Would you count the show successful if it would get the viewership of Shadow and Bone (1.7 million)/The Boys?

[king of nowhere]

i have to say, every single concern expressed here make sense taken individually, but when taken all together, the amount of negativity in this board is staggering.

so what we learned so far by reading posts

- wot will fail because the director is incompetent

- wot will fail because the director has no respect for the source

- wot will fail because the items don't fit the descriptions enough

- wot will fail because they will change the plot

- wot will fail because they will not change the plot

- wot will fail because of bad release date

- wot will fail because of bad advertising

- wot will fail because of insufficient budget

- wot will fail because competitors are stronger

- wot will fail because covid will end and then nobody will ever stay indoor anymore

- wot will fail because it was not popular enough

- wot will fail because amazon is not popular enough

 

considering there are only a handful of posts every day, it's surprising so many of those concerns have even managed to be expressed in so little space. wow.

since we're here we may as well add

- wot will fail because of the global financial recession: people won't be able to afford entertainment anymore

- wot will fail because of new wave of conservativism: they will forbid anything that's not the bible

- wot will fail because of the third world war

- wot will fail because of the second american civil war

- wot will fail because all the actors will die in filming accidents due to performing their own stunts

- wot will fail because aliens will kidnap the actors

 

I guess some people are getting very anxious and are venting their worry here.

[Guest Wolfbrother31]

@king of nowhere that's funny! but there's also some voices for success too.

 

So ... let's try to make and add to a list of why we might think that WoT will succeed (I hope!)

 

- Amazon has a PILE of $$$ and is looking to make the next GoT.

-Brandon Sanderson praised Rafe and didn't have to do that. Plus he's a good guy who wouldn't lie. 

-A bunch of people do have Amazon Prime because they want that free shipping = big potential audience (I know I'm in that boat- otherwise I would have to agree with @Beidomon that I would keep pretty much all of the other services over Prime Video). But since people have Prime, if word gets out, the show could be HUUUGE.

 

And some new ones:

- The show had a pretty decent budget and has some star-quality actors.

- Let's face it, we live in the streaming era and if something is good - people are gonna binge it - and word will spread. 

-WoT has a pretty decent size fan-base because of the popularity of the books.

- Out of the hands that WoT could have been in (Sci-Fy channel, CW, what else??), Amazon isn't so bad.

- It's been greenlit for a second season (that's a good sign right?!).

 

Anybody have some other + reasons?

(as much as you are poking fun of us @king of nowhere)  - the fans of the fantasy genre are batting well below 50% for good tv adaptations of their beloved novels - but hey, in baseball that's the Major league!

[DojoToad]

Most, if not all, of my negativity disappears with a firm release date. The rest I can judge after seeing it. I still have very high hopes that I’ll love the show despite any known and speculated changes. 

[Guest Wolfbrother31]

10 hours ago, DojoToad said:

Most, if not all, of my negativity disappears with a firm release date. The rest I can judge after seeing it. I still have very high hopes that I’ll love the show despite any known and speculated changes. 

 

I think I'd be pretty happy with a trailer; I find it really hard to believe it's coming out this year when there's been virtually no promotion to the wider public. If we could get a trailer say - during the NBA Finals. Oh, glorious that would be!

[Fano'Lan Redux]

On 6/10/2021 at 5:58 PM, Beidomon said:

Nope, never heard of any of those shows except for Good Omens, and that was because I had already read the Gaiman book and happened to see the ad for the show on Amazon. 
 

Again, I don’t care what Amazon’s misleading numbers suggest - I’m pretty sure Disney+ is kicking the crap out of Prime because of their Star Wars, Marvel, and Disney catalogs. Amazon’s numbers are almost surely massively inflated by the free shipping crowd. 

 

I've had Prime shipping for years but did not activate the streaming service until I heard about WoT. Not sure what you mean by "Amazon's misleading numbers" but I'd imagine they distinguish between their Prime members and the folks utilizing the streaming service ... not one and the same.

