Yeah, I'm in the same "Lightning Thief was a terrible adaptation but an okay movie" camp. And
definitely agreed about the Lotus Hotel. They don't even explain the mythological importance of it in the book. And while I hated Grover's Character Derailment, he was one of the better parts of the film.
Also, for another fantasy(ish?) series that would make a good movie, Midnighters. Although it might work better as a mini-series, they're already somewhat...cinematic, for lack of a better word. Unfortunately, only five people in the world have ever heard of the series.
"We're home, Chewie."I have the feeling I could have written a better Percy Jackson adaption with a hand behind my back.
my drawing blog ya'll UPDATES 10 TIMES A MONTH WOW, THIS IS STRAIGHT UP MUH SOGGY KNEESomething from the Dying Earth. It's probably next to impossible to make a believable adaptation for today's audiences, but it would still be cool to see.
I'd also like to see a decent Conan adaptation.
edited 20th Jan '13 5:55:42 AM by supergod
For we shall slay evil with logic...
Double plus on the Conan adaptation, preferably one that stuck to the original Howard stories.
Other candidates: John C. Wright's Chronicles of Chaos, Michael Scott's Nicholas Flamel books and Garth Nix's Old Kingdom trilogy
Is there a thread like this for science-fiction books into movies?
edited 20th Jan '13 7:55:36 AM by tricksterson
Trump delenda estForgive me for beating the subject to death somewhat, but precisely what was it that was appealing about the movie version of The Lightning Thief's portrayal of the Lotus Hotel and Casino? True, they remembered to include the lotus flowers themselves, but then I seem to remember a montage set to Poker Face taking up the remainder of the time spent there. Including the moment with the taxi and the Lotus Card would have been great, but no...
Anyhow, I digress. They may not technically be conventional fantasy, but I'd love to see movies made of Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy. This would call for integration of live-action and CGI on an Avatar-like scale, but in the right hands it could be fantastic. A purely animated The Edge Chronicles could be good, too, provided that the distinctive style of the illustrations was preserved.
edited 21st Jan '13 4:42:49 PM by BrotherMycroft
"And every life is a special story of its own." —The Stargazer, Mass Effect 3If Poker Face hadn't been a modern song I'd like it more. As in, I think it actually fit trying to show the mood, even though it had been a song picked because it was currently very popular at the time.
Read my stories!I only just finished book two of The Wheel of Time, and I must say, it would make a good film series. But of course, it consists of fourteen doorstoppers, so adapting the series on a one-book-one-film basis would take 50 years or so to finish. And I think there's only a gap of a few months between each novel? Although I hear the books in the middle are filler, so I guess some of it can be cut out.
A fistful of me.I'd love to see a good adaptation of The Chronicles of Amber, but there's so much that could go wrong with a standard Hollywood treatment that I'm afraid to ask for one.
I think that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser could work, though. Yes, it's a much-copied classic that could lead to some "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny reactions, but it's also an ahead-of-its-time deconstruction of popular sword-and-sorcery tropes that are still in wide use, and I think people would get it.
I'm less sure about The Elric Saga, another much-imitated classic deconstruction-in-its-day, but if done well, it would be so cool that I'm not sure I'd care. :)
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.
I think there's more danger of Elric being confused with something from Goth culture. He's not a vampire, and the presence of BFSs and dragons, plus the utter lack of romance (outside of The Lost Lenore, with its interesting incest-squick elements) should help avoid any confusion with anything like Twilight. It's not like it's something you'd even particularly market towards women.
Ok, pale, scrawny and still sexy...that is something it might share with Twilight. But I think it could still easily be distinguished.
We are assuming the filmmakers do a decent job with these (thus the "If Only They'd Stop Messing Around" in the thread title).
Heck, I think a bit of added-on goth flavoring might even benefit Elric. It's already pretty close to being an unmade-trope version.
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.Mostly everything mentioned so far in this thread is too darn long and overly serial to make good movie material - It worked for the harry potter films because they were willing to commit to 8 movies. What you need is something short with strong imagery and characters that grab you. Most suggestions so far are more likely to get raided for TV series materials
Nation (Terry Pratchett) would make a good life-of-pi-only-with-overtly-anti-religious-messaging...
Tregillis, The Milkweed books? WWII, nazi scientist develops process to give people superpowers, mayhem ensues.
Westerfelds Darwinist/mechanist war books? Effect intensive, but that is not all to the bad. Needs an androgynous, yet attractive actress for the lead, tough.
..
Use Of Weapons. Banks. Yeeesssss.
edited 11th Feb '13 1:36:09 PM by Izeinspring
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Hey, as long as we're dreaming, I think we're free to dream of high-quality long movie series. But I don't think the thread is really supposed to be limited to theatrical movies. In some cases, I think what we want is the production values of a movie, but otherwise more like a TV series. :)
That said, fantasy (especially these days) does seem to tend towards long, sprawling epics that can't be shoved into a movie format very well. But the more episodic fantasy series, like Elric, or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, could work in the same way that, say, Conan the Barbarian worked. The movies can be standalone, so you start at the beginning, and maybe make a couple more as needed. No reason to try to cover the whole story in a series of movies, because it's really a series of standalone stories.
Discworld is another example—even though the movies that have been made so far are Made-for-TV, they're still basically standalone. The series as a whole is huge, but so episodic that you don't have to commit to tackling the whole thing. There's a lot of stuff I'd be quite happy to see done as well as the BBC has done with Discworld.
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.Well, if not something long, then The Bartimaeus Trilogy definitely stands out as a prime candidate, if they can ever get off their duffs and just do it. It's three books, four if you count the prequel book, and none of them are exactly doorstoppers. Even Ptolemy's Gate, the final book in the series, is only 512 pages long. And since it's already done and dusted, it's self-limiting by nature.
Not sure if this counts as fantasy, but I staunchly believe that Dinotopia would make for a great film. No, it has not already been done.
A fistful of me.

Yeah, The Lightning Thief wasn't that bad. I actually enjoyed a few changes they made to the plot, mostly in terms of the Lotus Hotel.
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