WoT Movie

[Breaker of Light]

if they were to do a wheel fo time movie, i would hope that peter jackson would do it. And if they do change the characters, i'll never watch another movie again

[Guest cwestervelt]

Please no.  If it must be made into a movie, don't let him do it.  Just about every important event in the books won't make it in unless you get the special edition DVDs.  And by then it will be to late to save the storyline.

[Jambo]

Please no.  If it must be made into a movie, don't let him do it.  Just about every important event in the books won't make it in unless you get the special edition DVDs.  And by then it will be to late to save the storyline.

 

I know what you mean. Everyone raves about the Lord of the Rings but they don't realize that although it was a good movie, it was really inaccurate to the story. If you look at King Kong it's the same thing. He spent so much time doing pointless action scenes (the bug pit one for an example lasted like 20minutes) that there was enought time for some other scenes such as getting Kong onto the boat, which were included in the original.

[reyler]

Muppet Wizard of Oz isn't proof that the Muppets are dead? Jim Henson screams from beyond the grave with every Pizza Hut commercial they appear in, I'm sure. The Henson Workshop is alive and well, and produced quite believable Vogons for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. I've said before and I'll say again, I'd love it if they were to build and puppeteer Loial in a live action movie. He'd be even larger than Ludo was, but I think over twenty years later they'd have better ways to deal with the weight.

 

I don't want Peter Jackson to be in charge of a WoT film, not because of anything I disagree with that he did with the LotR movies (which is a shorter list than many others', I'm sure - a movie is a different animal than a book, kittens), but because I don't think he'd fit stylistically/tonally. It's almost more suited to Oliver Stone.

[Lune]

This belief that anime is 'low quality' and 'kiddy' just haven't been watching the right ones, actually don't watch the popular crap. Nobody gets a good impression with Naruto. I don't like Naruto either, or Bebop, or Yu Gi Oh. Yeah I know, your room mate made you watch this and this and this. Nowadays low quality anime with repeat frames are considered below the bar and feature mostly in hentai series. Have you ever seen work like Afro Samurai? You can hardly call it sub par when it features big names doing the voices with Samuel L Jackson as the main character.

 

In fact, Studio GONZO (who did Afro) has a lengthy resume for doing some high quality adult oriented (not hentai) anime. Basilisk? I think you call it Ninja Scroll there. A fantastic 24 episode adaptation of a novel. Much better than their crummy live action one. They did Trinity Blood, Hellsing, the opening for Suikoden III as well for those who've played that.

 

If you're looking for anime movies, I'm not going to direct you to Full Metal Alchemist, oh hell no. Some, if not most of those movies are made for fans of existing series. But even that doesn't bar them from qualifying for nomination. Advent Children isn't the example of a good movie, but it's an example of what technology is capable of in today's animation scene. Metropolis and Paprika are examples of good movies, but the former's style remains close to Osamu Tezuka's original so it naturally looks kiddy. xxxHolic, based on the series that's normally lambasted for poor animation quality was nominated for Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 06 alongside films like Origin (another anime), Wallace and Gromit and Asterix. They all lost out to Renaissance, but Renaissance is on a league of its own with 14 million euro budget and a production time of 6 years. Not to mention it was the only motion capture film out of the other hand/computer animated ones.

 

In fact, Japanese animation, or any animation really, is less likely to screw it up than live action, because they have a larger medium with less restrictions to work with. They don't have to put up with bad acting (bad voice acting maybe, but celebrity voices seem to carry over better than some of their wooden portrayals on screen), weather conditions, special effects (and their budget). They can produce fluid action scenes, channelling, creatures like the gholam etc. Without the LotR sized price tag.

 

WoT just doesn't have the following to warrant an LotR or HP budget. It's a terrible thing to say, but it's true. It caters to an older age group and that limits its marketability. "We can cover up the nudity" isn't going to be remotely easy neither is it going to remove the 'sexual nature' tag. How are you going to pull off Berelain's seduction scene, or Aviendha's streaking or the first sister ritual. You have to work with what you have and I don't see big funding for this. Animation can do more for less and still provide excellent results, maybe even better. And if you don't want the Japanese to do it, you can always get the Koreans. They do just as good animation, some of it right in America itself.

[Guest cwestervelt]

Ah, but you make my point.  People aren't watching what you list as good anime because the genre has been tarnished by the popular crap.

