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Word War Z.
Have it actually be a mocumentary with interviews. Once people start talking switch to the scene. It is a collection of short stories. Would be fun.
Or make it a mini series.
Personally I thought the book was good, but I don’t think an adaptation to a movie format is the right move. Maybe a mini series would be best.
Hmm, miniseries could work. I stopped reading the book because it felt like a screenplay. (And the movie is unrelated garbage.)
Yeah I’ve never read the book but I’ve heard the movie was literally just a generic zombie movie that had nothing to do with the book.
It wasn’t even that it was a generic zombie movie, it was a particularly shit zombie movie.
This is how we’ve ended up with 17 different attempts at the fucking Fantastic Four. Each one is shit, and EVERY director thinks that they’ve got the chops to make it work.
Hollywood…please…fucking stop. It doesn’t get better. It’s a cursed movie. Stop fucking trying to get the Fantastic Four to work. Just…put the poor thing out of its misery and let it sleep peacefully.
Ehh, some of them were to maintain Fox license from Marvel. They were contractually obligated to put out a movie every X years or they lost control of it. Mostly they just wanted something cheap or weird out of the door.
Now that Fox entertainment and Marvel have been gobbled by the mouse, it may not be a problem anymore. They sure got Reid Richards right in that doc strange film, even if he got obliterated on alternative earth.
I still don’t think he looked right, but I think it’s impossible to make him look right.
Krasinski played him with the right attitude of earned arrogance to my eye. The stretching power looked fine enough too, but yeah, that’s always going to look weird in live action.
Krasinski was fine, and I didn’t mind the way she spaghettified him, because hex magic does not obey physics. The problem always is that Mr. Fantastic’s powers aren’t magic, he’s just able to elongate and stretch himself. It’s barely shown in the movie, as the only time he uses his power is to jump into the frame and reach out to try to grab Wanda after she murders Black Bolt. It is the briefest moment and yet it still doesn’t look right, because his arm doesn’t thin as it stretches out, and he leans forward when physics would suggest he lean back to counterbalance the shift in his center of gravity.
Every movie featuring Reed Richards has gone out of the way to avoid showing his powers.
The best example I can think of was that one ridiculous scene where Ioan Gruffud fought The Thing, and you can tell they cropped half the fight out of the frame to avoid showing more terrible CGI. Like you just see their heads bobbing around while their arms fight each other off camera, and then it awkwardly pans out to reveal Reed has Ben all tied up.
You know what would be a great Fantastic Four movie? A tongue-in-cheek film set in the 60s based on the original comics.
Oh yeah, go full 1960’s Batman Camp. Not sure who could play Mr. Fantastic, but whomever is picked should be told to emulate Adam West’s complete deadpan delivery.
Exactly! I would love that so much!
Hollywood: “Wellll ok…but we’ll need to do just one more to
earn more proficlose out the story”
I’d go one further. Do longer run remakes for good source material that ended up with a bad movie.
Golden Compass Movie = bad
His Dark Materials limited series = fantastic
Yeah, there are so many movies based on media with a deeper and richer source material than can be presented well in a 2-hour movie format. For example, the Ender’s Game novel spent a significant amount of time on the progression of Ender’s career at the Battle School and the movie only spent as much time as was necessary to show that he was good. A TV series could tell the parallel story of Ender’s Shadow as well in the same season.
A counterexample is that sometimes the TV series may over milk the source material and drag out which should be a shorter story. The first season of American Gods was awesome, but they kept dragging out the series way too much by stretching out the stories of minor characters and fumbled in the end.
Just as long as we avoid giving money to Orson Scott Card…
Works for me.
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Do longer run remakes for good source material
In that vein, I would go even farther. Cinema is a defunct, dinosaur medium, with built-in limitations. Anything worth making at all is worth making into a high-quality, high-production-value series.
You know what’s hilarious about that, though? The first people who would start shrieking that I’m going too far…you know who those people are? Film directors and obsessive fans of film directors. And yet, if I’m not VASTLY mistaken, directors always want to make a cut of every movie that’s, like, 50 hours long.
Motherfucker, that’s a series. Make a series. This is the 21st Century. We all have perfectly good screens in our houses. Let go of your popcorn fixation and just do everything as a series. ESPECIALLY if you’re adapting a comic book series or a novel, or series of novels.
