quote:Originally posted by Scott R: I'd like to see Ender's Game as a series on HBO. Rather than squeeze it into a 2 hour splodaganza, you can stretch it out and cover all the tidbits that make the book beloved.
Of course, but no one ever listens to that suggestion...
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Yeah I don't disagree with you, I just wanted to point out that she seemed to be injected into episodes for two reasons, not just the one you mentioned .
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1. The probability that I will like the movie adaptation of a book is roughly inversely proportional to how much I liked the book. A really good novel, like Ender's Game, works on many different levels. The aspects of it that are likely to work well as a movie, are probably not the aspects of the book you love. A movie is long enough to tell a short story, not two novels. That means stuff's got to be cut and changed and chances are very high that they are going to cut and or change some of the things you love about the book. There are about a hundred reasons why this is more likely to be true for Ender's Game than for the average book.
2. No one ever listens to the suggestion to make Ender's Game into a mini-series because, although it might be great artistically, it would be a looser financially. Card has said that Ender's Game is his most valuable intellectual property. An Ender's Game movie has the chance of being a blockbuster that makes millions. A mini-series could never do that.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: One could finance the other.
The second reason that no one ever seriously listens to the mini-series option is that the single biggest problem with making the movie, capable child actors, would be an even bigger for a series.
Maybe in a few years, when CGI is better accepted as a dramatic medium, a CGI mini-series could work.
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I'm not sure that it's a given that a mini-series will make no money; if we expand it from Ender's Game to the Shadow books and the recent Ender novels, then there's a good potential for a SEASON or two, rather than a series of episodes.
But I don't know much about how money is made in TV. How's Game of Thrones doing, financially?
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quote:Originally posted by Scott R: I'm not sure that it's a given that a mini-series will make no money; if we expand it from Ender's Game to the Shadow books and the recent Ender novels, then there's a good potential for a SEASON or two, rather than a series of episodes.
But I don't know much about how money is made in TV. How's Game of Thrones doing, financially?
I didn't mean to imply that and Ender's series would make no money, just that a successful series would be a looser in comparison to a successful movie.
I couldn't find any information about profits and costs for Game of Thrones. But the highest grossing TV shows are making 5 - 6 million in advertising per episode. The average budget for the Harry Potter Movies was 144 million dollars. The Chronicles of Narnia had a budget of 225 million. The budget for Avatar 237 million. Pirates of the Caribbean: at the World's End had budget of $300 million. So a little math tells us that per episode budget for any TV series would have to be around 1% of what it costs to make a movie. The initial episodes of Heroes had a budget of $4 million.
Let's say you could make a decent TV episode of Ender's Game for half that and it was wildly successful and brought in $5 million per episode for 20 episodes. That's a net profit of $60 million dollars if the series were massively popular. (Note this would not be the profit to OSC. It would be split between the network, the local stations and everyone involved in the production.)
A blockbuster movie would net 5 to 10 times as much and be much higher quality (presuming any relationship at all between what you pay and what you get).
[ November 22, 2011, 10:51 AM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:A blockbuster movie would net 5 to 10 times as much and be much higher quality (presuming any relationship at all between what you pay and what you get).
It depends on what you mean by "quality." Quality of technology (ie, cgi, 3d etc) perhaps.
Quality of story? Execution? Scope? I think that's debatable.
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For quality of store, stick with the book. Neither movies nor a series is going to come close.
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I tried to wade into the LotRs awhile back, and couldn't get off the ground. The books are laborious. The movies have their flaws, but at least are accessible.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I tried to wade into the LotRs awhile back, and couldn't get off the ground. The books are laborious. The movies have their flaws, but at least are accessible.
As I said before the probability that you will like a movie adaptation is inversely related to how well you liked the book. If you thought the book had a lot of weaknesses, then there is a lot of room for the movie to improve on the book. If you think the book is perfect, there is nowhere to go but down.
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Am I the only one that thinks Stephen Lang would be an amazing Mazer?
I also vote Chloe Moretz as Petra. Well, either her or Elle Fanning, though I think Elle might be too tall.
As long as they don't cast Jayden Smith in the movie I'm fine with their choices.
Other kids to consider: Kodi Smit-McPhee and Dylan Minette. Dylan Minette played the bully REALLY well in Let Me In, I think he could play a decent Bonzo.
