"Why so few fantasy film adaptations of books?" Topic

When LotR and Potter became big box offices hits, I assumed that other film adaptations would follow. Apart from some Narnia films, there have been few and the ones that have appeared, Eragon and the Golden Compass for example, never made it beyond the first movie.

Is it the case that modern, tome-like, multi-book fantasy series are not suited to films?

Is a GoT-like series actually the way to go with fantasy? (GoT was unsuited for film anyway and it didn't require the sfx budget that some fantasy would have to have).

Are we more likely to see something like the Wheel of Time as a TV series than as film series?

What is the future of fantasy films?

Not being an expert I would assume that it boils down to money. Narnia and Potter and LoTR had long standing built in, enormous audiences. Many other series do not. As a non-fantasy person I had heard of them prior to their becoming films. I have never hear of "Wheel of Time", not that I'm saying anything against it but if you want someone to plop big bucks down on a movie you have to get as wide an audience as possible.

For anything that isn't car chases and explosions or super heroes I think that HBO or Showtime might well be the way to go. For one thing you have more time. Imagine if GoT was a movie, each book would be one movie and the story would be condensed down to 90 or so minutes. Also if you're looking for character development I think the miniseries is the way to go. Again imagine Band of Brothers as a film.

Again this is just my opinion, I claim no expertise in this area.

If the powers that be THINK that a property will make money, they will purchase it and them make a vague effort to follow it.
For every Harry Potter or Game of Thrones that is 95% faithful in the first book there is the Tim Powers Blackbeard novel that actually had pirates in the movie.
For every trilogy or more that makes money with the first book and gets a sequel there are more that fail.

The possibility of making money is the only thing that matters.

did Wheel of Time ever reach a conclusion ? i started getting bored with it around book 6 when the author realized that the more he dragged out the story the more books he'd sell and the more money he'd make . the early books covered weeks or months of the adventures of several important characters while the later ones covered a few days of one or two people . i gave up at book 10

The Lord of the Rings almost didn't get made. New Line took on the property when bigger names were stilled scared of it, and was in danger of going under while making it, till they showed some early clips around and got huge buzz and backing.

The Chronicles of Narnia was made largely by a very dedicated effort, and got Disney's money based on the success of The Lord of the Rings, but almost flopped. So far only three of the films have been made, with middling success (good casting, solid effects, but lackluster directing and scripts, along with some truly horrible "Hollycrap" plot insertions in the last two films). I'm not up on the status of the remaining four books to be filmed, but time is passing with not much movement, so the series is probably dead in the water.

Other fantasy properties are in various stages of development, but Hollygreed operates very much under the "what have you done for me lately" mentality, and the big money makers (aside from The Hobbit) have been superhero movies, dystopia teen flicks, and apocalypse films.

And, as others have pointed out, not many fantasy novels are really that well known, not to mention that fantasy (with its heavy world-building) can be difficult to translate into a purely visual medium, except as standard tropes.

Challenge: Aside from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Conan and Narnia, (and now GoT), name a high fantasy novel or series that is popularly known outside of fantasy fans? Because there really aren't any.
The widely known properties are the kid's phenomena like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Hunger Games and its dystopic ilk. The grand sword and sorcery epic? Nobody knows 'em.
Nobody knows Leiber.
Nobody knows Moorcock.
Nobody knows Dunsany.
Nobody knows Feist.
Nobody knows Cook.
And most of those wouldn't wind up being popular movies as it is.

But properties are still in the works— Terry Brook's Shannarra series, Novik's Napoleonic dragon series. So you may get them… eventually.

In the meantime, enjoy the books. They're better anyway.

(Was gonna link to the song Rage of Thrones, but it's very NSFW, and that's not my thing…)

No robots to computer generate.

Pat

And also Not Spending Too Much Money.

You can shoot a modern day movie in any number of cities, who will welcome you and give you tax breaks. No major set design issues. I've inadvertently walked up to a newspaper box offering me the Denver Post in Toronto – I suppose the camera crew setting up around me should have been a giveaway.

While the GOT people have done wonders with Northern Ireland, Malta and Croatia, I do notice that there are no phone lines, parked cars or Starbucks. And the passers by seem to be wearing oddly medieval clothes.

Look at the bleep they've been doing with Howard lately, Solomon Kane was bad and the Conan reboot was worse. Most of the bleep is because they can't leave well enough alone and just shoot the movie based on the stories – or at least faithfully portray the characters and setting from the stories.

Instead the Department of Missed the Point insists on origins stories, revenge cycles, and fate-of-the-world plots. Solomon Kane was God's angry man and we never know why and we're cool with that. Conan left Cimmeria as a teen but he was cool with that, not out to avenge anyone. Nobody knew Eastwood's Man With No Name or High Plains Drifter's origins, no one knew James Bond's origins, no one knew Han Solo's origins. Conan never got hung up on revenge, Solomon Kane would – but never for himself. And between them they only saved the world once in print (Conan, Hour of the Dragon). Um, sorry, rant over, but man those movies hurt.