If we just assume, from the get-go, that everything will be a “TV” series (even the word “television” is a stupid dinosaur word, but I’ll use it for convenience), we can also finally convince studios that they should MIX THE FUCKING AUDIO FOR PEOPLE TO HEAR IN THEIR HOUSES, WITH 2-CHANNEL SPEAKER SYSTEMS, RATHER THAN 872 CHANNEL THEATER SETUPS.
I’m fucking tired of having to turn on closed-captioning for every goddamn thing I watch.
Chris Nolan is slowly putting on lipstick while he writes your name on his list…
I’m too lazy to comment on all the other stuff, but you can get your bog-standard 2.0 stereo from any encoded track. Strikes me as kind of funny to argument with future vs. past and then stick to 1930s stereo tech for film when it’s become more easy than ever to set up a decent 5.1 system.
That’s a fair point. Although I’m pretty sure the encoded mixes don’t really solve the dialogue-is-mixed-way-too-low problem.
Imagine actually thinking this
Why not? All screen media is divided into the era before Breaking Bad and the era after Breaking Bad.
Movies are obsolete. Period.
They’re like troubadours, after the spread of the printing press. They used to be the state-of-the-art in storytelling, but they have become nothing more than a silly novelty, from a bygone era.
All screen media is divided into the era before Breaking Bad and the era after Breaking Bad.
No lol. The Shield, if anything, but that’s still irrelevant to your argument.
Film and TV serials are two completely different mediums. Do you think that The Wall should’ve been a painting? Or that The Weeping Woman would be best as a 9 part Netflix special?
I personally don’t think you’re wrong, but I also feel like Hollywood execs are no longer interested in the type of stories that make good movies. Movies are tight, self contained stories delivered in a couple of hours. Most of the good ones (Critically acclaimed) don’t get that many sequels. Those are infinite cash cows, which is what execs prefer.
Premium series are infinitely expandable and are readily able to adapt larger narrative works. They’re potentially endless wells of money. Seems like the industry wants to move in that direction.
But The Wall is a painting…and a music album…and a live stage performance…and a theater play…
Film and TV serials are two completely different mediums
Different, yes. But not as different as your example of a painting vs a TV series.
The modern scripted series IS the evolution of and replacement for the obsolete, way-too-short traditional movie. My analogy of the troubadour being replaced by the printing press is simply correct. We were only saddled with pathetically short movies, because people had to physically go to the theater, and still have time to get home and cook dinner.
Those days are over, and good riddance to them. The paradigm has shifted. There is no longer any reason to fuck around with arbitrarily far-too-brief motion pictures. Of course, there will always be people who cannot let go of the past, and insist that the limitations of obsolete media are somehow features, rather than bugs. Lots of people still unironically insist that black-and-white photography is somehow better, more serious, more artsy.
That’s just nonsense. The page has turned. Technology has moved forward. Longer IS objectively better than shorter. Color IS objectively better than black and white. More IS better than less. Every child knows all of this. We only begin to deny facts like these, when we grow old enough to become insecure, and in need of things to brag about, show how “sophisticated” we are, etc.
We don’t have to accept the limitations of yesteryear, unless we insist on it, for reasons of hipsterism.
I’m not sure I completely agree with your premise, but you’re articulating your point well and I value your passion towards the topic.
Many discussions need to be spread over multiple comments on a post instead of being crammed into an over-long single post that still doesn’t capture the point of view of the author as they intend.
Furthermore, often times people come back and edit their single comments into massive pages long diatribes and people just TLDR it, when they should have been part of a multi comment back and forth between the poster and their audience, and I think you’re doing the latter well.Haaaaaaang on…
That’s fair enough.
I will admit that I’m over-egging the whole concept. However, I truly believe in the basic concept of what I’m saying. I think it’s fair to say that at least a huge percentage of motion pictures have been more harmed by their limited scope than they were helped by it.
Note, as I mentioned in another comment, that directors themselves have ALWAYS chafed under the length restrictions of traditional cinema. They’re always reined in by the moneyed interests, but if they had their way, even Syd Field’s supposedly gospel paradigm of the three-act structure would be thrown out, in most cases.
And I can’t disagree with the directors. The greatness of cinema has never been tied inherently to the runtime of a traditional movie. The things that are inspirational and beautiful about cinema all exist, whether the piece is a 45 minutes episode of a series, a 110 minute standard feature, or an epic 5 hour director’s cut. The things that really define filmmaking are the photography itself, composition and lighting, acting and screenwriting, the subtle magic of the editor, the subtle-to-not-so-subtle magic of effects artists.
