I definitely believe LotR is much more of a selling point than a negative, there hasn't really been anything LotR-esque (by that I mean like the movies, not books) on TV yet. Game of Thrones has in setting, tone etc. virtually nothing in common with LotR in my opinion and SoT/Shannara didn't even try to reach that level. It's not like the Hobbit movies didn't perform at the box office the last couple of years, despite their obvious flaws. I believe there is a much bigger audience for a high-quality, truly epic and unapologetically uncynical/romantic* fantasy TV series than most people believe. But "high-quality" is the key word, whatever one might think about it mainstream TV watchers are extremely turned off by low production values, especially when it comes to fantasy/SF. 

 

You can't go into filming this series thinking "We are going to make a good fantasy series". You need to go into it thinking "We are going to create the most epic. high-quality, award-winning tv series ever made. Nobody is even going to care which genre it is because they are going to be too busy telling all their friends how awesome it is and if they don't start watching it too they are going to be lost at every dinner/party/lunch break for the foreseeable future." That is what Game of Thrones did and whatever one's opinion of that show it has worked.

 

*Romantic as in marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealised (Merriam-Webster)

1. I prefer thefreedictionary.com

2. As I've stated before, I see the tv series as a big ad (see Ubisoft and the new AC movie, which is not really a movie, it's a global ad). And we've seen in the last decades that books stay with us, tv series don't. The world moves on, and 5-6 years later nobody cares about these 'groundbreaking' tv series. The books, on the other hand, stay with the audience with much longer (2-3 decades at least.)

3. I fear for the 'John Carter, Valérian et Laureline etc' effect. I mean, when WOT will see the sunlight on tvs/movies screens, the audience will react in a negative way, because in the last decade alone many books/movies ripped from many things from WOT. And we cannot explain to them that hey, this was an original series back in the nineties...

4. The series needs a fan, a caring fan in seat of the main producer. You mentioned the Hobbit movies: the problem with these films was not the overdone (and weak) cgi, but their soulless state. Ofc, the arrogance of them was way over the top: I talked with an important cgi guy from Weta a few years back (we did an interview), and their whole attitude was disgusting ("the audience will not notice anything" etc) We can pour into $200 million into every season, but, without caring the end result will be poor.

5. I'm not interested in awards, I'm interested in new readers. Unfortunately, GOT despite being a real bestseller since the debut of the show, more and more people say that they not interested in the books, they will watch/re-watch only the series.

6. One more thing about the 'secretive' company. Producers always tell us that they have to build a hype (= awareness) way before the series/movie will be watched by the audience. They speak about min. three years, because you have to build your audience.  So they have to put things in motion sooner than later.

I think the author saw himself in Perrin or vice versa, so... yes, we really need Perrin.

By cutting him out they can fit the first four books into two longer (14-16 epis, net. 60 min) seasons.

Re it seeming too much like LotR I think that's more of a selling point for an adaptation than a negative.

That's the big question.

I have a feeling that the producers are going to want to keep more or less the same structure that RJ had, with the first three seasons being devoted to the first three books, for much the same reasons.  If the first season sucks and fails, they can cancel it there and still have a fairly "complete" story.  If it has moderate success they can keep going through the end of the Dragon Reborn, not pick it up after that, and still have a fairly "complete" story.  If it picks up enough viewers to keep going after that, then we'll start seeing some serious rejiggering of plots and characters, so they can wrap the whole thing up in 7 to 9 seasons.  It's pretty rare that any kind of fantasy/sci-fi series lasts that long, except the most popular, and I have a really hard time seeing anybody take it past ten seasons, no matter how popular it becomes, if only because they won't want to end up paying Friends-level of salaries for the main cast, on top of all the other expenses.

Your plan sounds reasonable but it will not happen. After S3 they have to cut too many things.

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.

  W, you basically exhibit what we, humans , call reasonable, rational, logical (my vocabulary ends here), but it looks like even you pre-plan too much in a way that is not really feasible right now.  Let's cross that bridge when we come to it.

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

Create, read, update, and delete?

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.

I prefer cutting to merging. (Do we really need Perrin?)

