Apple Working on TV Show Adapted From Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' Novels

[theluggage]

Yes, unfortunately. The problem with "I, Robot" was, it started out as an entirely unrelated movie in production, called "Hardwired", and they got hold of the Asimov IP and slapped on the name, changed some character names to match, and tweaked it a little bit. It's main connection to Asimov's story is the name.

Y'know, if that's true then either "Hardwired" leaned very, very heavily on Asimov's robot stories or they did a <i>lot</i> of rewriting after changing the title.

...it certainly wasn't a perfect movie, and was blighted by some crass-beyond-believe product placement (plus, Susan Calvin as the love interest.. =:-O ) but the main plot strands (how could a three-laws robot apparently commit murder, robots/computers becoming so sophisticated they think their way out of the three laws and and use them to justify playing God to better protect "Humanity"). Ultimately, I thought it worked well as a mainstream film "inspired" by the Asimov stories. Anyway, since the book "I Robot" was a collection of shorts, they couldn't exactly stick to the story.

I think that's probably a better approach than trying to film the book: after all, the biggest successes in the SF-book-to-movie category have been the P.K. Dick adaptations which (mostly) just take a couple of key ideas from the book and weave a completely new story around them. Not saying that Blade Runner is a better story than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (it isn't) but I think its a better movie than a closer adaptation would have been. I think Total Recall and Minority Report may actually be better stories than the originals (We Can Remember for you Wholesale was basically a comedy, Minority Report had some remarkably non-threatening and forgiving bad guys...)

Trouble with adapting Sci-Fi novels like Foundation as films faithfully is that the novels tend to be slow-moving, cerebral and exposition-laden which would result in a film with art-house audience appeal and a summer blockbuster effects budget.

Its a while since I read "foundation" but what I remember is basically "the Hari Seldon lectures on Psychohistory" with huge time-jumps in between. great SF, great radio play (pretty sure its been done), but a movie/big-budget TV series? Unless, you present it as something like The Man from Earth (basically: a bunch of people sitting around a room talking for 90 minutes) which could be a hard sell.
[doublepost=1523548137][/doublepost]

For example, Breaking Bad - if Apple bought the rights then they have it changed from Walt cooking meth in the desert to doing baggies in the evening on a street corner to make his fortune - it's similar but with the excitement turned down.

I wouldn't assume that Netflix are too anti-hero friendly. They just made Altered Carbon and turned the protagonist into a crusader against a corrupt regime with a heroic revolutionary past and a soppy backstory involving his sister... instead of an ex-government elite soldier turned mercenary with a relaxed attitude to switching sides and a conscience that only cut in if it provided an excuse for retaliatory ultra-violence. They did leave the sex and violence in, though (it wasn't that bad).

 

[GeneralChang]

Y'know, if that's true then either "Hardwired" leaned very, very heavily on Asimov's robot stories or they did a <i>lot</i> of rewriting after changing the title.

...it certainly wasn't a perfect movie, and was blighted by some crass-beyond-believe product placement (plus, Susan Calvin as the love interest.. =:-O ) but the main plot strands (how could a three-laws robot apparently commit murder, robots/computers becoming so sophisticated they think their way out of the three laws and and use them to justify playing God to better protect "Humanity"). Ultimately, I thought it worked well as a mainstream film "inspired" by the Asimov stories. Anyway, since the book "I Robot" was a collection of shorts, they couldn't exactly stick to the story.

I think that's probably a better approach than trying to film the book: after all, the biggest successes in the SF-book-to-movie category have been the P.K. Dick adaptations which (mostly) just take a couple of key ideas from the book and weave a completely new story around them. Not saying that Blade Runner is a better story than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (it isn't) but I think its a better movie than a closer adaptation would have been. I think Total Recall and Minority Report may actually be better stories than the originals (We Can Remember for you Wholesale was basically a comedy, Minority Report had some remarkably non-threatening and forgiving bad guys...)

Trouble with adapting Sci-Fi novels like Foundation as films faithfully is that the novels tend to be slow-moving, cerebral and exposition-laden which would result in a film with art-house audience appeal and a summer blockbuster effects budget.

Its a while since I read "foundation" but what I remember is basically "the Hari Seldon lectures on Psychohistory" with huge time-jumps in between. great SF, great radio play (pretty sure its been done), but a movie/big-budget TV series? Unless, you present it as something like The Man from Earth (basically: a bunch of people sitting around a room talking for 90 minutes) which could be a hard sell.

This is the nail on the head right here. And I'm with you on I, Robot. As a mainstream movie inspired by a hard sci-fi collection of short stories, I thought it was great. The part that actually sold it to me was in the end credits when they actually used the terminology "Inspired by I, Robot by Issac Asimov" instead of "Based on a book by Issac Asimov", which it clearly wasn't.