I genuinely believe the balance between all these factors is difficult enough, without having to fight about which scenes get cut, in order to fit in a singular feature length time constraint. Certainly, that shouldn’t be seen as some kind of end-all, be-all, defining feature of motion picture art. I was being pushy and pithy about it earlier, but I really do believe that movies are only the length they are, because people only had a few hours to spend going to and from the theater.
I think so many directors of the past, if they’d had their choice in the matter, would ALWAYS have preferred to make a high quality series, rather than a limited movie. Especially if they didn’t have to choose an objectively inferior picture quality and aspect ratio, as early television was lumbered with.
I think the final point is related to that, too. I think we’re all still laboring under the prejudices of the early era of TV. Television was cheesy. Television was ugly. Television was cheap. Those attitudes are hard to shake off, even after we’ve all seen the current apex of the “small screen,” and what it’s capable of showing.
I really am not much of a movie fan, but the serialisation of everything is already so tiring.
I liked watching “a man called Otto” and have a think about it afterwards. I don’t want a mini series of Otto providing unnecessary backstory or sideplots, coupled with intense social media discussion and memefication.
Stand alone movies are still a very good medium, see Oppenheimer. Just because Marvel and DC basically serialise everything doesn’t mean the medium doesn’t hold validity.
Serialization doesn’t mean eternal serialization. Mini series exist. I’m currently watching the 80s Shogun adaptation. That thing aired originally as a 5 part mini (VHS) covering each of the 5 volumes of the original book, but TV syndication usually broke it into 30 minutes chunks (it does have some nice natural points of fade to black every that often). The version I have is 3 blu-rays but the whole thing paces like a 10 hour movie. Who cares, it’s the same story, it has a start and an end, and several breakpoints you can choose. Even the concept of perpetual TV presence with endless seasons is stupid and makes no sense in a world of video on demand. It continues to exist because production pipelines are still designed to work in seasons. But the important part should be to tell a story and tell it well in the time frame it takes.
but the serialisation of everything is already so tiring
Frankly, that sounds like a you problem. Good storytelling is not at all tiring to me. You find complex stories to be challenging and exhausting, for some reason. I’m not making any specific judgments on that point. It just is what it is.
For the rest of us, the obsolete traditional movie medium is just too simplistic. Even Oppenheimer is a perfect example. The actual story of the Manhattan Project is FAR too complex and complicated to tell in a single sitting, to the point that I don’t even have any interest in seeing some ludicrously compressed, dumbed-down film version of it. No matter how hard they tried to make it good, it’ll inevitably just boil down to “hat man make big bomb.”
I’m just not interested in that.
It would undeniably be better as a series. As would everything worth making, which was my original premise.
Do longer run remakes for good source material that ended up with a bad movie.
I immediately thought The Hobbit for some reason.
God that trilogy was so painful.
I immediately thought The Hobbit for some reason.
God that trilogy was so painful.
That doesn’t count. There was a bunch of stuff in those movie that never happened in the source material.
I think remaking it with less.
I even watched the fan edit, and it was still too much.
Which one? I’m a fan of the cardinal cut, but that still ends up being over three and half hour long.
Oh good to hear, I just acquired his dark materials, but haven’t seen it yet.
There are so many poorly executed great ideas. I’d love to see them redone, whatever format (tho complex stuff does tend to be better serialized… limitedly - end the story when it’s done, not when people give up on it because it fell apart)
I don’t care what anyone says, the worldbuilding that was done for the 1990s Super Mario Bros. movie was awesome and if the movie had lived up to it, it would have been great.
Remember that when the movie was made, Mario was a plumber that jumped on mushrooms and turtles to save a princess and he had a brother named Luigi that did the same thing. That was pretty much the entire storyline they had to work with.
Your aim: logic.
Their aim: capitalism.
:-(
Looking at you, Dark Tower
I can’t believe we’re in the universe where there’s a Dark Tower film with the incredibly talented Idris Elba and it was so stupidly bad.
Does he play Susannah?
No, he plays Jake.
Should be a TV series. Start with The Gunslinger and work your way through the books, but also split up Wizard and Glass into small chunks to use as episode openers so there isn’t suddenly a season long flashback with different actors.
