What book series would you like to see made into a movie trilogy or a show with multiple seasons?
I've often wanted a movie/series based on the Dragonlance books or the Dark Elf trilogy. What would you all like to see done if you had the ability to do it?
I honestly think that would ruin it for all the Culture fans. Much as I love Banks’ work, I like the movie of the books that I’ve produced in MY head more than what anyone else could make.
I'm kinda in this boat too. I'm glad Banks' estate didn't let the Amazon series go through. Something about a guy like Bezos hailing the books while being a billionaire capitalist egomaniac just makes me uneasy with the whole idea.
My first thought. Though you could do Use of Weapons, Inversions, and The State of the Art. The Algebraist, Feersum Endjinn, The Player of Games, could all be their own trilogy. Use of Weapons, Look to Windward, Surface Detail etc.
I always thought the drone scenes would be so interesting on film like a mix between bullet time and 10000fps. Also weird storytelling seeing the other scenes pop up in drone time.
Do it in full photo realistic CGI; I want to see the beautiful castles and countryside, all the delicious food, and the gruesome battles in all their glory.
Bit of a normie but the Dark Tower series would be awesome. Mixing tons of genres, having very different locations to film in. It would be extremely expensive to produce.
The gunslinging of Idris Elba in the movie was nice but everything else wasn't.
Mike Flanagan is making the TV series. It's been in the works for a year or so and has King's nod of approval on it. No casting has been solidified yet and stuff is of course currently halted due to the strikes, but it's currently a high priority project after Hollywood can start up again.
Maybe? It's been decades since I read it, but I remember enjoying Hyperion and fucking hating Fall of Hyperion. It felt like Hyperion was amazing and well thought ought but then Fall was just mailed in.
Because Fall rushed the story with a fuck ton of plotlines. It really should have focused on continuing the story and have a third book conclude the major plotlines. That way a lot of things that happened wouldn't feel like they were pulled out of left field.
I have only played The Witcher 3 and its DLCs and watched The Netflix show up until S02, so far I like it (especially the game).
I'm slowly introducing in the books/reading field, and just started with classics like Dracula (so far liking it) are the books of The Witcher stand on their own as a good entry point for my "current phase"?
I also had only played the witcher III when I started the books. The games are all set after the events of the witcher saga (books), and are honestly just really really good fan fiction based on the characters (like, really the best fan fiction you could think of), so you can feel free to just read the books.
If you’re not a big reader (if I understand the note about dracula correctly) the witcher audio books are really well done, and the stories lend themselves very well to being listened to.
Finally, I could write a treatise on the failures of the netflix show, but it would all be old news—about 10% of the show is accurate to the stories told in the text (and the text is so much better), the rest is a bunch of made-up nonsense that serves nothing other than to muddy the narrative.
In short, yes, read the books (also why do people need to ask advice about reading books these days. just read books).
The Left Hand of Darkness might be interesting. The Word for Tree is Forest would likely get thought of as an odd Avatar clone. But The Dispossessed would probably never get made, people would find worth in the politics and abandon the megacorp making it.
Le Guin prose is exceptional and would be nearly impossible to bring to screen well. I'm sure it will be tried at some point. Maybe a dark horse, but I actually think The Lathe of Heaven might be the most adaptable. It's the simplest story and has plenty of room for exciting changes and visuals in a film.
Her Earthsea book was actually adapted. By Studio Ghibli no less. It was so bad that the dad of the director left the theater halfway through to have a smoke. Said dad was no other than Hayao Miyazaki (Director of Spirited Away, Howl's Miving Castle, Castle in the Sky, etc)
I came here to say this - Night's Dawn (or his other massive series the Commonwealth Saga) would make excellent TV. But it would have to be skilfully made, probably animated (like Sonnie's Edge in Love + Robots), and cover many, many seasons.
It isn't that they can never get adapted well, it's just much harder to do. I think Fate/Stay Night has examples of terrible and great adaptations. Studio Deen's adaptation of the Fate route was awful, their adaptation of Unlimited Blade Works was even worse. Ufotable's adaptation of Unlimited Blade Works was pretty good, and their adaptation of Heaven's Feel was great.
