A TV series is a lot more practical than a film series, since it is a soap opera in many ways.
Joel Send a noteboard - 21/05/2012 01:23:04 AM
Perhaps that was inevitable given how much epic fantasy is derived from TLotR, and how much of it is in turn derived from Das Nibelungenlied.
I do not think the special effects budget as much an obstacle as casting is; as such things go, TWoT is not chock full o' "big 'splosions." Some of the most memorable scenes provide obvious instances (e.g. Dumai's Wells, the Cleansing, almost every direct combat between Rand and Forsaken,) but most episodes involving the One Power and similar non-material phenomena can be easily, convincingly and inexpensively depicted by some combination of CGI, super-imposition, stop-motion filming and/or thin wires.
Much of fantasys renaissance in the past century comes from its appeal over science fiction in offering other-worldly elements heightened by their presence in more familiar environments. The cost of portraying science fictions more exotic realms could well increase fantasys appeal to mass media. Filming TLotR required no more than an unindustrialized New Zealand location, rather than the demands of filming an Arrakis, Coruscant or Babylon 5. In TWoTs case, wattle and daub facades could furnish most towns, villages and even cities, with some location shots at Neuschwanstein for the various palaces. The AoL would require more elaborate sets, but except for TSR and TEotWs Prologue I cannot recall any scenes involving it anyway. The biggest challenges would probably be the Stone and the White Tower, but neither would be an insurmountable cost.
Casting is where I fear the problems would arise, because of the sheer number of actors you rightly note would be required. We would most likely see many prominent characters portrayed by relatively (or completely) unknown actors, as was the case with much of the TLotR: No one had heard of Viggo Mortensen or Orlando Bloom until then, Ian McKellen was a well established stage actor but had only recently begun emerging on screen thanks to the X-Men films, and John Rhys-Davies was (and still is) no more than a (very good) character actor. The quality of the undertaking would probably depend on finding many good (or at least decent) actors willing to work for scale playing characters like Dobraine, Basel Gill, Tam al'Thor etc. To that I can only say, "good luck!" because, while it would be as easy to find a horde of extras to play silent armies in TWoT as it was in "Braveheart" and so many similar offerings, the hundreds of speaking roles would be quite a challenge. Many could be cut or combined for films, but that could only be done on a limited basis if a TV series were to remain even remotely true to the feel of the books.
Do not count it out though; "Little House" was on the air and quite popular for many years, and the main reason was a setting offering more appeal than just another generic soap. The recent release of the "Dark Shadows" parody brings to mind an even better example (made ripe for mockery by the similar and successful "Twilight" series.) The original TV series was no more or less than a "vampire soap," but the gothic elements made it just unique and interesting enough to be more than JUST a soap.
In terms of WoT films though, the only hope of success would be combining multiple books in virtually every installment. Filming a movie usually takes about as long as writing a book, so Harry Potter fans got to see the main cast grow up before their eyes. TWoT consists of twice as many books spanning a mere couple of years, and no actors now appropriate to play protagonists in their late teens would remain so two decades from now. The best bet might be filming movies like this:
1) TEotW-TDR (with the finale being Rand taking Callandor)
2) TSR-LoC (with the finale being Dumai's Wells)
3) ACoS-WH (with the finale being the Cleansing)
4) CoT-TGS (with the finale being Rands epiphany)
5) ToM and AMoL (with the finale being, well, the finale)
That MIGHT be manageable, but would involve a lot of cramming with the first two films (on the other hand, compressing TPoD and WH into the end of ACoS might almost make them bearable, though it would make the last half of the movie pretty boring until the Cleansing.) I honestly do not expect it to ever happen, and certainly not well, but then, I always said the same thing about TLotR, and Jackson did a phenomenal job depicting the world (he just butchered the plot.)
The details are from more precise reports:
Universal have bought the full rights for seven years. They have four years left to put a movie in the theaters or a mini-series on the air, or they lose their option to extend their ownership of the rights. The rights will revert to RJ's Succession again, which is what Harriet apparently doesn't hide much she wishes happens.
By Hollywood standards, that's a short time for a big VFX project for which they still have no script (according to the DM owner who read the latest version, it's terrible), and rumors are the movie is already shelved as a kind of potential John Carter - and that'd be a wise decision as it's exactly what it would turn out to be.
That's terribly short for them to turn around, rethink the project as a mini-series (even assuming they would consider this at Universal) and get broadcasters interested, then write and preproduce it and enter production, with broadcast starting almost a year later, typically for big minis.
As well say this project is dead, and no other project will start before 2016 at the earliest, which again would take 3-4 years minimum to develop into anything going into production.
