The Wheel of Time Will Be Adapted as a TV Series

[dexterryu]

 

If this is the case we can pretty much say goodbye to any chance of a WoT adaptation ever happening. The tv fantasy high will be well over by the time (10+ years) anything might happen with the rights and the books themselves will be too old/not current enough and all fans will have moved on. It would be a depressing end well fitting the curse-like bad luck this series has had regarding adaptations. Really hoping Starz didn't buy the rights.

As far as I see it WoT has a really short window to get on the air in order to be successful. It pretty much closes one year after GoT ends (barring some other fantasy tv show of similar popularity coming and keeping the flame alive). Once the GoT crowd stops longing for something new and moves on it's over.

 

 

I disagree here... at least as far as TV fantasy shows go. There is always going to be an appetite for fantasy shows (just like there is for fantasy books). Same goes for comics. Game of Thrones isn't as popular as it is because it's fantasy, it's as popular as it is because it's really good.

 

So if Wheel of Time is made into a show, it will succeed if it's good. I would say that it would succeed if it is good even if it started it's run while GoT is still on the air. In fact, similar to books and how fans like to compare and debate having more than one show that is good is more likely to help BOTH shows. Fans will debate on social media, which builds awareness, which usually brings in more viewers.

 

The reasons a Wheel of Time show would fail or be cancelled are #1 it isn't good or #2 It's viewership isn't high enough to justify the costs.

[szilard]

I disagree here... at least as far as TV fantasy shows go. There is always going to be an appetite for fantasy shows (just like there is for fantasy books). Same goes for comics. Game of Thrones isn't as popular as it is because it's fantasy, it's as popular as it is because it's really good.

 

I don't know. SFF was not as popular as today. There are no Western movies/series, there are no rom-coms in today's cinema etc.

 

as for GOT... you know, when you read the thousands (or hundreds of thousand) posts about the actresses' bodies, and there are countless polls about how would you f*** her/them, or the "she's 18 now, where are the nude scenes" etc. I think when there are so many degenerates in the audience, there are problems, huge problems.

[dexterryu]

 

I disagree here... at least as far as TV fantasy shows go. There is always going to be an appetite for fantasy shows (just like there is for fantasy books). Same goes for comics. Game of Thrones isn't as popular as it is because it's fantasy, it's as popular as it is because it's really good.

 

I don't know. SFF was not as popular as today. There are no Western movies/series, there are no rom-coms in today's cinema etc.

 

as for GOT... you know, when you read the thousands (or hundreds of thousand) posts about the actresses' bodies, and there are countless polls about how would you f*** her/them, or the "she's 18 now, where are the nude scenes" etc. I think when there are so many degenerates in the audience, there are problems, huge problems.

 

 

SFF is growing in popularity for several reasons. The first that comes to mind is that the tech to film it and much of the magic not look janky or cheap now exists. LoTR & Harry Potter did wonders to change this perception for the big screen. GoT has done similar for the small screen. 

 

Not only have they proved that they can do the source material justice but they've also shown that there is an audience for these shows. Heck, just look at how many Marvel movies and shows exist now. It's almost over saturated, but since the quality tends to be decent they are all doing well. I feel that good SFF would be the same way.

 

Good westerns still do well, but there isn't much about them that couldn't be done in the 70's and 80's from a technical perspective... so pretty much all of the source material has been covered. We've seen movies about Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickock, and Wyatt Earp. That said, there are several current & recent TV shows: Hell on Wheels, Deadwood, Longmire, Justified... They are out there and co-exist.

[szilard]

OFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!

 

SFF is growing in popularity for several reasons. The first that comes to mind is that the tech to film it and much of the magic not look janky or cheap now exists. LoTR & Harry Potter did wonders to change this perception for the big screen. GoT has done similar for the small screen. 

 

Not only have they proved that they can do the source material justice but they've also shown that there is an audience for these shows. Heck, just look at how many Marvel movies and shows exist now. It's almost over saturated, but since the quality tends to be decent they are all doing well. I feel that good SFF would be the same way.

 

Good westerns still do well, but there isn't much about them that couldn't be done in the 70's and 80's from a technical perspective... so pretty much all of the source material has been covered. We've seen movies about Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickock, and Wyatt Earp. That said, there are several current & recent TV shows: Hell on Wheels, Deadwood, Longmire, Justified... They are out there and co-exist.

 

Well, what I see in my little world (and on the net) is a little bit different. You know the situation is similar to the market smartphones: 'everybody' says that nobody can live without apps, but half of the smartphone users have never downloaded any app. Ever.

 

What I'd like to say with that, there are tv/movie addicts: many people, I mean the 'same people' (the overlapping is huge), watch these shows - that's what I hear back; relatives, friends, collagues, pals tell me all the time that they watch 10-15-20 shows a week. Other people do not watch them/tv at all.