Hollywood, for all the politically liberal folks it attracts, is commercially EXTREMELY conservative. Executives are followers, not trend-setters. They will chase success, but like to bet on bankable franchises. That's why you don't see a lot of mid-range budget features now. They generally bet big money on established franchises and small money on more indie films – little in between, as those films aren't generally profitable.

And John Carter burned several careers, so…yeah.

There are alot of reasons, but I think that MJS raises a very good point. Existing places to film Fantasy just don't exist the way they do for modern, near future and period pieces.

When you film a fantasy film, you can't just get away with filming on castle ruins somewhere with theater costumes anymore as you might have in the 80's.

Now you've got to expect to have to build an entire world from scratch. Look at how much it took to make LoTR. Even a smaller budget fantasy movie (especially an "Epic") is going to be a huge investment.

Look at all the stupid changes they made to LOTR to make it financially viable. Arwen – remember her?

Circling back to Narnia… the first three books were sort of a trilogy, and followed a story from one to the next. The fourth was kind of a sequel, but did not involve any of the characters from the first three. The fifth was an origin story, the sixth ran parallel to the first three but had no characters in common, and the seventh was a wrap up of the series (and the whole mythos set at an undetermined future time.

So, making the first three into a movie series made good sense, but trying to reel people into a big budget movie with the last four is much riskier, as there is really nothing familiar besides the name with which to associate with the original three.

Fantasy in general is escapist (not always) and it is sometimes hard to find a hook for the story or characters to be meaningful on the big screen. Science Fiction is also largely escapist, but also has a foundation and history of social commentary and speculation on future possibilities. Done right, science fiction has a much easier time both amusing and teaching, and often audiences find the speculative moralism more fulfilling.

That last bit was pure invention on my part, I have nothing to back it up with…

But it sounds good.

Game of Thrones is unique. George RR Martin had a lot of input into the HBO series. He had the advantage of having worked extensively in TV, so he knows the score. It also came as a surprise when HBO came calling. He did not think GoT was filmable! He actually vetted the show runners by asking a pointed question to see if they had paid attention, and were not just looking for a property to hang a TV show on. "Who is Jon snow's mother?" If you have an answer to that… Well, they did. It may not have been the correct one, but at least it showed Martin that they paid attention.

Martin is in the same league as William Goldman who is both a novelist and a screenwriter. See "The Princess Bride", "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "Marathon Man", etc. Wrote the novels AND the screenplays.

Powers was ecstatic to give the title "On Stranger Tides" to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. He cashed a check! That's all a fantasy writer, even a damn good one like Powers can expect. Hey, the movie had pirates in it, like my good friend Winston said.

It is as unrealistic to expect Hollywood to be faithful to your favorite fantasy novels as it is to expect them to use the right tanks.
So, if you want to see a movie about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser… be careful what you wish for. Come to think of it, Leiber had some cynicism inducing experiences with Horrywood also.

I watched a few Dresden Files tv shows, and was no better than youse guys are. "Hey! Murphy is blonde! And short!"

To the authors: Cash the check, and say nice things. If you do, you may get more checks.
Consider this. Martin has revealed that Jeyne Westerling will be in The Winds of Winter prologue. Put that against Robb's wife in the HBO series. She lives! In the books, anyway.

Usually they suck.

I hear somebody just optioned the Pern books.

Doug

And Starz is producing the Outlander series. "Critics" have called it a feminist Game of Thrones.

I hear somebody just optioned the Pern books.

I was thinking today that those were quite viable as films now, thanks to CGI, and are very visual in terms of action and plot. Drawback might be that in the first book the lead character is not all that likable for much of the book (not to mention being extremely dense at times).

I think that High Fantasy simply missed the boat. There was a mini-boom of fantasy pictures in the 1980s: Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, etc. The abundance of High Fantasy epics in bookstores was just getting underway, but a lot of Hollywood's fantasy output at the time seemed more geared towards making the next Star Wars than to exploring a growing new literary genre. It took so long to get The Lord of the Rings to the screen that by that time the hot literary genre had shifted from a glutted epic fantasy market to Young Adult novels. So great forests will still be denuded (and pixels hunted close to extinction) to fill the shelves with bloated fantasy epics, but very few of them will ever be filmed. If what happened to On Stranger Tides is any indication, perhaps it's just as well.

Ron

What about the format of fantasy books, is that detrimental?

Whilst you may want to see your favourite 900-page doorstop on the big screen, the hacking that would be required to turn it into a sub-3 hour film would be dispiriting.

Science fiction has always had a good deal of short stories written. Authors like Phillip K. Dick, adapted for lots of films, wrote quite short books and lots of short stories.

Adapting and extending shorter stories seems to suit Hollywood more (Jack the Giant Killer, H & G, etc.).

Nobody knows Moorcock.

Although – not high fantasy, but – I do remember watching a Jerry Cornelius film in the early '70s.

While Science Fiction is respectable and mainstream, Fantasy has always been the weird, "never to be taken seriously" oddball.