In the meantime, trendier and much easier to manage candidates for TV/movie adaption of Fantasy will no doubt come out. GoT is a big success for HBO because it's HBO, but it's not the kind of success that attracts the big networks right now. Way too expensive, and beside HBO has developped this reputation for ultra solid series that make foreign broadcasters fight to buy them, which isn't much a reality anymore for the network shows that often gets sold at rebate or not at all these days. The odds of an adaptation of WOT in any foreseeable future are very, very bad.
Adapting WOT is a terrible idea anyway. The whole interest of the series is its detailed plot and massive cast, and the character interactions. Yes, it does attract a certain kind of readers, and it annoys the hell out of a whole lot of other Fantasy fans who expected something more traditionally epic and who've lost patience along the way. What they don't seem to understand though, if that any attempt to trim WOT down too significantly would result in a generic epic hero's journey that would be essentially an unholy mixture of a Tolkien and Arthurian rip-off.
WOT is like this huge Fantasy soap (aka Feuilleton, for the litterary counterpart and ancestor to TV soaps. Think Alexandre Dumas) set on an epic background. Of course, no TV soap would ever have the budget to adapt this, but it would be the right format for it (not with soap style writing and acting, of course). So basically, WOT is very much something for the written medium and audiovisual adaptations would totally denature it, unlike GOT, which is written much more like an historical drama, and which lended itself much better to shortening/adaptation. You cut the battles and big scenes from GOT for budget reasons, you still have a good, fairly theatrical drama, excellent for the miniseries format. You cut the epic stuff from WOT, you end up with a soap. You cut tons of secondary characters to keep it anywhere close to a manageable cast, you end up with a very bad soap.
Of course there are ways to condense the plot, but the problem is that WOT isn't that much about plot (which is an arch-typical good vs. evil story, its main originality is to have split the cental hero into an ensemble of them), its essence if far more in all that goes on around the plot, with the characters. That's all those little things that could interest some TV viewers (and annoy many others), but there's no way to make this truly manageable and still be WOT.. the series has over 2000 named characters, hundreds of them have been recurrent, dozens have done so more or less regularly and many fairly significant ones even skip many books. That would be a nightmare for TV. The core cast is huge, and they would have to rely on a massive rooster of recurrent guest stars, and the problems with guest stars are that very often, they're just not available when you want them. If you inflate some roles so they're there regularly through all seasons, you make the core cast even bigger, and you don't make the story shorter.. you end up adding subplots to a story that doesn't need any more.
I very much doubt an American network in the current state of the business would seriously consider an adventure like WOT. Yes, it might have some success, but it would be an expensive show, so financial success would be relative. And the thing is, the networks care only for money, and that's one of these complicated projects they never cared much for, and one of those for which the first season might make or break the show because it's one of those shows with weekly continuity, something the networks always hesitate a lot over and often end up dumping along the way, because it's very difficult to get new viewers further down the line. Typically, those series lose viewers each year, and you hope they'll retain enough to see it through the end of the story, otherwise bye-bye.
In the end, there's much, much easier shows to develop and manage that could make them the same money or more.
And for those with delusions HBO might eventually pick it up... WOT may be Fantasy, but it doesn't have the tone or aspects of the stories that interest HBO.
I like WOT a lot, as books, but the closest comparison to WOT that's been seen on TV is Little House on the Prairie. And yes, I'm serious.
Buy the characters, buy the world, change the timeline so it doesn't take place in the LB years and write episodic stories about Warders and AS and so on. That would still be closer to the tone of WOT than any attempt to reasonably adapt the series itself. Not that I wish this ever happens (and it won't, Jordan explicitely forbade this)
Universal have bought the full rights for seven years. They have four years left to put a movie in the theaters or a mini-series on the air, or they lose their option to extend their ownership of the rights. The rights will revert to RJ's Succession again, which is what Harriet apparently doesn't hide much she wishes happens.
By Hollywood standards, that's a short time for a big VFX project for which they still have no script (according to the DM owner who read the latest version, it's terrible), and rumors are the movie is already shelved as a kind of potential John Carter - and that'd be a wise decision as it's exactly what it would turn out to be.
That's terribly short for them to turn around, rethink the project as a mini-series (even assuming they would consider this at Universal) and get broadcasters interested, then write and preproduce it and enter production, with broadcast starting almost a year later, typically for big minis.
As well say this project is dead, and no other project will start before 2016 at the earliest, which again would take 3-4 years minimum to develop into anything going into production.
