff really only works in books.

If they can make a movie of the boardgame "Battleship" (of all things FFS!), I'm sure that one could be done of Pern.

Taksraven

Posted

If they can make a movie of the boardgame "Battleship" (of all things FFS!), I'm sure that one could be done of Pern.

Taksraven

"can" and "should" are two different things. ^_^

Posted

"can" and "should" are two different things. ^_^

Not if you think like a Hollywood exec. Hasn't this entire thread taught you anything?

Taksraven

Posted

I really don't know if Pern would ever translate well into film... In order to stop the dread space thread they bio-engineer giant psychic, teleporting, fire breathing dragons they have to ride on... some stuff really only works in books.

If they could turn "I Robot" into a film then they can certainly handle Pern, "I Robot" being a good sign or a bad sign I'm not so sure about... (Although I personally liked the film - I was expecting an action movie with a bit more going for it then normal and that is just what I got, and I had the urge to buy a pair of sneakers right after the movie for some reason)

Posted

If they could turn "I Robot" into a film then they can certainly handle Pern, "I Robot" being a good sign or a bad sign I'm not so sure about... (Although I personally liked the film - I was expecting an action movie with a bit more going for it then normal and that is just what I got, and I had the urge to buy a pair of sneakers right after the movie for some reason)

So I'm not the only one then. Subliminal messaging wacko.gif

Posted

If they could turn "I Robot" into a film then they can certainly handle Pern, "I Robot" being a good sign or a bad sign I'm not so sure about... (Although I personally liked the film - I was expecting an action movie with a bit more going for it then normal and that is just what I got, and I had the urge to buy a pair of sneakers right after the movie for some reason)

I robot the movie is unrecognizable from the book. If they're just going to make Pern: Hip young kids with flying dragons fight evil... then why call it Pern in the first place?

Posted

Not necessarily. Quite recently one of the producers, Joshua Long, was interviewed by ANN and he stated that project was still on track and they're reworking the script.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/anncast/2010-10-15

More likely the film is in development hell.

I sure hope it's in development hell. Not that I'm totally against a Cowboy Bebop live flick, but Keanu as Spike would make this project far more a Bogus Journey than an Execellent Adventure...

Posted

I think that the Dan Dare film has the potential to be interesting and fairly original. (at least to the big screen)

Taksraven

Posted

I sure hope it's in development hell. Not that I'm totally against a Cowboy Bebop live flick, but Keanu as Spike would make this project far more a Bogus Journey than an Execellent Adventure...

Keanu is a rather mediocre actor I'll agree with you on that, but if the film doesn't have a Hollywood heavyweight behind it, it doesn't stand a chance of being made.

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