 

Or they read nothing just fantasy, just sf, just King/Grisham/Steel, and they never go out from their comfort zone.

 

Western movies/shows were just an example, and honestly, who could top Once Upon a Time in the West , but even the new popularity of SFF will go out of the fashion. And maybe a WOT adaptation in 2030/2040 would be meaningless, because the audience will not care anymore. (LOTR movies basically killed the fantasy genre.)

 

I don't want to write a long off topic post, but our culture is dead: novel died with Ulysses (ofc, there are novels from *), German critics said 40 years ago that German literature is dead, plays/painting/ceramics/sculpting/poetry/short stories/visual arts are dead too.

 

It is not a coincidence that Scorsese (Mean streets, Taxi Driver - his other films are not very good) says that he does not watch new movies, or see that article: http://www.artsjournal.com/letters/20040310-11773.shtml

 

If we stay with SF, outside the four (or five, or six) great dead writers I do not see anybody who makes any waves. There are workmen, many workmen, who pour out novels after novels, but there are zero new ideas. (Because our culture is dead etc.)

 

 

*btw, 'after' Joyce we have

Kosztolányi: Pacsirta (Skylark), Édes Anna (Anna Edes)
Moricz Zsigmond, Szabó Magda, Molnár Ferenc, Fekete István, Karinthy, Rejtő, Örkény, Déry, Márai
Italo Svevo (Zeno's Conscience)
Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Švejk)
Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)
Woolf (Waves, To the Lighthouse)
Bulgakov, Musil, Camus, Borges (essays) Huxley, Proust, Hemingway, Milne, Waugh, Faulkner, Nabokov, Chandler, Steinbeck, Canetti, Orwell, Beckett, Sholokhov
Hesse (The Glass Bead Game), Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Murdoch, Golding, Pasternak, Duras (short stories), Heinlein, Solzhenitsyn, Kesey, Vonnegut, Bellow (Herzog), Böll
Hermann Broch (The Death of Virgil)
Nikos Kazantzakis (Christ Recrucified)
Thomas Pynchon ( Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland)
Krasznahorkai László (Az ellenállás melankóliája - The Melancholy of Resistance)
 

Not a long list... (ofc, i did not include 'lesser' authors: Arno Schmidt, Bernhard, Bely, V. Grossman etc)

[Occams whiskey bottle]

Good stories never go out of fashion. If they are able to make the right casting decisions, and have the novels converted over to a good screen play then the series should be popular. It's a great story they just need to make the correct cuts and changes to make it successful on the silver screen.

[szilard]

Good stories never go out of fashion.

I don't know; I think the genres are dead, but they are thrasing violently as the Fades right now.

 

If they are able to make the right casting decisions, and have the novels converted over to a good screen play then the series should be popular.

 

Even an awful casting (and a bad sp) cannot harm the series from a box office pov. China alone could stay WOT afloat (especially now, that they slowly increase the revenue-sharing basis), not to mention Russia, SK, SA etc.

 

It's a great story they just need to make the correct cuts and changes to make it successful on the silver screen.

 

They just need to make HUGE cuts to make it successful on the silver screen.

 

Or, instead of adaptation, they could write totally new stories (WOT is huge in space and time). But I don't like this approach.

[dexterryu]

 

Good stories never go out of fashion.

I don't know; I think the genres are dead, but they are thrasing violently as the Fades right now.

 

 

I agree. If the story is good the show will be good and therefor likely successful. So as long as they don't mess up what is already a great story they should be fine.

[OlwenaSedai]

Lord of the Rings came out ages ago, yet the movies were popular when they were released 20 years after the books were published. WoT is a timeless story.

I have higher hopes for a series adaption than a movie. The universe is just too huge. It might even be too big for a show. The WoT world is more immense than the GoT world, even though you don't realize it at first because our characters stay on one continent (at least for a long time). 

Edited December 30, 2016 by OlwenaSedai

[Occams whiskey bottle]

Happy New Year! Where’s our TV show?     

[wotfan4472]

Happy New Year Occams whiskey bottle!! Waiting for our show patiently :)

[wheeloftimetv]

Happy New Year! Where’s our TV show?

The latest rumour for the rumour mill...

http://www.wheeloftime.tv/2017/01/has-good-ship-amazon-sprung-leak.html

Edited January 4, 2017 by Narg_The_Trolloc

[Occams whiskey bottle]

 

Happy New Year! Where’s our TV show?

The latest rumour for the rumour mill...

http://www.wheeloftime.tv/2017/01/has-good-ship-amazon-sprung-leak.html

 

 

 

Amazon would make a lot of sense because they would make money off the book sales, the show, and any merchandise that they would sell also. They would do much better than HBO because so many people already buy stuff from them.