Funnily enough the movie they made was supposed to be the intro to a TV show.
Trying to expand Gunslinger to bring in more backstory (and reeeeeeeally messing up the backstory) killed both the movie and the planned TV show. It’s crazy how well their plan could’ve worked if they hadn’t tried to fold too much into the “prequel”. Dark Tower even has the built-in “out” that this is a different turn of the wheel.
They were going to run out of material way too fast the way they did the movie. They condensed The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, Wolves of the Calla, and Song of Susannah into ninety minutes. They could have done the rest of Drawing, but then that just leaves The Waste Lands, The Dark Tower, and an excessively long flashback with Wizard and Glass. They would have needed to just not adapt more book content in order to have more than a couple seasons of material.
yeah it can’t be a movie. Unfortunately my favorite character will never be accurately adapted and will lose her badassery. Better we wait for another time
THERE’S A MOVIE!!?
Yo, I am reading that series!
Don’t get hyped, it’s mid at best.
Awh
Dragonball Evolution was so shit that it drove Akira Toriyama out of retirement, which led to Battle of Gods, Resurrection F, Broly, Super Hero and an entirely new anime/manga series titled Dragon Ball Super.
It even technically is leading to Dragon Ball Daima, which looks like a serious effort to try and do the whole ‘Goku is a kid again’ concept that Dragon Ball GT fucked up 25 years ago.
So he literally lives the plot to do many movies.
We need you back…
I’m retired…
But “thing” has happened…
… Son of a bitch, I’m in
Dragonball Evolution was a horrible Hollywood adaptation of Dragon Ball’s original plot.
Imagine that instead of making it the action-packed goofy parody of Return to the West that Akira Toriyama originally envisioned, you instead make Goku and Chi Chi US high-schoolers and Bulma some kind of secret agent.
It’s more like the movie was so utterly dogshit that Toriyama felt he had to personally step in and ensure the franchise wasn’t going to die on that negative note.
Like Dune? Like Dune.
Nah the original was great. Idk but old shitty VFX do something for me.
I liked the Lynch version.
Captain Picard and Sting!
David Lynch didn’t even like the Lynch version
In my eyes, SFX still stands the test of time. Sure you can see CGI is shit, but models and custom made suits just scream style and dystopian nightmare. I love it and still watch it from time to time. Didn’t watch the new one as it ads nothing to the story, at least from what I heard.
Indeed the new one, in attempting to the faithful to the book, but minus any of the critical inner monologue, just manages to be bland on a big budget.
I love the campy 84 version, even if it departed wildly from the text. The characters were colourful, over the top, memorable. Current version everyone’s a slightly different dark haired man in a dusty suit. Give me some dated CGI and theatrics any day.
Give me some dated CGI and theatrics any day.
Same. I still happily rewatch Sci-Fi movies from 80s and 90s. Those were the days. Today CGI has advanced much but it seems directing and world building have taken a back seat.
Ha ha I remember when fans would slit your throat for saying “Sci-Fi” instead of “SF”.
The visuals were great, and the film has a hypnotic fever dream feel to it. Not sure it can be called a"good" film, but it’s extremy entertaining.
The new film has more gravitas and is much more loyal to the book, but it also doesn’t add anything to the book and is just less interesting to watch (for me it was down right boring). I think it over-corrected the Lynch version.
Or Dredd.
Watching clips of that movie today. So good!
I decided a few years ago to simply stop watching anything that was a remake, reboot, update or ‘franchise’. Too many of them have used nostalgia and familiarity to compensate for shortcomings in storytelling. Even more cynically, leveraging intellectual property is all about money and business, whereas for me storytelling and art are about the human experience and spirit, so it’s no wonder these IP films are usually so poor.
It’s also that Disney own almost all the known IP, and will roll it out time and again as a safe bet with predictable returns - art by focus group simply isn’t a thing.
Capitalism, baybee!
Is this the innovation I was promised?
How are our corporate overlord supposed to know what a good story is other than the success of a movie based in them?
Ironically capitalism does not like to take much risk, nor do the large companies who are best able to take them. It also sucks that many things are switching to being ads supported, so there is further limiting of creativity. For example, Love, Death, and Robots is a really awesome animated anthology. It is something that does not try to have the broadest appeal; however, the customers are now advertisers who may not want to run ads on something with a narrower audience. Oddly it seems Netflix will be going down the path of YouTube battling that to keep the content adverts will buy space for, and YouTube trying to be independent of it with its premium. Strange world.