[dssharp]

On 6/10/2021 at 6:29 PM, Wolfbrother31 said:

@king of nowhere that's funny! but there's also some voices for success too.

 

So ... let's try to make and add to a list of why we might think that WoT will succeed (I hope!)

 

- Amazon has a PILE of $$$ and is looking to make the next GoT.

-Brandon Sanderson praised Rafe and didn't have to do that. Plus he's a good guy who wouldn't lie. 

-A bunch of people do have Amazon Prime because they want that free shipping = big potential audience (I know I'm in that boat- otherwise I would have to agree with @Beidomon that I would keep pretty much all of the other services over Prime Video). But since people have Prime, if word gets out, the show could be HUUUGE.

 

And some new ones:

- The show had a pretty decent budget and has some star-quality actors.

- Let's face it, we live in the streaming era and if something is good - people are gonna binge it - and word will spread. 

-WoT has a pretty decent size fan-base because of the popularity of the books.

- Out of the hands that WoT could have been in (Sci-Fy channel, CW, what else??), Amazon isn't so bad.

- It's been greenlit for a second season (that's a good sign right?!).

 

Anybody have some other + reasons?

(as much as you are poking fun of us @king of nowhere)  - the fans of the fantasy genre are batting well below 50% for good tv adaptations of their beloved novels - but hey, in baseball that's the Major league!

It seems a lot of a shows success can come down to some luck. (Timing and what the public is hungry for at the time.)  I think the things that can be done other than luck ARE being done to give it a good chance of success:

-using a real fan with good experience as the show runner. 
-using Brandon Sanderson as a consultant

-employing a book series super fan Sarah N. as a consultant

-going all out with sets and props and costuming

-having the whole of the source material to adapt and foreshadow and streamline, rather than being left to invent their own a la Game of Thrones. 
-having a very generous budget

-having high quality actors

-being not TOO late to the genre (I would feel more nervous about a new superhero property (like Jupiter’s Legacy), it seems there may be some superhero fatigue

-going big out of the gate. I feel that going low budget could have hamstrung this property before it got going, but with the big effort and big budget are certain expectations. 

Although none of the above guarantee success obviously, they are all giving it a good chance to succeed (or as good a chance as it can have). My questions are: how real and organic will it feel? How well will they get the character arcs and nuances and motivations? I hope it is all about the characters and I think it will be. Will the things beyond their control line up? (Pandemic, other releases, etc). 
 

such a huge undertaking has a lot of places to go wrong, and a lot has to come together for a mega hit. But so far it certainly looks like it has a reasonable chance!

 

 

[flinn]

On 6/7/2021 at 12:19 PM, SinisterDeath said:

The problem with GOT is that while they stuck relatively close to the source material in the beginning, the Show Runners D and D had no idea what they were doing.

https://bgr.com/entertainment/game-of-thrones-season-8s-bad-writing-finally-almost-explained-5753407/

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/game-of-thrones-david-benioff-d-b-weiss-panel

 

 The problem I have with people who dish on D and D is this... what exactly do they expect?

 

 GRRM completely, 100%, screwed over D and D.

 

 It seems some GoT fans expected D and D to quit tv, spend a few years learning to write novels, become best selling novelists, finish GoT novels for GRRM, then quit being best selling novelists, go back to TV, become producers again, adapt the best selling novels they wrote for GRRM and make a great ending to his series.  Btw, by the time they do all that, the actor playing Bran is 102 years old.

[mistborn82]

That's the difference WOT is finished so the team can adapt the whole series, not go book by book. The GOT writers may have, foolishly as it turns out, expected Martin to finish Ice and Fire while they were doing the show. After all, if I remember correctly, Harry Potter movies started when the series wasn't finished.

[king of nowhere]

18 hours ago, flinn said:

 

 The problem I have with people who dish on D and D is this... what exactly do they expect?

 

 GRRM completely, 100%, screwed over D and D.