[reyler]

We in the realm of geekdom perhaps forget that we are sort of our own society with our own standards of familiarity. The general public is only peripherally aware of anime, and that only because their kids are crazy about Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto and whatever, likewise the primary familiarity with animation in general is Disney (which is underrated as it is in terms of suitability for adults), and so the common perception is of a thing for children. In America, at least, animation whose demographic includes adults is only a recent concept, so within the next generation or so, that stigma will hopefully vanish, but for now, there it is.

 

And Lune is right about the fan base. Again referencing that bit about us being our own society, the general public has never heard of Robert Jordan or The Wheel of Time, and had only sort of heard about LotR before the movies. It takes hitting it mega-huge, like Potter and Eragon did with the youth base, to pick up the money for a movie. Nobody in their right mind is going to finance a 6-12 movie series that the mass market has never heard of. Unfortunately, you can't make a profit on a $200 mil movie on the geek base alone, hence the attempts in LotR to broaden the appeal.

[Lune]

That said, what I think would've been great is a movie on New Spring instead. Just NS to generate interest. It has a short enough story and actually doesn't require a whole lot of background. What they could do is show the prologue of the EotW first and then continue as normal.

[reyler]

I'm kind of surprised you left out Akira. Anyone who thinks animation as a medium is unfit to handle WoT should take a look at that, if they've got the stomach for it.

[Darth_Andrea]

Personaly I think a Anime or CGI series of films would be ok IF they are done well. Not using the childish animated style that Warner Brothers animated super-hero shows and films have been using. I think if a series of WOT movies were made like Final Fantasy Seven Advent children with the attention to detail and the absolutly beautiful CGI work would be great. Perhaps if it could be done get the same team as Advent children to make them. (yes I am totaly in love with that movie) The TMNT movie was well done but the style they used was cartoony for my tastes. A live action series of movies or a television show would be preferable.

 

I think however it would be way to expencive for a studio to under take. Given the amount of enviroments, peoples, costumes, and special effects alone we could be talking 150-200 million dollars per film. I would think it would cost that much per-season for a television series. Again I can't think of a Studio that would under take that expence with out some guarente of returns. WoT isn't as popular as say Lord Of the Rings or Harry Potter. So it's not getting the attention they do and is alot further down the list of books to turn into film.

 

Last I heard some outfit named Red Eagle Productions had the rights to WoT and as of yet hasn't done anything with it. And more than likely its because of the expence. I think it's going to take a fairly large named director or someone of Jole Silvers influence to get a WOT film project rolling. If anyone knows even indirectly someone of such influence in HollyWood, Pass them the books with a note requesting they read them and just let the wheel weave what it wills from there.

 

 

Darth_Andrea

[Guest cwestervelt]

I doubt it is just the expense that are holding them back.  How many people actually heard of Red Eagle Entertainment before reading they bought the rights for anything connected to The Wheel of Time.  I know I hadn't.  When I tried to look them up, they were almost nonexistent.  Even now, if you google them, what you come up with for a website http://www.red-eagle-entertainment.com/ is a single page with an annoying bird chirp and a contact email link.  I just double checked and that is the same URL as was provided for them on Tor's announcement http://www.tor.com/jordan/media.html.  I think Tor should have done better research before going into any kind of deal with them.

[Jonn]

Hayao Miyazaki would be great for an animated feature.

 

Look at Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Howl's Moving Castle. Just fantastic at adapting literature into beautiful works of art.

 

If anyone should be approached to bring the lyrical beauty and high adventure of of RJ's Wheel of Time, it would be Hayao Miyazaki.

 

Drawbacks would be his demand for total creative control and how much time it would take for production because each feature is mostly traditional animation with the addition of some digital painting and effects.

 

Still, I think whatever his studio did with anything in the books would be quite beautiful.

[Lune]

I disagree, not only is the art style unsuitable, Miyazaki's style is geared more towards an idealistic fantasy than something gritty. He enjoys the storytelling process, little nuances, that sort of thing. That's why his movies are so darn long. I'll admit I fell asleep halfway through Whispers of the Heart, it was just too slow and too long. Couple that with the already long WoT and... yeah...

[reyler]

Not to knock WoT, but seriously, "lyrical beauty"? Miyazaki makes fairy tales, flights of fancy; WoT is so grounded it has roots down to the K-T border.