Hollywood almost never tries to sell a movie as "fantasy" if they can find any figleaf to tag it with. They think selling it as fantasy would limit the audience to the few hundred dorks who play that "Dungeons and Dragons thing about demon worshipping that causes kids to commit suicide."

LOTR was basically an old-school epic. Narnia was all about the Christian message, Harry Potter has a built-in audience, but they sell it as a kid's film.

Maleficent, Snow-White etc are essentially Twilight romance knockoffs featuring a pseudo-psychological drama about a woman who got so badly screwed by evil men she turned bad …

Percy Jackson : Firmly Young Adult territory.

Thor : despite an atypical straight sell any other studio would have bent over backwards to tone down, reeimagine, deconstruct or ham up to near cosmic level, they are still sold as aliens with technology that looks like magic …

Even Game of Thrones is sold more like a classic "dysfunctional characters ensemble" like Battlestar Galactica, Lost and The Walking Dead than trying to sell the Fantasy roots (not to mention GoT is fairly low-magic setting)

Almost all attempts to make actual fantasy films tend to be low budget B-features or straight to video releases like Orcs, Curse of the Dragon Slayer, etc.

I read about a year or two back that Moorcock had received a second payment of three for the rights to film Elric. I don't think the studio paid the last payment and it lapsed. A shame really as I think they could really do the series justice now…

As an aside, I really liked Carter, probably because I haven't read the books.

LotR frustrates me, because I have read the books and the way they hacked the dialogue about, changing it from one character to another was as DC says, dispiriting….

Theoden really loses out in this, in the book he is advised by Gandalf to take his people to Helms Deep, in the film, they castigate him for it, why???

Yep, frustrating and dispiriting…oh, and perplexing….

As an aside, I really liked Carter, probably because I haven't read the books

I have read them, and I still really liked it.

Doug

Me three. John Carter was just horribly marketed by suits that didn't really know HOW to market it, and the scuttlebutt is that a top level management change at Disney led to the new people incoming basically wanting to sabotage any chance of success of pet projects backed by the outgoing people. Think about how many movies not dissimilar to John Carter have large ranges of toys, action figures etc on the shelves months before the movie comes out (which helps build huge buzz), and then think about all the toys Disney released from John Carter – not a SINGLE ONE that I can recall from a movie that could have spawned a massive range of cool action figures and vehicles, and I would have bought the hell out of a toy Woola :)

"Maleficent good but not as commercially successful as it might have been"

Worldwide, Maleficent made $727 USDm+, not too shabby I would say! Maybe not in the $1 USDbn crowd but pretty successful overall.

I personally think it has to do with what translates well to the big screen. Sometimes what is on the written page does not translate to image. Studios invest millions into movie projects and expect to make a huge profit so they can produce more movies. Many of your favorite books have had the movie rights purchased by a studio and they are just sitting in limbo for either the right screenwriter or director to be found. Those rights do expire after a while and are eligible for other studios to grab them. This can take years and then someone dusts them off and reads them and realizes that what's in the book won't translate to a modern audience without a massive redesign of the story. 1940's technology lingo isn't going to make it in 2014. Also, you have to look at the readership of the book. If it sold only 100k units, is that enough of a base to work on? It's all based on a profit margin and the risk a studio is willing to make. Scifi and fantasy are massively expensive to make. The good thing is that with kickstarter, many individuals are starting to produce features on their own. We will see where that takes us.

To bring a fantasy novel to the screen, you must first acquire the rights--easier said than done in many instances.

Then, you have to find a screenwriter who is good enough to write an exciting script but is willing to subordinate his/her own creativity (and/or ego) to merely "translate" the novel into a script. I think this is the stage where most fail--either they get a hack who can't write, or an egotist who wants to write his own story using only the names of the characters from the novel. Or worse (and usually) they get a hack with an ego.

There is, of course, a huge difference between making a fantasy film and making a film out of a book. Aside from the issue that a screenplay is always much, much shorter than a full-length novel, the fans of the book always seem to gripe about any changes from the book. And not just the book, their own conception of the book.

Have you ever read an online discussion of the Conan movies? 75% of contributors complain that none of them match their own concept of Conan himself, and demand a remake featuring (it seems) a professional wrestler with the sort of acting skills found in the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Failing that, they'll just take a wrestler with the right wig.

To bring a fantasy novel to the screen, you must first acquire the rights--easier said than done in many instances.

I think I speak for most authors when I say that acquiring movie rights to our work isn't that hard; just write us a big enough check!

Percy Jackson : Firmly Young Adult territory.

As a children's author (and now YA librarian), I'll quibble. Percy Jackson is "Middle Grade" (think "Tweens") rather than YA. YA ranges from 12 to 25, with the emphasis on 15 and up, sometimes dealing with more mature themes. Though read by teens, and with a teen protagonist, Percy is targeted to 10-14 year olds. So the movies are similarly packaged for older kids and young teens. YA films would be Hunger Games, Divergent, The Fault In Our Stars, etc., where teen relationships are as essential to the story and plot as the adventures going on.

But your point stands-- Percy Jackson films aren't really "grown up" fantasy films as The Lord of the Rings, et. al.