 

 It seems some GoT fans expected D and D to quit tv, spend a few years learning to write novels, become best selling novelists, finish GoT novels for GRRM, then quit being best selling novelists, go back to TV, become producers again, adapt the best selling novels they wrote for GRRM and make a great ending to his series.  Btw, by the time they do all that, the actor playing Bran is 102 years old.

well, nobody expected them to do as good a job of storytelling as GRRM, but as professional storytellers, they were expected to at least do a passable job at it. they awfully failed to even reach that mark.

[wotfan4472]

13 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

well, nobody expected them to do as good a job of storytelling as GRRM, but as professional storytellers, they were expected to at least do a passable job at it. they awfully failed to even reach that mark.

For quite a few on here, what happened with Game Of Thrones is the main cause of the negativity.

For others, it is Star Wars and Star Trek, and what happened to those is what is fuelling the negativity of the Lord Of The Rings t.v show.

For others, it is The Seeker and the Shannara Chronicles. Even I had my issues, but, I am really excited as I see more and more of what they are doing. I also started my Prime subscription when I heard this was coming. 

[imlad]

On 8/10/2021 at 10:32 PM, flinn said:

 

 The problem I have with people who dish on D and D is this... what exactly do they expect?

 

 GRRM completely, 100%, screwed over D and D.

 

 It seems some GoT fans expected D and D to quit tv, spend a few years learning to write novels, become best selling novelists, finish GoT novels for GRRM, then quit being best selling novelists, go back to TV, become producers again, adapt the best selling novels they wrote for GRRM and make a great ending to his series.  Btw, by the time they do all that, the actor playing Bran is 102 years old.

 

Something people might not realize, GRRM is still to this day screwing them over. Martin had them over to his home for an entire weekend as he outlined for them the future plotlines of the books before they began breaking the rest of the story for seasons 6 and onward. That's what they based those seasons on. And GRRM at first backed D and D on the veracity of their story, allowing for differences based on the variations caused by who was alive or dead on the show that wasn't in the books. But as time passed, and more so in recent months, GRRM has basically stabbed them in the back by making many in the public believe that the books would be ending very differently from the show. If George's statements leading to this belief are true, then it seems he saw how much fans rejected Dany going mad and torching King's Landing, Jon killing her, and Bran ending on the Throne, and decided "hey, I can't do that, they'll eviscerate me!" and decided to change his mind and thus the story (something many feel RJ did with Taimandred, who originally killed Asmodean in his notes, btw). This would explain why GRRM is still writing book six, after 11 freaking years and counting (with no travelling and conventions he had to do over the last year and a half thanks to Covid).

[mistborn82]

It probably wasn't possible to end GOT well and if Martin ever, doubt it, finishes aSoIaF, people won't like it. They liked the blood and sex in the show but not the logic conclusion of that. The book begins with a beheading, Ice and Fire wasn't a remotely happy ending story but people wanted it that way, forgetting that John and Dany are Related to each other so not a traditional ending. Biggest things for WOT is, it's finished, it does have a traditional ending and it will have more going for it than sex and blood.

[Borderlander]

On 8/10/2021 at 9:32 PM, flinn said:

GRRM completely, 100%, screwed over D and D.

 

 

I respectfully disagree. 

 

No one put a gun to D&D 's heads and forced them to make a GOT show; in fact, they went out of their way to pitch it to HBO and GRRM knowing full-well the written series was years away from being finished, and that GRRM has/had a history of years-long intervals between book releases.