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Well I think the better way to say it is that Game of Thrones is as good a tv show as Song of Ice and Fire is a book series. There are just some things done in the books that can't be done on tv (level of detail, various first person perspectives, etc...) and no one expected them to be accomplished in the tv show for logistical and budget purposes.
So...Ender has been cast, that's super exciting! I frankly can't wrap my head around people who say they are unhappy about the movie because they are worried it will ruin the book? Really? I don't get how that's possible. Will a bad movie result in a mass book burning? Of course not. The book exists and always will exist in the form it is in now and if the movie is a horrible failure, that will have zero effect on it. Frankly I'm excited for the chance to see the story told in a new medium. But the bottom line is the movie will be its own entity. If it's awesome we all win. If it's horrible the only thing any of us lose is the $10-$12 bucks we spend to go see it.
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Stephen Lang is a great actor. Unfortunately, I really don't want him to either do it as a white guy, or in makeup to make him look Maori. Couldn't he, you know, eat lots of doughnuts and play Graff?
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quote:Originally posted by dansigal: Well I think the better way to say it is that Game of Thrones is as good a tv show as Song of Ice and Fire is a book series. There are just some things done in the books that can't be done on tv (level of detail, various first person perspectives, etc...) and no one expected them to be accomplished in the tv show for logistical and budget purposes.
Well, they also massively change things that have nothing to do with budget or logistics, so, there's that...
I like the show, but it's got some deep flaws, and not just because it's so divergent from the book. It's good, but nowhere near as good as I hoped it would be.
quote:Originally posted by dansigal: So...Ender has been cast, that's super exciting! I frankly can't wrap my head around people who say they are unhappy about the movie because they are worried it will ruin the book? Really? I don't get how that's possible. Will a bad movie result in a mass book burning? Of course not. The book exists and always will exist in the form it is in now and if the movie is a horrible failure, that will have zero effect on it. Frankly I'm excited for the chance to see the story told in a new medium. But the bottom line is the movie will be its own entity. If it's awesome we all win. If it's horrible the only thing any of us lose is the $10-$12 bucks we spend to go see it.
I agree with this, though.
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quote:Originally posted by millernumber1: Stephen Lang is a great actor. Unfortunately, I really don't want him to either do it as a white guy, or in makeup to make him look Maori. Couldn't he, you know, eat lots of doughnuts and play Graff?
Ah, I totally COMPLETELY Mazer was half Maori! Ok then, I have to go with Nathaniel Lees. Perfect Maori Mazer.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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quote:Originally posted by millernumber1: Stephen Lang is a great actor. Unfortunately, I really don't want him to either do it as a white guy, or in makeup to make him look Maori. Couldn't he, you know, eat lots of doughnuts and play Graff?
Ah, I totally COMPLETELY Mazer was half Maori! Ok then, I have to go with Nathaniel Lees. Perfect Maori Mazer.
He's actually Samoan- born in New Zealand. I agree though. If he has the acting chops, he'd make a pretty good Mazer- certainly fits the description.
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You do all realize that the likelihood of the casting people actually sticking to the ethic backgrounds of the characters when finding actors is practically 0%, right?
They'll all be young Americans (and British, judging by the Ender casting) maybe the odd Australian.
But they're not really going to bother searching the world for the perfect mixed-race Greek/Belgian kid, or the authentic Armenian girl. They're not going to care. They'll just pick some random kids from California. It's the idea of said kids doing accents that really makes me shudder.
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Chloe Moretz is an amazing young actress with a wealth of potential but if they can't even respect the character designations in casting then I don't have much hope for this film. The IF and Battle School are a fascinating setting that would be sorely dis-serviced if filled with white people from southern California.
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Children typically don't have strong accents in any language, if they are conversant in that language. It's only the movies that pretend this actually happens.
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Off Topic! They do if they learn said language from a non-native speaker. Some kids here in Spain who speak English, do so with an accent you could cut up and spread on toast because they learnt it from their Spanish English teachers (eg. counting 'wun, tu, tree...').
It's rather adorable - but it'll be difficult for them to lose it later, should they want to, and it's something that needs to be fixed before they hit 10, or so.
Also, (I remember getting a lot of attention as a kid in the US because of my South-Eastern English accent) - within a language there is of course, the same amount of variation in the accents of children and adults.
On Topic - I fully expect to have blood dripping from my ears as some broadly American kid pretends to be Belgian (and how is the kid playing Ender's US accent? Anyone know?)