In the meantime, trendier and much easier to manage candidates for TV/movie adaption of Fantasy will no doubt come out. GoT is a big success for HBO because it's HBO, but it's not the kind of success that attracts the big networks right now. Way too expensive, and beside HBO has developped this reputation for ultra solid series that make foreign broadcasters fight to buy them, which isn't much a reality anymore for the network shows that often gets sold at rebate or not at all these days. The odds of an adaptation of WOT in any foreseeable future are very, very bad.
Adapting WOT is a terrible idea anyway. The whole interest of the series is its detailed plot and massive cast, and the character interactions. Yes, it does attract a certain kind of readers, and it annoys the hell out of a whole lot of other Fantasy fans who expected something more traditionally epic and who've lost patience along the way. What they don't seem to understand though, if that any attempt to trim WOT down too significantly would result in a generic epic hero's journey that would be essentially an unholy mixture of a Tolkien and Arthurian rip-off.
WOT is like this huge Fantasy soap (aka Feuilleton, for the litterary counterpart and ancestor to TV soaps. Think Alexandre Dumas) set on an epic background. Of course, no TV soap would ever have the budget to adapt this, but it would be the right format for it (not with soap style writing and acting, of course). So basically, WOT is very much something for the written medium and audiovisual adaptations would totally denature it, unlike GOT, which is written much more like an historical drama, and which lended itself much better to shortening/adaptation. You cut the battles and big scenes from GOT for budget reasons, you still have a good, fairly theatrical drama, excellent for the miniseries format. You cut the epic stuff from WOT, you end up with a soap. You cut tons of secondary characters to keep it anywhere close to a manageable cast, you end up with a very bad soap.
Of course there are ways to condense the plot, but the problem is that WOT isn't that much about plot (which is an arch-typical good vs. evil story, its main originality is to have split the cental hero into an ensemble of them), its essence if far more in all that goes on around the plot, with the characters. That's all those little things that could interest some TV viewers (and annoy many others), but there's no way to make this truly manageable and still be WOT.. the series has over 2000 named characters, hundreds of them have been recurrent, dozens have done so more or less regularly and many fairly significant ones even skip many books. That would be a nightmare for TV. The core cast is huge, and they would have to rely on a massive rooster of recurrent guest stars, and the problems with guest stars are that very often, they're just not available when you want them. If you inflate some roles so they're there regularly through all seasons, you make the core cast even bigger, and you don't make the story shorter.. you end up adding subplots to a story that doesn't need any more.
I very much doubt an American network in the current state of the business would seriously consider an adventure like WOT. Yes, it might have some success, but it would be an expensive show, so financial success would be relative. And the thing is, the networks care only for money, and that's one of these complicated projects they never cared much for, and one of those for which the first season might make or break the show because it's one of those shows with weekly continuity, something the networks always hesitate a lot over and often end up dumping along the way, because it's very difficult to get new viewers further down the line. Typically, those series lose viewers each year, and you hope they'll retain enough to see it through the end of the story, otherwise bye-bye.
In the end, there's much, much easier shows to develop and manage that could make them the same money or more.
And for those with delusions HBO might eventually pick it up... WOT may be Fantasy, but it doesn't have the tone or aspects of the stories that interest HBO.
I like WOT a lot, as books, but the closest comparison to WOT that's been seen on TV is Little House on the Prairie. And yes, I'm serious.
Buy the characters, buy the world, change the timeline so it doesn't take place in the LB years and write episodic stories about Warders and AS and so on. That would still be closer to the tone of WOT than any attempt to reasonably adapt the series itself. Not that I wish this ever happens (and it won't, Jordan explicitely forbade this)
I do not think the special effects budget as much an obstacle as casting is; as such things go, TWoT is not chock full o' "big 'splosions." Some of the most memorable scenes provide obvious instances (e.g. Dumai's Wells, the Cleansing, almost every direct combat between Rand and Forsaken,) but most episodes involving the One Power and similar non-material phenomena can be easily, convincingly and inexpensively depicted by some combination of CGI, super-imposition, stop-motion filming and/or thin wires.
Much of fantasys renaissance in the past century comes from its appeal over science fiction in offering other-worldly elements heightened by their presence in more familiar environments. The cost of portraying science fictions more exotic realms could well increase fantasys appeal to mass media. Filming TLotR required no more than an unindustrialized New Zealand location, rather than the demands of filming an Arrakis, Coruscant or Babylon 5. In TWoTs case, wattle and daub facades could furnish most towns, villages and even cities, with some location shots at Neuschwanstein for the various palaces. The AoL would require more elaborate sets, but except for TSR and TEotWs Prologue I cannot recall any scenes involving it anyway. The biggest challenges would probably be the Stone and the White Tower, but neither would be an insurmountable cost.