And that's what people miss sometimes, I think, the challenge inherent in adapting anything that originated as a written work into a visual format. Every time I've seen it done "successfully" it worked because the people creating the adaptation were willing to change and throw stuff out. I think adapting Foundation successfully will be incredibly difficult, and if it's done right they'll alienate a lot of people who just wanted the book, much like Jurassic Park or The Lord of the Rings did.

Of course the other option is to create a soulless parody of the original because they tried to hew to close to it or they'll wind up with "a film with art-house audience appeal and a summer blockbuster effects budget." I'm hopeful that the show runners on this project understand why the best adaptations stray so far from their source material, and we wind up with a story inspired by Foundation rather than based on it.

Or they could do it as a mini-series of hard sci-fi vignettes kinda like Ray Bradbury Theater did back in the day. I don't think that would get the big audiences they want, but I'd sure enjoy it.

 

[CarlJ]

Y'know, if that's true then either "Hardwired" leaned very, very heavily on Asimov's robot stories or they did a <i>lot</i> of rewriting after changing the title.

Go read the Wikipedia page on I, Robot (film), particularly the Development section. I recall the IMDb comments section having more detail/insight on the situation, but IMDb threw away all of their comments sections (sigh).

Same thing happened with Starship Troopers, which started life as an entirely unrelated movie project - someone decided to slap the Heinlein IP on it, and... to quote Wikipedia:

The film started life as a script called Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine. When similarities, especially the "bugs", were pointed out between this and the novel Starship Troopers, plans were made to license the rights to the book and tweak character names and circumstances to match. Verhoeven had never read the book, and attempted to read it for the film, but it made him "bored and depressed", so he read only a few chapters:

I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring … It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book.​

So, you have a director actively disinterested in telling the story whose IP he has licensed, who sets out to show how badly such a scenario would work (it's a little bit like putting someone who hates the EPA in charge of the EPA). I would not want to live in the world described by the book Starship Troopers, but it's an interesting and compelling story. And Verhoeven did a great disservice to fans of the original story, by making a caricature of the story instead - it's like Rick-rolling the fans.

...it certainly wasn't a perfect movie, and was blighted by some crass-beyond-believe product placement (plus, Susan Calvin as the love interest.. =:-O ) but the main plot strands (how could a three-laws robot apparently commit murder, robots/computers becoming so sophisticated they think their way out of the three laws and and use them to justify playing God to better protect "Humanity"). Ultimately, I thought it worked well as a mainstream film "inspired" by the Asimov stories.

It wasn't that it was a bad movie - that's debatable (I'd say on it's own it was mildly interesting) - it's that they didn't market it as "Hardwired (slightly inspired by 'I, Robot')", they titled/marketed it as "I, Robot". Period. This makes it much less likely that an actual film of the book will ever get made.

Anyway, since the book "I Robot" was a collection of shorts, they couldn't exactly stick to the story.

Why not? I reject your assertion. There have been a number of critically acclaimed movies that were composed of a series of vignettes (the first to come to mind is Paris, je t'aime, but Love Actually was very well received by audiences and did an excellent job of weaving together a series of ten slightly related stories). And Hollywood has a long history of selling audiences short - remember, it is well known that the audience simply isn't interested in a superhero who is a woman, or black. Such movies will simply never work - nobody will go see them, and they'll absolutely positively flop at the box office, guaranteed - so we shouldn't even try.

I think that's probably a better approach than trying to film the book: after all, the biggest successes in the SF-book-to-movie category have been the P.K. Dick adaptations which (mostly) just take a couple of key ideas from the book and weave a completely new story around them. Not saying that Blade Runner is a better story than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (it isn't) but I think its a better movie than a closer adaptation would have been.

Again, Ridley Scott didn't make "P.K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'", he made (the utterly masterful) "Blade Runner", which was known by well-informed audience members to be inspired by P.K. Dick's story - the story wasn't even used as a subtitle of the movie. If someone aspired to make a faithful "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", that door is still open.

 

[theluggage]

Same thing happened with Starship Troopers, which started life as an entirely unrelated movie project - someone decided to slap the Heinlein IP on it, and... to quote Wikipedia:

...I think that was a much clearer case of an unrelated action flick with some bits about bootcamp and earning citizenship tacked on: the main plot was the "bug hunt" (and was citizenship mentioned after the first reel?).

And Verhoeven did a great disservice to fans of the original story, by making a caricature of the story instead - it's like Rick-rolling the fans.

Amen there.