Mushoku Tensei was adapted amazingly, and while many details were left out, the adaptation is a masterclass of how to do it well.
If we're talking about ordinary books, Andy Weir's The Martian had a pretty good adaptation, and I am expecting Project Hail Mary to be good as well.
World war Z made a pretty bad movie. However, it would do a gneat TV show, in the style of these 1990's show with in dependant episodes despite some metaplot
The only thing it takes from Asimov is jargon. The books are about society and civilization. The show is about the emperor, Hari Seldon, and his magic. They're hardly related.
The Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brien. 21.3 books of amazing naval adventures, spy stuff, and survival. They made a movie with Russell Crowe but it doesn’t nearly capture the scope of the novels.
The Monster at the end of this Book. It’s the one with Grover from Sesame Street. They made a second one where Elmo fucking ruins it by being all annoying… Another Monster at the end of this Book. Maybe in the third one Grover kills Elmo?
I've always thought The Belgariad/Malloreon/prequels (David & Leigh Eddings) would make for an interesting anime. It's a very shonen kind of story and world.
I would love to see a movie or miniseries based on the "Bas-Lag" novels by China Mieville, which are "Perdido Street Station", "The Scar", and "Iron Council"
I think the best description of these books would be "Gritty Steampunk Fantasy" with a very generous dose of Weird. The writing is very descriptive, even when you really would rather not know about what's being described.
Some things that are mentioned in these three books:
Mosquito people. The males are quiet and studious, the females are strong, dangerous, and driven mad by hunger
Punishment factories. Criminals are sentenced to "Remaking". The Remade are people who have had either machinery or animal parts grafted onto them. Most Remakings are cruel and useless.
Smokestone. Rock that will change unpredictably into smoke - and back into stone.
Frog people who can make water hold a shape for a short time. A longshoreman's strike in one of the books involved a bunch of these guys forming a large gap in a river.
Sentient steam powered constructs
*Drugs that let you experience other people's dreams.
There is a lot I have to leave out due to spoilers, but it would be an awesome series.
I have a couple. I’d love to see Prydain done right but I don’t have much hope anymore.
Temeraire got optioned by Peter Jackson years and years ago. I remember thinking that Richard Armitage would be a perfect Lawrence, but it’s been too long; I think he’s probably too old now.
I'd love for Temeraire to be a series, in my head I had Tom Hiddleston as Laurence but he might be aging out as well. Though Richard Armitage would also have been awesome.
All I can think is that it would cost a boatload of money. Boats, war and dragons.
I'd watch it as an animated series, then it wouldn't matter how old Armitage or Hiddleston were.
Yeah, I really like live action but I think it has a better shot as animation. I don’t mind animation but I’m more drawn to live action. But it’s hard and costly to put a lot of fantasy to live-action screen.
I’ve just realised perhaps the Pleistocene series by Julian May could probably be pulled off, especially if using the original (to me) cover illustrations as visual ‘canon’.
There are some really great kids books I've read to my daughter that I think would work well in a visual medium.
In particular the work of Alastair Chisholm (Orion Lost, The Consequence Girl and Adam 2) would work well I think.
Also Jamie Littler's Frostheart series would be great.
I'd also like to see an adaptation of How To Train Your Dragon that's much closer to the books than the movie series of the same name. The books are so good but so different from those films, and their story and characters would make a great TV show IMO.
It seemed like it was finally going to happen - someone even acquired the rights, after Feist knocked back offers over and over due to them not being a "good fit".
Yeah, it is. Out of boredom, I watched it one Sunday when I had nothing to do and could only make like 20 minutes into it before I shut it off. It is not good at all lol.Here it is in its horrible glory
Early Mormon church history is about as bizzarre and dramatic as it gets. I think a well-produced & historically accurate dramaticization of the weird beginnings of the Mormon church would make for a good miniseries.
Bolo. They'd have to do it in the *Love, Death, and Robots" format, since they're all short stories and no recurring characters, but it'd be great like that.