Love, Death + Robots is amazing and everyone should watch it.
For real.
Well they are taking another swing at Fantastic Four
Some older movies that come to mind: Enemy Mine. Great sci fi premise that was ahead of its time. Just plagued with bad effects and limitations.
The Last Starfighter Not bad even for the day but I think it’s a solid enough concept that could use a refresh. Set in the 80’s to get the retro video game vibe. I think it could even be a multiple movie property.
Masters of the Universe It was a goofy premise with some interesting characters that were wasted. Even the updated animated series didn’t do great. Or even go off in a space Western and do a Rio Blast movie.
Krull was really missing the visual elements to tell the story and it ended up cheesy and stilted (still holds some nostalgia for me though). It could still be a fun space fantasy.
The Last Starfighter Not bad even for the day but I think it’s a solid enough concept that could use a refresh. Set in the 80’s to get the retro video game vibe. I think it could even be a multiple movie property.
If it were a Netflix production they could have little easter eggs in it like the arcade being the one in Hawkins (Stranger Things).
Great post and right to the point of the OP!
The last Starfighter, was supposed to be multiple movies. I loved the original, but I’d be down with a remake.
Krull was bad, but I still loved it!
They just make the same mistakes again or do something even worse, as proven by the Resident Evil 3 remake.
Well, there’s Dredd.
Dredd was fucking awesome and didn’t get the justice it deserved.
I’m not a comic book guy by any means but that movie is great.
Equally so is Constantine. (And the TV show!)
Either of them have reached the levels of the worst, most generic Marvel movie.
The original Dredd was better. It’s meant to satire cops, not just be an uncritical action flick about a badass cop. If you strip Judge Dredd of its silliness and satire you’re left with dust colored post apoc action, and Fury Road did a better job of that.
I’ll take your word on the intentions of the original Dredd, but the point still stands, Dredd was good. Not as good as fury road good, but good is all that matters. I’d like to see more Dredd with that kind of action, even if it’s not true to soruce material.
Can we have good action flicks that aren’t at the expense of good stories? It seems like the only reason to use the IP at that point is for cynically bankable nostalgia.
Nostalgia for what, though? It was a ‘duo go into a tower and kill everyone’ movie that happened to be called Dredd. I liked it for what it was and I didn’t go in with any nostalgia. I feel your anxiety, but, I wonder if action movies by their nature can’t really be deep meditations on the human condition. What story can be told at the muzzle of a gun or the end of a fist that hasn’t already been told?
I kind of feel like action movies are at their best when they operate in a space that is far away from the frontal cortex, invite us to a more libidinal place. Even ‘thinker’ action movies like The Matrix, kind of strike me as philosophically shallow harangues interspersed with cool fights.
I donno, maybe I’m wrong, or not steeped enough in the genre, or just have normie preferences. Out of curiosity, what action movies have a good story & are worth checking out, in your opinion?
To answer your question (did I miss that or was it edited in?) I’d recommend Fury Road straight away if you’ve not seen it, then going back for Ip Man, Guns Akimbo, Kung Fu Hustle, Psycho Goreman, Black Magic M-66, and of course the original action film, Seven Samurai. Not all pure “action” flicks, but all are examples of action packed cinema that don’t leave any storytelling by the wayside.
Kurosawa is a good counterpoint for sure. Haven’t seen Guns Akimbo, Psycho Goreman, or Black Magic M-66. I’ll keep my eye out for those. Thanks!
If I call a movie Animaniacs and it happens to be a heartfelt tear-jerker about a 1600s Russian peasant, would you say the same thing? Nevertheless, the original Dredd was a fun action film in its own right, you can definitely do both. I don’t know what we’re supposed to gain by expecting less.
In the case of Dune that is just happening, which is an exception.
Jodorowsi’sLynch’s Dune was great in its own fever dream kinda way - don’t get me wrong, I’m over the moon we have the new movie, and prefer part 1, but the older movies are a thing.Jodorowski never got to make his Dune.
Jodo’s Dune was never made though, a fact that makes me sad everytime I am reminded of it. However, we have The Incal, The Meta Barons and The Technopriests which is great.
If Denis Villeneuve is passionate about a story you let him make the movie, its pretty simple.