[Rednalloc]

 

 

Happy New Year! Where’s our TV show?

The latest rumour for the rumour mill...

http://www.wheeloftime.tv/2017/01/has-good-ship-amazon-sprung-leak.html

 

 

 

Amazon would make a lot of sense because they would make money off the book sales, the show, and any merchandise that they would sell also. They would do much better than HBO because so many people already buy stuff from them.

 

 

 

Let's hope that the rumour is true and Amazon is making the show. They would have the most to gain from making sure it's successful and would also have the best reason to keep it faithful to the books (since they will want to push book sales in parallel). They certainly have the money to take the risk and desperately need a high-profile show to put them on the map, tv-wise.

[szilard]

Let us also not forget Amazon knows exactly how well WoT sells and what demographics it works for as they have two decades of sales data.

 

http://www.wheeloftime.tv/2017/01/has-good-ship-amazon-sprung-leak.html

 

BFG and others say otherwise.

 

But let's say the rumours are true: how long will the bidding continue? A year? Two years?

 

There is no way to adapt the series for the tv before 2020-2021.

 

Or they will not adapt the series. After all the WOTversum is huge (in time and space), so they will make 'independent' stories first.

[wheeloftimetv]

Wtf is BFG?

 

Bidding? Huh?

 

?

[szilard]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BFG

 

What I've wanted to say:

3. Bids considered as a group, as at an auction or in card games: The bidding was higher than expected.

 

[wheeloftimetv]

Nargs head hurts.

[Occams whiskey bottle]

Not getting what the BFG reference has to do with a Wheel of Time adaption...?

[szilard]

Not getting what the BFG reference has to do with a Wheel of Time adaption...?

 

BFG is an extremely popular book. And all the box office sites predicted that the film adaptation (by SPIELBERG!) will bring at least 800-900 million dollars from the theaters. And it was a huge flop. (It's a very bad film, but at least the first weekend could have been better. Especially in the UK.)

 

There are countless examples (popular books, games etc) when the audience do not care about the adaptation.

[szilard]

Moloch      

Posted 15 December 2016 - 09:54 AM

 

 Most of these fan castings would never happen in a million years without a 200 million dollar budget per season, and more for a movie.  No way are you getting a movie star without opening the wallet in a BIG way.

 

Look, if Bezos is a fan that he could buy the rights for 40 million dollars, and he can spend 600-700 million dollars on the series. (Ofc, he could spend $66.7 billion - liquidity, I know, I know -  on homeless children and adults in the USA, but hey, everyone has their preference list, maybe he loves WOT very much, who knows)

 

 

[Werthead]

Interesting thought: we know now that Taim was originally meant to be Demandred and RJ changed his mind abruptly later on.

 

For the TV show, would people prefer:

 

1) Keeping Taim as Demandred and going with the LoC/ACoS depiction of Taim throughout, expose Taim as Demandred dramatically later on and just drop the whole Shara thing.

2) Go with the idea of Taim being a separate character and drop all the oddball references in LoC/ACoS that hinted he was a Forsaken.

3) Adapt the books as they are and just let the TV viewers get confused about it so book readers can explain it to them and feel superior later on.

 

There's probably quite a few issues that require judgement calls like this to be made.

[wheeloftimetv]

1. It makes more sense. the whole Shara thing was crud anyway.

[Rednalloc]

1. It makes more sense. the whole Shara thing was crud anyway.

 

 

Second that, I believe it will work the best on screen and will also merge two characters. Merging characters will probably be necessary to a great extent in order to keep the cast remotely manageable, even though that's hard both practically and emotionally in a story this detailed and complex.

[Occams whiskey bottle]

Interesting thought: we know now that Taim was originally meant to be Demandred and RJ changed his mind abruptly later on.

 

For the TV show, would people prefer:

 

1) Keeping Taim as Demandred and going with the LoC/ACoS depiction of Taim throughout, expose Taim as Demandred dramatically later on and just drop the whole Shara thing.

2) Go with the idea of Taim being a separate character and drop all the oddball references in LoC/ACoS that hinted he was a Forsaken.

3) Adapt the books as they are and just let the TV viewers get confused about it so book readers can explain it to them and feel superior later on.

 

There's probably quite a few issues that require judgement calls like this to be made.

 

 

 

They will probably eliminate or minimize much of the Eye of the World storyline since its so close to Lord of the Rings.

[Occams whiskey bottle]

Interesting. I wondered a while back if Apple was going to create original content if the Wheel of Time would be the place it landed

 

https://www.cultofmac.com/462093/apple-could-offer-original-scripted-tv-content-by-end-of-2017/