 

Possibly GRRM told them he would do his best to finish writing the series in a timely manner, but I have never heard reports of any such conversation. And assurances, even well-intentioned assurances, are not iron-clad guarantees; you would not start building a house with only a handshake agreement from your roofing supplier that he thought he could 'maybe, probably, hopefully' get the roofing materials to you before the rainy season started. If you agree to that, the fault is all your own when it starts to rain and your house isn't finished. Nor, in this example (or in the actual case of GRRM) would I hold the roofer at fault if he did not deliver on time: he may have tried to, he may have wanted to, he may have busted his butt to make good on his word, but was simply unable to meet your deadline (for any number of reasons that may be no fault of his own.) In such a case, the roofer would only be 'to blame' if there was a written contract he violated. (And yes, in many cases a verbal contract is binding, but a seasoned roofer will rarely if ever give a potentially binding verbal agreement in such a case, nor have we heard any report that GRRM gave a firm verbal commitment to D&D that the book series would definitely be done by the time they needed it.) (If I am wrong about that, please let me know.)

 

Unless GRRM signed (or verbally agreed to) a contract explicitly promising to finish his novels by the time D&D needed them, GRRM is not to blame.

 

However, you can still screw someone over even if there is not a contract in place: if I promise to pick you up from the airport and I don't show up on time, I have screwed you over. But again, there is no record (of which I am aware) that GRRM promised D&D a finished series by a certain deadline.

 

I'll take it one step further: no one is to blame. Because no one got screwed over. D&D got a contract to make a show; they made it. GRRM agreed to the terms. HBO agreed to the terms. D&D agreed to the terms. They made the show. Done deal. 

 

The only 'problem' is that a bunch of fans (myself included, vehemently so) didn't like the last few seasons. Which is, obviously, just a matter of opinion. We are not owed the show we wished to have gotten; we pay HBO in exchange for access to content they create; they created content and gave us access to it. Few instances of modern culture have seemed so ridiculous to me as fans signing a petition demanding HBO remake Season 8 to suit their preferences. Certainly the fans had every right to create a petition, sign it, and deliver it; HBO, likewise, had every right (and in my opinion was right to) tell them where they could stuff that petition. True, they could have given in to the mob's demands (as so many do) in order to pacify public relations concerns and keep their paying subscribers happy, but they certainly were under no legal obligation to do so. If we, as fans, don't like their product, their attitude, or anything else, we can stop giving them our money.

 

That said, if Rafe botches WOT, I would appreciate all your signatures on a petition to put me in charge of the reboot; I promise* I my version of the show will make everyone on both sides of every issue happy. ?

 

(* Promises here given are not legally binding.)

[WheelAmeuter]

Nope. Because, if you divide 80 by fourteen, then you get 5 leaning onto six. So even if all of the Wheel of Time books sold the exact amount, if would still be at least 5/6 million copies per book. So it should get about the same amount of viewership if not higher, for the show to be successful.

[Zander?]

On 5/22/2021 at 4:55 AM, eva.reves said:

Naturally, we will never know the exact numbers, but there are pr materials. (I will not bring it up that the population of the US is 332 million.)

Shadow and Bone, despite being hyped up to the sky, 'racked up 721 million minutes of viewing time (in 3 days), equivalent to an average audience of about 1.75 million viewers (based on its total running time of 413 minutes). It finished second among original series to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+ (796 million) and third overall.'

The Boys (Amazon): According to Nielsen the first season of The Boys had attracted 8 million total viewers in its first 10 days of release (This must be a global number, because ‘Jack Ryan S2 topped Amazon’s ‘The Boys’ in viewership, Nielsen says the thriller averaged 4.6 million viewers'). 

According to Amazon, the second season had the most-watched global launch of an Amazon original series ever, with the episodes to date having grown the audience from Season 1 by 89%. 

Or you declare WOT successful, if it will not get cancelled?

 

If WoT is anything like The Boys.... Imma be real excited to watch it.... Lololololol 

[Guire]

As long as it is successful enough to stay on air through completion I will be happy.  Once we get into meat of Mat, Egwene, and Rand's arc this show will explode.  I think the characters will draw fans just like GoT did because they are complex and interesting.  

[Maximillion]

On 5/22/2021 at 7:07 PM, king of nowhere said:

i would count the show successful if i like it. and it's not cancelled, because if i like it but they leave it unfinished it would suck.

