Upcoming fantasy movies - spoilers strictly prohibited

[Scott DeWar]

Greetings and salutations.

Some have known me for years through thick and thin, others have met me as the officially un-official automated EnWorld greeting bot.

Today I start this thread for a link I stumbled upon that discusses the movie and television industries upcoming proposed productions in the wake of Mr. George R. R. Martin's "Epic Mini series", 'Game of Thrones'.

Referred to link here

I wish to know your thoughts on this, without any spoilers, if you please.

If there are any so crass as to give away content of any proposed or produced visual media listed, I humbly request the mods to loan me the Most Holy HAMMER OF BANNING That I may politely smite the cretinous scallywag
[*] thoroughly about the head and shoulders.
[*] Ahem. Sorry for the strong language.

 

[Jhaelen]

There's quite a few of my favorite novels on that list:
- Dan Simmon's "Hyperion"
- Iain Banks' "Consider Phlebas"
- Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash"
If done right, these three should be excellent; if done badly, I'd still watch them!

Also some classics:
- Larry Niven's "Ringworld"
- Isaak Asimov's "Foundation"
- Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light"
These are a bit trickier and will likely require a bit of updating the source material to be appealing.

Then there's a few that I consider very unlikely to be good, despite (or because of) the source material:
- Alan Moore's "Watchmen"
- Andrzej Sapkowski's "The Witcher"
- Robert E. Howard's "Conan"

And finally there are some that may become sleeper hits:
- N.K. Jemisin's "Broken Earth": I haven't read the novels yet, but they've been highly praised.
- Matt Ruff's "Lovecraft Country" sounds fascinating - never heard about it before, though.

 

[Scott DeWar]

so many I recognize, and I agree with your catagorization.

Especially Conan. Mako and James Earl Jones had the full hold on their plot points.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I have no hopes for a good Conan, unless it has an 'R' rating and is directed by someone with a good track record for suspenseful horror and action shots. So yeah...

Good Omens could be a hit. I'm surprised the BBC never did a mini-series for it before.

Lord of Light is one of my favorite science fiction novels. The scenes are very fantastic and visual, so I don't think it would fit well as a TV series.

Snow Crash from Amazon? Oh god... the largely anti-technology Corporation book put to screen by one of the largest technological Corporations in the world? I expect either something quite meta or a watered down product.

 

[Scott DeWar]

I wish there were some sort of trailer for these movies.

 

[Eltab]

Asimov's Foundation Trilogy could make an excellent movie / mini-series. The director &c would have to stick to the themes the author developed, not what they think should have been written.
(Given the theme of social/technological decay and a potential 1000-year span for the whole series, the technology should look clunky.)

The last few Foundation novels Asimov wrote, had his IRL opinions slathered over them, and would go over less-well.

In Prelude to Foundation Asimov made Hari Seldon into himself, and tried to write a 'tie all my life's works together novel'. Hello, R. Daneel Olivaw under an alias, what are you doing here/now? This one I would support writing an improved version - still keeping within the larger themes being explored by the series.

 

[MNblockhead]

Pat Rothfuss's Kingkiller Cronicles is getting a movie and Showtime series:

Patrick Rothfuss’ series The Kingkiller Chronicle will get an appropriately epic multimedia adaptation, with both a television series and a feature film exploring different corners of Rothfuss’ universe. While Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda is hard at work on Showtime’s prequel series, a recent report from Variety provides an update on the movie side of things: Spider-Man and Evil Deaddirector Sam Raimi is in talks to direct the feature film adaptation of The Name of the Wind, the first book in the series.

https://www.tor.com/2018/01/29/sam-...ion-of-patrick-rothfuss-the-name-of-the-wind/

 

[Scott DeWar]

Pat Rothfuss's Kingkiller Cronicles is getting a movie and Showtime series:



https://www.tor.com/2018/01/29/sam-raimi-to-direct-the-film-adaptation-of-patrick-rothfuss-the-name-of-the-wind/[/QUOTE]

from your link I give the quote:

" .. .. .. .. .,. currently being written by Lindsey Beer, who served as a writer on Transformers: The Last Knight. Her other upcoming projects include the movie adaptation of Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking (starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley), to be released in 2019, and a forthcoming adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, projected for 2021."

the accented portions of my doing, they give me cause for concern

 

[Cleon]

" .. .. .. .. .,. currently being written by Lindsey Beer, who served as a writer on Transformers: The Last Knight. Her other upcoming projects include the movie adaptation of Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking (starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley), to be released in 2019, and a forthcoming adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, projected for 2021."

the accented portions of my doing, they give me cause for concern

I can understand your concern, the writer does seem a bit of an unknown commodity and the Transformers movies as hardly glowing examples of writing. Although in fairness, The Last Knight was one of the ones I couldn't be bothered seeing so I guess there's the possibility it was OK.

Curious, there's no Lindsey Beer listed in the writers' credits for The Last Knight on IMDB, but the Wikipedia version list her as one of the writers' room members.

The IMDB page for Lindsey Beer says she's only got one finished movie to her credit - namely Sierra Burgess Is a Loser. All the others writing credits are either still in production or just "announced" and seem to be pretty big productions - including Godzilla vs. Kong.

It inclines me towards a "wait and see" for these titles.

 

[Tristissima]

Snow Crash from Amazon? Oh god... the largely anti-technology Corporation book put to screen by one of the largest technological Corporations in the world? I expect either something quite meta or a watered down product.

Ugh. Snow Crash ~ I mean, I'm still bitter cuz all my friends told me to read it cuz I love ancient Sumer and just, no. Just, no. Diamond Age, Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, on the other hand ~ THAT I would 186% be down to watch obsessively. I will say, considering Neal's famous skills at ending his novels, the episodic TV series format might really work for his storytelling, mebbe better than the prose novel.

Asimov's Foundation Trilogy could make an excellent movie / mini-series. The director &c would have to stick to the themes the author developed, not what they think should have been written.
(Given the theme of social/technological decay and a potential 1000-year span for the whole series, the technology should look clunky.)

The last few Foundation novels Asimov wrote, had his IRL opinions slathered over them, and would go over less-well.

I will say, as concerns IRL opinions, I have some concerns about Foundation Trilogy's themes and how they would interact with the current sociopolitical landscape of the US. I found a good chunk of the series technocratic and elitist in a way that I've become sensitized to as Silicon Valley girl, born and raised. I could see the origins of what seemed a very dehumanizing, caste-based, unassailable/unquestionable, hierarchical/power-over government model that had been argued by some of my more engineering-minded friends in Asimov's world creation.

In the current climate, with so many of those friends (who are liberals, progressives, and libertarians) feeling free to throw around ableist and sanist slurs in description of Trump, as they did back in G-Dub's day, li'l ol' crazy anarchist me worries about throwing narrative energy into an idea like "psychohistory" and Hari Seldon's almost-Nietzschean ability to predict and (vaguely) determine future events by means of his intellect and reason.

I may not have communicated well ~ my apologies if my point wasn't clear. In addition, I have tried to leave some things out of this post to prevent flames. I am hoping that we can dig into the themes of the books (or not, if no one else is interested ~ is OK, too) and their reception in US culture without getting into complaining about each other's points of view...