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

That depends on the screenplay. They could do so much with Book 1. But starting with Book 2 the viewers will get an insane pace; the show needs a breakneck speed. (Or not?)

I think that's quite difficult because EotW is the entry point to the series and it worked in hooking people in (to the tune of almost 100 million book sales), so messing around with that approach may be inadvisable. I think there are some ways of dealing with it.

bolded: we do not live in the past; newcomers see WOT as an old (30th anniv. is in the corner), and very, very long series.

One way could be a very short season (6 epis), other one is a totally 'deranged' storyline.

lanfear doesn't crawl around anywhere,she glides,smooth and cool,

as regal as any queen.

My main issue with Mat is his annoying over-protectiveness, he is like my nightmare of an overprotective brother. Nynaeve handled a forsaken in her FIRST meeting with one and yet he seems to think she is helpless like a babe. And he evaluates the looks of all women, it's literally the first thing he does. He doesn't do that with the men. Yes, you can feel that is irrational, but it makes me angry. I hate men who try to flirt with all women and act like all of them are a potential sex partner, the first time they see them. Women are human beings, not just bedmates.

That being said, as I mentioned, I DON'T hate Mat. He has a good heart, which mostly makes up for all his flaws - he is not as cynical as many of the other main characters and never forgets where he comes from. And that whole thing with Tylin, and how little support he got from the others about it, was heartbreaking. So it is impossible to hate him, but he does annoy me on very many levels. To me, he symbolizes the male ego, in many ways. :P 

1. Olwena, please, stick to one username, I mean do not use them parallel. It's entertaining for a while, but after that it's annoying.

2. I don't know that you are a woman or a man, but if you are a woman and you will not accept this then you will be alone. Almost every men like this. 

And this topic is about hating, iirc. I usually do dot like hard mods, but it looks like the thread's totally derailed.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

I will not retype my whole post again.

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.

My thoughts exactly.

With the extended silence regarding any production after what I have to assume was strictly a settlement with red eagle over the rights I'm reminded more and more of the many decades that the rights to the lord of the rings were bought and sold and resold and made with false starts and sold again and sat on shelves until peter Jackson finally made a respectable movie version of all three books.

I suspect we're going to see something like that here, and that the rights, if they were optioned, are on the shelf for the forseeable future.

I think if anyone had any plans for the near future they'd be publicizing it and trying to sell more books and tease the fan base and interest people outside that base and that's not happening.

I have max. 30 years to live (it's rather 20-25), so if they will postpone the whole project, then they will lose a viewer too.

bolded: since October the sales are doubled in the UK, and in the US we are seeing a miracle right now: strog sales in Oct, very strong sales in Nov, and extraordinary sales in Dec. 

But Harriet absolutely worked on every single WoT book as a professional editor. She also did beta readings of the material in progress and came up with about half of the chapter titles in the series, as well as coming up with ideas for the chapter icons. She also did some work on the appendix for each book, and coallating some of RJ's notes.

 

As Robert Jordan's widow and his partner in the Bandersnatch Group, Harriet also pretty much is the Jordan Estate.

1. We have different interpretations on what does it mean being an editor (there are many types, ofc), and from what Jordan told us, she was not.

2. I did not see/read Jordan's will that's why I'm guessing.

Not entirely. Companies buy the rights and then keep quiet about it all the time. The GoT deal was done-in-principle in January 2006, so it was a year before it was formally announced. If there are multiple parties involved and one party decides to suddenly hold things up, the other parties cannot proceed without them. I wouldn't be surprised if there was lingering legal issues from the Red Eagle fiasco.

I don't know. I usually see 'deal + announcement' then we get more and more info.

But what I find really interesting that Universal bought the film rights, but they'd filmed an 'unknown' novel from OSC Delaney:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXiNkOjM7oM

I do not remember the film at all, but I could sleep easily with a similar production look.

These days it's all about the franchises, so they could make an action packed series for the built-in audience.

A lot of people were promised RAFO's and never had it answered in the books.  I think Alan and Maria released some clarifications and we were waiting on the companion to answer the rest and it didn't.  I'm with those still wanting to know, lol!