[Destrus]

I personally don't think the time is right for a WOT movie.  Yes, fantasy is a popular genre right now, but I think that it would be a mistake to sell off the production rights for WOT right now to a company who is strictly looking at making a quick buck off of WOT because of the fact that it is fantasy.

 

There are some fantasy movies that have come out in the past few years that have been 'godawful'....Eragon...Dungeons & Dragons...just to name a couple. 

 

They are working on making a movie of Terry Brooks' Sword Of Shanarah (SP?) which I fully expect to be awful as well.  Then again, that book was hideous, and I still think that Mr. Brooks is lucky that he hasn't been sued by the estate of JRR Tolkien for so blatently ripping off LOTR.  I fully expect that the S.O.S. movie is going to be awful.

 

Also on the immediate horizon, though I think it will be a straight to video release, is the Dragonlance CGI movie.  It has a decent cast, but I think it's still going to go straight to video due to the lack of interest needed to justify a wide opening at the box office.

 

Also, throw in Zemeckis' upcoming Beowulf movie...and I think the "masses" are going to just about be 'fantasied out' for about 10 years or so.

 

Maybe come 2015 to 2020 we could realistically look at doing WOT justice with a good director who grew up with the series and would be willing to give it 100% effort.....but I just don't see anybody doing WOT the right way right now.

[ApostleofJordan]

everybody is all hung-up on the anime/3D/realtime conundrum, but a point was made earlier that I fully agree with. The time is not right for a WoT movie. Reletively few people have read, let alone heard of tWoT, especially when compared to huge best-sellers like Harry Potter, LotR, and Eregon. In my opinion, making Wot mainstream is one of the most important things that can be done to aid the production of a Wot movie. But at the same time, the question must be asked, "would becoming mainstream be good for WoT in general?" If a good movie is made it WILL become mainstream, and then thousands wiil flock to bookstores to pick of copies of the WoT novels. The ranks of hardcore fans will be diluted by those who read a couple books because it was in the vouge, and that would be much worse than a crappily made movie. At the moment, we are fantasy connosoires (the correct spelling would probably be better), the elite of this genre. Do we really want to give that up just so what we love can be popular for its 15 minutes? That, I think, is the most important question.

[Lune]

Good point. Let's wait for AMoL to come out before we think about a movie then. I don't want to be subjected to queueing up for hours on end for my book only to have some punk drive by shouting Dumbledore dies

 

...oops wrong series.

[Guest cwestervelt]

I think the Wheel of Time books are much better known than some of you are thinking.  I've been quite surprised at how many people I have met that read them.  Certainly more than I would have expected just a couple years ago.

[Darth_Andrea]

Well I hadn't heard of them till just a few months ago. A friend of mine from work burnt me a copy of The Eye of The World Audio book (Micheal Kramer and Kate Redding as readers) and I admitedly fell in love but I hadn't even heard of the series or RJ before that. And I am a fairly large fantasy reader...well in my eyes I am I have around 300 fantasy books, series and one shots. I reciently went to my local book store and asked them to see if they could find book 8 for me unabridged on audio CD with the same readers and they looked at me funny. They hadn't heard of the series and the one who did didn't know there was more books beyond The Dragon reborn. She had thought Jordan had died....and that was a Barns and Noble store...Then again I live in the bumbkin region of the country in southern Ohio.

 

 

Darth_Andrea

[Guest cwestervelt]

It can't be much worse than were I was when I got introduced to them.  A small town in Northwest Iowa.  The local librarian put me onto them.

[ApostleofJordan]

Well, I'm up in western Washington, which is a pretty heavily populated area. Throw in the fact that I live in Redmond, with Microsoft headquarters, the Nintendo of America headquarters, and Digipen (and extremely prestigous programing school), I am surrounded by every level of geek, dork, and nerd imaginable. Many of them being fanasy geeks, dorks, and nerds (I'm one of them). So if not may people know about it where I'm from, it's not a heavily read fantasy series. BTW, I was also itroduced to WoT by the audiobooks!