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Granted, a child will pick up a foreign accent if the language is taught to them with an accent- but my point was that children who speak English as a second language do not maintain the language patterns that would cause them to have a strong accent in English. So for instance, children in "battle school," where English is the primary language would pick up the variety of English spoken by the majority of speakers and speak it without a strong indication of any particular accent.
The "mini-adults" take on kids presented by OSC in EG, especially in terms of language, doesn't make much sense from my experience. Children don't *shed* accents quickly, their first words in English are in the accent of the teacher. To them, there is no distinction between a word and its pronunciation, as long as the LAD process is still going on.
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quote:children in "battle school," where English is the primary language would pick up the variety of English spoken by the majority of speakers and speak it without a strong indication of any particular accent.
Excellent point. Although since the 'children' in this movie will be twelve-plus rather than six, that would make a difference.
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They would have been there since about 6. You can fairly easily justify a pan-American or Trans-atlantic mix of accents by that logic.
In an emersive environment, a child will learn to communicate in English in as little as a few weeks, and be at par with native speaking peers in a few months. OSC just didn't really know enough about language learning to have gotten that aspect of it right in the novel: references to "language patterns," being set at the age of 4 are simply wrong.
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quote:Originally posted by Bella Bee: Also, (I remember getting a lot of attention as a kid in the US because of my South-Eastern English accent) - within a language there is of course, the same amount of variation in the accents of children and adults.
I was 6 years old when we moved, I remember my sisters (4, 7, and 12 at the time) all lost their accents within a few months. I'm 22 and still retain mine. I think my sisters made a deliberate attempt to change theirs (so their new friends would stop giggling every time they spoke), whereas at that age I was already a rugged nonconformist and was quite bitter about being mocked. I also thought the other kids sounded stupid. (I did not have an easy childhood)
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My younger sisters did it more or less subconsciously. I remember my older sister (12 a the time) walking around, practicing saying certain words over and over again, so she wouldn't slip up. My brother and 2 oldest sisters were adults, and generally speaking didn't have to worry about fitting in as much.
I definitely made a very deliberate attempt to maintain my accent. Or rather, I realized it was what made me different from the other kids, and I enjoyed not being like them. (I was a pretty hateful little bastard) Then again, from my memory of Ender's Game, the one kid who's mentioned having an accent (Bernard) sounds like he's exaggerating it to sound cool and pompous. Card's comment about "language patterns being set at 4" is of course ridiculous - one of my best friends growing up didn't speak English until he was 5. He learned it mostly at school (as opposed to from his parents), and speaks with a perfectly normal American accent. I can't imagine why most of the kids at Battle School - completely deprived of their parents and cultures - wouldn't just convert to a common accent.
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1. In Ender's Game, OSC refers to the fact that all kids were taught a common, accent-free language with the exception of the "insular" French who waited until after the French language patterns were established in their children before teaching the common language. So, it probably doesn't matter in the least about who has what accent in the movie.
2. J.R.R. Tolkien was an author who was highly educated, and probably expected his readers to be similarly well-educated. The fact is, we do not teach children or young adults to read works that are both challenging and entertaining, let alone challenging and instructive -- we seem teach them to read works that merely entertain. And this appalling lack in our educational system shows . . . *sad sigh* . . .
That is all. Carry on. Posts: 5609 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Well, to be fair, OSC basically downgraded everything about Earth that he had painted in broad strokes to essentially 20 Minutes in The Future technology and politics for the shadow books. So, conveniently, the "One World Language" aspect of Common mostly disappeared, and suddenly only educated people spoke it.
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quote:It's their current obsession with getting as much nudity as possible into their shows that's holding them back from making truly great shows, IMO.
Eh? I would have a hard time coming up with an all-time top ten list that was not dominated by HBO. If The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood are not "truly great," I do not know what you are looking for.
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I'm not denying that anything made by HBO is generally 10 times better than anything else. I'm just picky. Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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quote:I'm not denying that anything made by HBO is generally 10 times better than anything else. I'm just picky.
So you are just disappointed with TV in general? If so, why ascribe your disappointment to HBO's adult content?
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quote:Originally posted by Foust: So you are just disappointed with TV in general? If so, why ascribe your disappointment to HBO's adult content?
Because HBO was specifically being talked about in this thread?
In two HBO shows I've recently watched, the single thing I felt that was holding them back from being completely immersive and captivating was their need to pull away from the story periodically to show long, boring sex scenes that generally had no place in the story.