  But I really thinks leaving many things unanswered is way better than having answers in clay tablets

Wow... lots to respond to here and some of this will be Off Topic, so sorry in advance.

 

First, regarding the show. I think either Harriet or someone involved with the property responded somewhere along the lines and said that the news/cat got out of the bag way early. They said it was happening, just that news broke about it much earlier in the process than normal. 

 

Second, in regards to serial shows vs "case of the week" type shows a lot of that depends on the network and whether they want the show to go into syndication or not. For a show to be eligible for syndication, one of the requirements is "case of the week". While an overarching story can be told, each episode has to have it's own story & conclusion. If you recall a few years back with Legend of the Seeker, the network that made it was hoping that it was popular enough to have the rerun legs like Xena and Hercules did. 

 

Serial shows on the big networks are much more rare. They are somewhat new (on ABC/NBC/CBS) and didn't really become a thing until Lost... but Lost is not syndicated despite it's popularity due to it's serial nature.

 

Third, as for new shows... if you don't have Netflix you really are missing out on some great shows that they produce. Stranger Things is amazing. All of the Marvel shows are really good (I prefer them to the MCU movies). Marco Polo, House of Cards, also great stuff. Give them a try if you haven't already.

 

1. Harriet's role in WOT was simple: according to RJ she was a beta reader (NOT an editor) Does she hold the rights ot the estate I don't know, but:

January 16, 2007 | 06:28PM PT Cabler acquires rights to Martin's 'Ice'  HBO has acquired the rights to turn George R.R. Martin’s bestselling fantasy series “A Song of Fire & Ice” into a dramatic series to be written and exec produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

 

August 12, 2008 | 09:00PM PT Studio nabs film rights to Robert Jordan book  Universal Pictures has acquired film rights to the late Robert Jordan’s bestselling “The Wheel of Time” novel series in a seven-figure deal.

 

Harriet, if you read this topic: this is not rocket science. Someone buys it, you publish the deal. All these 'we develop the series/films on the quiet' is baloney.

2. I think, this big 'secrecy' is just dropping dust into our eyes, nothing more.

3. Thank you for your recommendations, but after watching a few minutes from these shows, I turn them off. I cannot connect to the characters at all. I try, I really try to find new series in every year, but this is happening with the movies too.

My 'toplist' for 2016: The Confirmation, *a very long pause* the first minutes from Pete's Dragon, a few moments from Moana, the POV killing sequence from London Has Fallen, the trailer of Criminal, and Toby Jones from The Man Who Knew Infinity.

And even the Confirmation is not a good film. Yes, my bar is quite high.

Disney basically suffocates the whole industry, so I really don't understand that why Sony and Universal do not cooperate, and why don't they make a 'reduced' WOT film series = focusing only Rand and action.

I have to wonder if Red Eagle Entertainment is still involved somehow because this seems like an oddly long wait after Team Jordans announcement.

It was just a prank. Or the last weapon against REE.

You know, I can accept that they will/can not tell us everything, but at least give us some clear informations.

 and Eladia for nearly destroying the White Tower and her almost genocidal attitude towards the Blue Ajah.

It's an exaggeration, but you could think of her as Lieutenant Dub from Švejk (at least in the earlier books): "Do you know me? I tell you, you don't know me yet. You may perhaps know me from the good side, but wait till you know me from the bad side. I'm nasty. Don't imagine I'm not. I make everyone cry. Very well, then, do you know me or don't you know me?"

Lieutenant Dub is awesome.

I pretty much predicted that Egwene was going to have a dream (if it was?) about being Rand's wife.  Pretty much all three of her experiences surround Rand and each time she had failed to help him.  If these experiences are a reflection of her heart, could they be a representation of her having a hard time letting Rand go?  Or are they actually reflect events that could or may possibly happen?  I can understand why Egwene is still hung up on Rand, they had practically been engaged since kids and it was pretty much understood by whole village they were going to be married.  Yet, overnight (the night they left Two Rivers with Moiraine) it's been thrown out the window. 

Even though there wasn't any love between them, and there wasn't any real interaction between them at all (that's true for the relationship of Rand and Perrin), when you are constantly told that this person will be your consort, it is hard to see them in a different light. And Eg do not see only Rand anymore, she mostly sees the Dragon Reborn. And I will not bring it up her other desires. As for Rand: ditto.