- remember, it is well known that the audience simply isn't interested in a superhero who is a woman, or black.

Is that in the same way that its "well known" that - until Black Panther and Wonder Woman came along - there were no major SF/Fantasy movies with black and/or female leads...

Catwoman,
Alien and 3 sequels,
Electra,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
two Tomb Raider films,
Supergirl,
Ultraviolet,
The Golden Compass,
Hunger Games (however many there are),
Terminator (the first film, certainly),
Lucy,
Blade I, II and III,
Men in Black I, II, III,
Pitch Black/Chronicles of Riddick/Riddick (see Vin Diesel's bio on IMDB)
After Earth,
I Robot,
Attack the Block

...and that's just what I can think of without an exhaustive search, and just main protagonists - other films had major black/female characters.

Dont mistake this for a "political correctness" rant - I think its pretty clear from recent events and revelations that Hollywood still has serious ongoing problems with race, gender and sexuality - but SF/Fantasy on TV and movies is probably been doing better than other genres (at least since since Ripley kicked her first Xenomorphic butt) and deserves some credit, yet listening to the marketing for Black Panther and Wonder Woman you'd think that everything that has gone before was a 1950s B movie about a white guy rescuing a screaming women from the monster which has just eaten the black janitor.

Another factor may be that we've had a huge glut of movies about the big "household name" comic book superheroes characters that originated in the 1930s/40s/50s when action heroes were rather predominantly white males - because Hollywood certainly does prefer to stick with an established brand rather than take risks. Kudos for Marvel for the way they've used those established characters to bootstrap more recent, more diverse characters that, otherwise, only comic book fans would have heard of.... much better than gender-flipping well-known characters, which mainly creates troll-bait.

(Amazon will have to do a but of work to make Ringworld less sexist, though - perhaps they should try Terry Pratchett's parody version Strata - instead )

Again, Ridley Scott didn't make "P.K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'", he made (the utterly masterful) "Blade Runner", which was known by well-informed audience members to be inspired by P.K. Dick's story - the story wasn't even used as a subtitle of the movie. If someone aspired to make a faithful "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", that door is still open.

Or, for that matter, if someone wanted to film the unrelated script Blade Runner from which Scott just bought the rights to the title... Once they'd cut the electric sheep, and re-named the "androids" as "replicants" they couldn't really have kept the original title, though.

However, the story and some of the themes of Do Androids... are still vaguely recognisable in the film, as are a couple of scenes, so I don't think you could film the book without it being obvious.

As for Asimov, I'd have thought The Caves of Steel/The Naked Sun/The Robots of Dawn would be the more obvious movie/TV targets - pitch: Inspector Morse with robots (In the story, the events of The Naked Sun get made into a hit movie , so that's a good sign )

 

[mtbgtr]

Here’s hoping they don’t screw it up like the Dune movie

 

[theluggage]

Here’s hoping they don’t screw it up like the Dune movie

Its ages since I've read it, but I seem to recall that its about 230 pages of exposition with not a huge amount of action (...my memory is just 3 monologues by Hari Seldon's hologram but I think that's a distorted memory). Which can be great in a hard SF novel, but might have rather limited appeal if it were done "straight" on TV.

So, yeah, they'll inevitably mess with the plot to make it more 'filmic'.

(Netflix even messed with the plot in 'Altered Carbon' and that book looks like a ready-to-shoot screenplay alongside Foundation)

 

[cmaier]

Its ages since I've read it, but I seem to recall that its about 230 pages of exposition with not a huge amount of action (...my memory is just 3 monologues by Hari Seldon's hologram but I think that's a distorted memory). Which can be great in a hard SF novel, but might have rather limited appeal if it were done "straight" on TV.

So, yeah, they'll inevitably mess with the plot to make it more 'filmic'.

(Netflix even messed with the plot in 'Altered Carbon' and that book looks like a ready-to-shoot screenplay alongside Foundation)

There’s actually quite a lot of action.

 

[CarlJ]

Here’s hoping they don’t screw it up like the Dune movie

The original Dune movie got a lot of things right, I thought (the overarching look of things, the casting and such)... it went horribly wrong every place the producers decided they had better / more exciting ideas than the original story (things like weirding modules, heart plugs, etc.).

I also wasn't amused that Dune's wonderful ornithopters - planes that fly in large part by flapping their wings like a bird - were replaced, for no discernible reason, by a completely un-aerodynamic bug-themed metal box, which "flies" primarily on the principle of "the producer wants it to". It looked a lot like the art directors had no idea what the word "ornithopter" means (or just ran out of time), ant punted.

 

[chatin]

I like Harry Seldon and am thinking Third Foundation is located on Infinite Loop.