If you want to talk about all TV (which has far, far lower standards of production than HBO), then there are a *lot* of problems I could bring up. But the comments I was responding to were specifically about HBO, not TV in general. If we were talking about doing Ender's Game as a Sci-Fi (SyFy? I haven't actually watched a TV is some years) channel miniseries, my comments would obviously be different.
To be honest, I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
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quote:In two HBO shows I've recently watched, the single thing I felt that was holding them back from being completely immersive and captivating was their need to pull away from the story periodically to show long, boring sex scenes that generally had no place in the story.
This is a discussion Hatrack has had before. It is funny: only people who have moral issues with sex ever call sex scenes "boring."
If a scene in an otherwise excellent show is actually boring, then it would be a blip in your enjoyment. HBO shows have boring scenes all the time. Every single story ever has had boring bits. Nothing is always interesting. So why single out the sex scenes? See the first paragraph in this post.
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quote:Originally posted by Foust: It is funny: only people who have moral issues with sex ever call sex scenes "boring."
What do you think my moral issues with sex are, exactly?
And have you seen A Game of Thrones or Spartacus? Though Spartacus actually has one fantastic sex scene. (the one where they dress up as the gods, if you've seen it) The nudity in Spartacus (especially among the men) seemed pretty natural in most places, the random gratuitous sex scenes not so much. In GoT, the random nude characters seem far more out of place.
I single out the sex scenes because they tend to be the one boring part that usually adds *nothing* to the story. Game of Thrones at least let the characters ramble on while they procreated so it added some tangential information.
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I apologize, Dogbreath, I think I misjudged you. I was going to ask you if you had seen GoT or Spartacus and say that maybe, just maybe they were examples of genuinely gratuitous nudity.
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But wait, now I'm really curious. If you're cool with that Littlefinger prostitute scene, what "boring" sex scenes are you thinking of? Or at least, which show?
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I already covered a lot of this on the thread dedicated to the A Game of Thrones show. I actually didn't mention the Littlefinger scene - the one sex scene in the show I actually thought did a lot in the way of storytelling was Tyrion's very first scene. I thought the Littlefinger scene was more or less porn with Littlefinger's little monologue spliced over it.
Most of the sex in both GoT and Spartacus is just naked people going at it doggy style, with very little sensuality or imagination. Even the actors look bored. I suppose if you (the director, not you personally) want to deconstruct how sex in movies is usually shown as being wonderful and sensual and perfect by showing long clips of sweaty people grunting, then do it in one episode and be done with it.
If you read A Game of Thrones, sex and nudity is definitely present, but typically only in places where it shows character development or reveals something about the nature of a certain character. However, the show cuts out a lot of important parts from the book due to time constraints, yet has no problem adding lots of extra sex scenes that weren't present in the book. The only justification I can see for doing that is they feel they had to make the series more titillating to attract viewers.
The scenes I'm thinking of is just about any scene with Theon and his prostitute, the scene with Maester Pycelle and the prostitute, the scene with Cersei and her cousin Lancel (who looked hideously underweight and actually managed to gross me out), the scene with Renly and Loras (which was a decent scene until the slurping sounds... *shudder*), the second scene with Drogo and Dany (which was actually really well done in the book), though at least in GoT they're pretty brief. Spartacus is the boring one. My objection with GoT isn't so much boredom as distraction - I feel like they're a little kinky and don't mesh with the otherwise very serious and lofty tone of the rest of the series.
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And Butterfield confirms role. On the plus side, it seems that the actor is familiar with the original text.
quote: Butterfield first quoted Ender on Twitter — “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him” — and then after repeating the word “happy” nine times, announced that “now that I’ve real eased all my pent up emotion, I’m going to talk a wee bit more civilised. I have just booked Enders Game.”
posted
Well, I for one think that quoting a book that you were just hired in the eponymous role is an extremely good sign. And not just once, but several times.
Ford would be interesting, though he's too old for the role as written. That doesn't mean he wouldn't be great, though.
I was just talking with a friend, and we thought that Elle Fanning would be great for Valentine - though with Butterfield cast, it might be hard to cast a Valenting younger than Ender :-)
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The Brit is confirmed. Sigh. As long as they are going that old why didn't they just use the Dolphin Tale kid, that OSC liked so much and wanted for Ender?
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What do you think my moral issues with sex are, exactly?