A Chinese show has already been released and an American one is releasing on Netflix soon. The Chinese version can be streamed on Viki. I'm about 1/3 of the way through (30 episodes) and I'm absolutely loving it. They don't dumb down any of the details with the science and is staying very true to the books so far. You just have to be willing to watch a subtitled show
I'm happy to be surprised but I doubt I'll like the US version as much. Nearly every US book adaptation I've watched has been dumbed down "for a wider audience" and changed quite substantially (looking at you, Silo and Beacon 23). This is also coming from D and D of GoT infamy, so we'll see if they can turn their track record around. At least this book is finished so they have the entire source material to work with
It's being made by Netflix I think. I'm 2/3rds of the way through the books. I think it lends itself well to TV because the characters are only devices to move the plot along, rather than specific identities that you can invest in/relate to etc. Interested to see how it goes.
Its not a series, just a standalone book but I would love to see a stop motion movie of the magnum opus. It's a book that was written by the makers of a stop motion short called the maker. I would love to see what they could do with a proper budget
I don't see what making a film or TV series adds to any book, all they ever seem to do is a disservice to the original story in the attempt to squeeze as much money from it as possible.
I'd rather more fully voice acted audiobooks were made staying more true to the original texts but adding that extra element to draw you in than just one narrator trying to differentiate characters with different voices.
I see your point. But if done right, the movie/show can be almost as good as the books (Fellowship of the Ring and One Piece). It just takes someone who loves the material being used or (in the case of One Piece) the creator watching over every step.
Maybe so but they are so few and far between, for me personally I can't think of an adaptation that I have really liked. I don't like The Lord of the Rings films that much but I actually dislike the books more in that case but I realise that I am an outlier with that opinion.
I love Sanderson novels and especially the Stormlight Archives. I know if Amazon or someone picked it up, they’d absolutely ruin it. Probably the only way we’d see a faithful adaptation would be in animated form.
I don’t see what making a film or TV series adds to any book, all they ever seem to do is a disservice to the original story in the attempt to squeeze as much money from it as possible.
It's that last part that effs it up. For example, I really liked Luhrman's Romeo+Juliet. That was a creative interpretation. I enjoyed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I thought the books were decent, but the movie captured the best bits, IMO. Early seasons of Game of Thrones were good. I like some of the changes made to move the internal dialog to conversations. It gave the side characters more life.
It's when the artistic vision is cast aside in the name of profit, then the work of art suffers.
The "titan" series by John Varley. A good trilogy. Also a good five year series could be had with "ringworld" by Niven - the ongoing adventures that could feature six months of gathering the players and explaining their mission(s).
If I were allowed some creative direction, I would specify that unless it was there in the source material there will be zero scenes of people just explaining shit instead of showing it
I'd like to see the more of the Discworld series as done by The Mob (the folks who have done the other adaptations). The Mob has actually been really respectful of the source material and have avoided any temptation to turn the books into the type of dreck which so often oozes out of Hollywood adaptations. Specifically, I would love to see Small Gods, though that means Pyramids first. And continuing the Rincewind series would be high on my list.
The Gentlemen Bastards series could work well: Not too much CGI needed, and fancy rennaisance italy aesthetics deserve a fantasy show about thieving orphans!
Hate the author, love the series. I've never been more angry with a movie, and a TV series with someone that's actually read the books BUT has also largely disassociated from OSC would go a long way towards repairing things.
I really don't know about this one. I love the books, and with their success they've genome a bit more compatible with a screen adaptation, but a lot of it, and especially the first one, is a lot of internal monologue. In addition, the space physics and combat are amazing, but don't translate into visuals easily either. Like I said, love the story, and pains me to say it. Some stories are just not made for the screen, and I think this is one.
GONE, really enjoyed that as a kid and when they then started making hunger game movies and everyone seemed to be following the formula I think it would've worked a treat around that time. It's not that similar to those however it's more supernatural mystery lord of the flies, but it would've felt like it belonged alongside the lines of hunger games and maze runner.
On another note the Jack Tanner books, especially Odin Mission would make great films or short series per book. Really enjoyed the pseudo retelling of world war 2 with bits of fiction mixed in.