Their relationship will be interesting, to put it mildly.

I got as far as halfway through the second book before I got burned out, but I have watched the HBO show.

What happened?

If Wheel of Time finds itself on a network that depends on commercial revenue during the broadcast then there will be a high chance that the series will suck. Just saying that this show is going to be expensive and will take a network like HBO, Netflix, or Amazon to do it justice.

I'm really worried that they will say something like that: "We are so happy! CW [as a big fan of Veronica Mars (S1, S2) I know about that channel, but when you see the list of their shows - courtesy of bing.com -: Supergirl, The Flash, Jane The Virgin, iZombie, Arrow, The Vampire Diaries etc it is clearly that they don't care about quality - even my curious wife will not watch an epi from these shows] is the perfect place for this series, and the budget will be sky high, yes, 15 million dollars could give the fans the real experience!"

And many months later we still don't know anything about anything. Pathetic.

Yes, so long as the goal is to tell the story rather than sell commercials. I.E... If they drag things out for the sake of it that's not good. This is where I look at GoT. They've shortened the seasons from 10 to 7 because that's the number of episodes needed to finish their story.

Seeing their numbers I think they've reached the ceiling, the actors demands too much money etc.

My wife is currently watching Tom Ellis (I mean Lucifer), Elementary, Blindspot, and Homeland.

While she knows that they will make the series as long as they making money, she does not like that there are so many empty episodes (they say filler is at least good, as opposite empty epis), and it looks like she will give up Blindspot because they put Jaimie Alexander  into the background. And if they will not give a big part to Rupert Friend, then she will say goodbye to Homeland too.

I haven't find any series worth watching in the last four years.

Mostly because most tv shows didn't have a linear story structure per season. Today many many shows are structured in such a way that if you have missed a couple of episodes its easy to become lost as the plot gets away from you. As such most shows don't re-run much because seasons need to be aired in a story order, for viewers to know whats going on and to keep interest in the property. Not all shows mind, but many. 

As far as I know, viewers like 'case of the week' structure more than the long -you have to look it up on Wiki- storylines. Which is a big problem for us. Plus, we cannot base on the 'degenerates' as GOT does, because WOT sees/treats its characters in a whole different way.

HBO, Netflix use (very) short seasons, so it is easily to catch up.

OK if u cut all this stuff, what will the show actually be about?

By the way, it was interesting to see the new wave of readers after WH/COT. They became the greatest theorists, posters. But even they do not post anymore.

And many disappointed fans gave up on the series after the slowness of the later books. (Not to mention the 'official' ending: "This is the ending???")

Or when a side got a new look, and its users departed.
They also departed certain sites when popular members were banned.

Many sites ran out of money, and its users did not join other sites.

Or see case of Wotmania: there is rafo (with similar UI), but the members did not migrated to the new site.

 

You could say it's a natural process, but experiencing things like that in such a rapid way (read under a few years) ...

You are welcome!

These links are very useful:

http://www.stevenac.net/wot/wotchron.htm

http://www.encyclopaedia-wot.org/

DM

http://www.theoryland.com/

And, if you have any question, you could always post it here.

The reason for the different running times is due to the lower episode count per season. This allows for more high dollar commercials to be run during the show. 

And what about GOT? (50–69 minutes)

But it was stored on Dragonmount and Jennifer L was a big contributor

Storing on here was just a rescue mission - sort of. And when was the last time/period when Jenny posted actively?

I chatted with the 'Founding Fanthers and Mothers' more than a decade ago last time, and most of them was not interested in WOT anymore. You should could ask this from Leigh and others, they just have moved on.

And honestly, we are way over the WOTFAQ in these days.

I do. In my opinion it allows the story to be the focus rather than the time. It allows the extra detail and character development to happen when necessary.  Heck even the episode count per season should be adjusted to tell the story the right way.

But earlier you have said that "Think of it as two eight episode seasons per year", so would S1 is only 6 episodes but S2 is 11 ep., S3 is 8 ep. be acceptable to you?