HBO turns ‘Fire’ into fantasy series
HBO has acquired the rights to turn George R.R. Martin’s bestselling fantasy series “A Song of Fire and Ice” into a dramatic series to be written and exec produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.…
The series will begin with the 1996 first book, “A Game of Thrones,” and the intention is for each novel (they average 1,000 pages each) to fuel a season’s worth of episodes.
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“They tried for 50 years to make ‘Lord of the Rings’ as one movie before Peter Jackson found success making three,” Martin said. “My books are bigger and more complicated, and would require 18 movies. Otherwise, you’d have to choose one or two characters.”
Note though, that in the words of a TV exec of my acquaintance: “Acquiring the rights to a series doesn’t mean squat. Wait until they greenlight production.”
As with yesterday’s Snow Crash news, this could be great, or it could be a train wreck (assuming of course that it ever gets to the filming stage).
Really though, I’m thinking that if HBO didn’t want to pay for another season of Rome or Deadwood, there’s really no reason to think they’re going to want to pay to make multiple seasons of this. It would almost be better if it were bad, so that there was no dissapointment when they stopped in the middle of the series.
I should do a post sometime about adaptations–I have some things to say about what makes one medium superior to another for certain purposes, but I also want to have a rant about readers who seem to think that having books made into tv or movies somehow legitimizes the books. Feh. On the up side, I’m sure there’s something to be said for the apparent trend of the visual media guys recognizing that there are kinds of stories that make good novels which need (much) more than 90 minutes to capture the value of the source material.
For now, let’s say that I’m happy for Martin, since this surely means a chunk of money to him now, and even more if the show actually happens, and he deserves it.