[Guest cwestervelt]

Taken from Barnes and Nobles page for The Eye of the World

From Our Editors

According to a 1996 New York Times article, "Robert Jordan has come to dominate the world that Tolkien began to reveal." Robert Jordan is hands-down the most widely read and talked-about fantasy author writing today. His mammoth, multivolume New York Times bestselling Wheel of Time series has sold more millions of copies to date.  Book One of the Wheel of Time is The Eye of the World, a staggeringly complex and enjoyable adventure that's not without its own cast of unforgettable characters: Rand, a simple sheepherder who is stalked by an evil he does not yet understand; Egwene, Rand's love interest, who happens to possess her own very special gift; Moraine, the beautiful but possibly dangerous member of a powerful legion of sorceresses called Aes Sedai; and Lan, Moraine's fearless companion and guardian.

--Andrew LeCount

 

 

From the Publisher

In one short decade, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has become the bestselling American fantasy series of all time—comparable in depth and scope to J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendary trilogy, The Lord of The Rings. Now, the first two titles in the series, The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt, are available unabridged on CD.

 

In the THE EYE OF THE WORLD three young friends; Rand, Matt and Perrin are attacked by subhuman monsters, bestial Trollocs. With the help of Lady Moiraine, an Aes Sedai, a woman who can wield the One Power and her Warder, Lanthe young boys flee their homeland. But they are pursued relentlessly by the forces of the evil Dark Oneand begin an adventure across an imaginative, fantastical world of strange wonders and deadly horrorwhere goodness stands on the brink of destructionfor the Wheel of Time is weaving a web in the pattern of ages, a web to entangle the world.

 

Bold statements to be making if the books aren't well enough known.  So there popularity and recognition shouldn't be a short coming as far as making movies.  Especially with the number of lesser known ones that are apparently being done/considered.

[ApostleofJordan]

I was comparing the popularity of WoT to the popularity of books like LotR and eregon, that are well read even outside of the world of fantasy geekdom. I recently heard that over 12 million copies have been sold worldwide. Now, there are over 300 million people in the US alone. There are about 6 billion people in the world, so the percentage of people who have read the books is pretty low. And just to make things easy, lets not discuss the illiterate people and countries the books haven't been printed in, so let's just say that there are 5 billion people with the ability and rescources to read the books. Now, if there are 11 books out (22 if you count the hardcover/paperbacks) and you throw in any replacement books, let's just say 1 per series. So 12 per person. So now we know that about 1 million people own the series, and when you compare that to 5 billion people, only .0002% of people have heard of it. Now, over 100 milion copies of LotR have been sold, and add the 1 replacement per person, that's 4 books per person. So, say 25 million people have read the books. So that's .005%. Which is considerably more than .0002%

[Jonn]

I disagree, not only is the art style unsuitable, Miyazaki's style is geared more towards an idealistic fantasy than something gritty. He enjoys the storytelling process, little nuances, that sort of thing. That's why his movies are so darn long. I'll admit I fell asleep halfway through Whispers of the Heart, it was just too slow and too long. Couple that with the already long WoT and... yeah...

 

While I can see some of your point, his more commercial films have mostly been about the dual nature of people, in the Japanese tradition where those who are considered evil are just as capable of being benevolent (and vice versa). Main characters are often presented in a pure light, which is indeed idealistic, but they face hard choices that speak of sacrifice and having to give something up in order to learn or triumph.

 

If applied to Jordan's high fantasy epic, I think there are a lot of possibilites here.

 

I don't think his style is unsuitable either. Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke were both rather gritty in their way, with death playing a central theme in both stories. The action and kinetic storytelling that Miyazaki employs in his films are very beautiful to look at, just as beautiful as the landscapes and character detail his films revel in.

 

And for those who think Jordan's work isn't lyrical or can't be deep, I don't know how many times I've daydreamed about Moiraine making the past come to life with her Manetheren speech in the Two Rivers. The trees sway in the wind, while ravens and crows flying overhead may be searching for more than just something to scavenge. Loial Singing at the grave of the Green Man. There so many moments and little tidbits that could say so much about the series. Who cares about the popularity of the books. If it's good, it's good and people will enjoy it.

 

I know I would really enjoy seeing a good film made from a great series. In fact if I had enjoyed the film having never read the books, how delighted would I be with to find out about a series of books so extensive, immersive and just...outstanding?

[Seriodor]

...i seriously might cry if they turned WoT into a movie, you just cant take 4000 something pages and turn it into a movie for theaters. It took 3 movies to do the 1000 pages of the LoTR. It would have to be heaaavvvillly cut.