Casting is where I fear the problems would arise, because of the sheer number of actors you rightly note would be required. We would most likely see many prominent characters portrayed by relatively (or completely) unknown actors, as was the case with much of the TLotR: No one had heard of Viggo Mortensen or Orlando Bloom until then, Ian McKellen was a well established stage actor but had only recently begun emerging on screen thanks to the X-Men films, and John Rhys-Davies was (and still is) no more than a (very good) character actor. The quality of the undertaking would probably depend on finding many good (or at least decent) actors willing to work for scale playing characters like Dobraine, Basel Gill, Tam al'Thor etc. To that I can only say, "good luck!" because, while it would be as easy to find a horde of extras to play silent armies in TWoT as it was in "Braveheart" and so many similar offerings, the hundreds of speaking roles would be quite a challenge. Many could be cut or combined for films, but that could only be done on a limited basis if a TV series were to remain even remotely true to the feel of the books.
Do not count it out though; "Little House" was on the air and quite popular for many years, and the main reason was a setting offering more appeal than just another generic soap. The recent release of the "Dark Shadows" parody brings to mind an even better example (made ripe for mockery by the similar and successful "Twilight" series.) The original TV series was no more or less than a "vampire soap," but the gothic elements made it just unique and interesting enough to be more than JUST a soap.
In terms of WoT films though, the only hope of success would be combining multiple books in virtually every installment. Filming a movie usually takes about as long as writing a book, so Harry Potter fans got to see the main cast grow up before their eyes. TWoT consists of twice as many books spanning a mere couple of years, and no actors now appropriate to play protagonists in their late teens would remain so two decades from now. The best bet might be filming movies like this:
1) TEotW-TDR (with the finale being Rand taking Callandor)
2) TSR-LoC (with the finale being Dumai's Wells)
3) ACoS-WH (with the finale being the Cleansing)
4) CoT-TGS (with the finale being Rands epiphany)
5) ToM and AMoL (with the finale being, well, the finale)
That MIGHT be manageable, but would involve a lot of cramming with the first two films (on the other hand, compressing TPoD and WH into the end of ACoS might almost make them bearable, though it would make the last half of the movie pretty boring until the Cleansing.) I honestly do not expect it to ever happen, and certainly not well, but then, I always said the same thing about TLotR, and Jackson did a phenomenal job depicting the world (he just butchered the plot.)
Honorbound and honored to be Bonded to Mahtaliel Sedai
Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
Movie
- 10/05/2012 05:23:07 AM
1241 Views
Not likely to happen any time soon
- 10/05/2012 11:23:33 PM
878 Views
Right People
- 11/05/2012 01:16:55 AM
732 Views
Hollywood would just get it all wrong anyway. Are they going to do 12 movies? Otherwise,
- 11/05/2012 03:04:32 PM
680 Views
I have always thought it would be much better
- 12/05/2012 05:19:20 PM
791 Views
Re: I have always thought it would be much better
- 16/05/2012 03:23:54 AM
766 Views
There could be a good market in the US since the success of shows like Clone Wars and Justice League
- 16/05/2012 01:55:56 PM
596 Views
In many cases, adjacent books could be merged with little significant loss.
- 14/05/2012 03:21:04 AM
1203 Views
That won't happen anytime soon anyway
- 16/05/2012 03:08:00 AM
984 Views
A TV series is a lot more practical than a film series, since it is a soap opera in many ways.
- 21/05/2012 01:23:04 AM
812 Views
Re: A TV series is a lot more practical than a film series, since it is a soap opera in many ways.
- 21/05/2012 03:49:52 AM
1141 Views
I will have to take your word on the special effects.
- 21/05/2012 08:05:46 AM
2606 Views
Re: I will have to take your word on the special effects.
- 21/05/2012 03:41:47 PM
614 Views
Odd and foolish as it sounds, I admit I had not considered the demands of cameras and lighting
- 21/05/2012 04:57:38 PM
719 Views
Re: Odd and foolish as it sounds, I admit I had not considered the demands of cameras and lighting
- 03/06/2012 06:43:54 PM
714 Views
At 1 season per book, how do you keep those Aes Sedai ageless for 14 years? *NM*
- 03/06/2012 07:15:37 PM
280 Views
I can only imagine how horrible the Rand/Ishy fight on Toman Head would be *NM*
- 13/05/2012 04:06:53 AM
315 Views
At this point, I HIGHLY doubt that a movie could be made about the books.
- 02/06/2012 02:46:53 AM
750 Views