 

One of the reasons I am in two minds to even start watching it until later seasons.

I am not sure what they are already committed to (2 seasons?), but the length of this story almost guarantees that it will unfinished unless the audience figures are huge.

 

I think a lot of people will feel the same way - which ironically makes it even harder for the show to be successful enough to stay on air.

 

 

Edited October 13, 2021 by Maximillion

[king of nowhere]

6 minutes ago, Maximillion said:

 

One of the reasons I am in two minds to even start watching it until later seasons.

I am not sure what they are already committed to (2 seasons), but the length of this story almost guarantees that it will unfinished unless the audience figures are huge.

 

that would be one more reason to watch it and get your friends to watch it too.

when i saw dune a few weeks ago, and learned they will not make part 2 unless they have enough public, i started recommending it to all my acquaintances. I even took a guy named Leto as an opportunity to recommend it to my students.

[Maximillion]

9 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

that would be one more reason to watch it and get your friends to watch it too.

when i saw dune a few weeks ago, and learned they will not make part 2 unless they have enough public, i started recommending it to all my acquaintances. I even took a guy named Leto as an opportunity to recommend it to my students.

 

Oh I have already started to market it to friends, colleagues and complete strangers ?

Honestly, though, I just can't see them getting through 14 books of storyline.  They might try and rush everything into a last season after 2 or 3 seasons I guess.

 

The success of GOT will help - there will be a lot of fans of that show that will tune in.

The acting needs to be really good - a lot of fantasy series can feel wooden and not believable on TV.  

The clip from Episode 1 was not very encouraging in that regard.

Edited October 13, 2021 by Maximillion

[Elder_Haman]

3 hours ago, Maximillion said:

They might try and rush everything into a last season after 2 or 3 seasons I guess.

No chance. If it gets cancelled before say ... 5 seasons, there's just no way they can bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.

[TheDreadReader]

3 hours ago, Maximillion said:

The success of GOT will help - there will be a lot of fans of that show that will tune in.

 

 

Another way GOT may help is that got to 8 seasons and messed up.  You can almost see uber competitive executives thinking we can get to 8 seasons and not mess it up. 

 

If I was to guess I think that they might get to 9 seasons based on Raf's proposed outline and 12 seasons being a likely maximum.

 

 

[mogi68]

At the least we will get to one of the "endings", if Season 2 is to include the Dragon Reborn

 

For some reason I always assumed that a show or movie would never make it past that point. I hope I'm wrong!

Edited October 13, 2021 by mogi68

[Maximillion]

1 hour ago, mogi68 said:

At the least we will get to one of the "endings", if Season 2 is to include the Dragon Reborn

 

For some reason I always assumed that a show or movie would never make it past that point. I hope I'm wrong!

 

You think they will cover 3 books in 2 series?

That seems like a lot to pack into 16 episodes.

Feels like a lot to get 1 book from 8 episodes, TBH.

[Elder_Haman]

I think they can get to the end of TDR by the end of Season 2. Books 2 and 3 are sort of repetitive in many respects, and there is plenty of room for cutting and consolidation.

[AdamA]

There are a whole lot of scenes of characters going into inns and hanging out there a while, questioning the locals or evading pursuers, over and over and over. Some of it I like anyway, but some is needlessly repetitive and can definitely be cut to streamline the first few books. Focus on building the lore with the dragon reborn, brewing conflicts with the Seanchan and the Children of the Light, darkfriends infiltrating all organizations of power. I think 3 books can be fit into two seasons and they're not gonna have much choice if they want to cover the entire story. This can't be a 13 season show, especially not if it becomes successful. They're gonna face the problem all shows that explode face where the actors start getting gigantic offers to star in film franchises and aren't willing to lock into long term contracts and the show is faced with doubling its budget or worse to keep them, but it can't recast everyone either. Look at The Walking Dead. It's coming the closest of anything that gets really popular, but lost almost every single one of its original actors and it still isn't going to hit 13 seasons.