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ALLAN LASSUS posted:Lady of the Lake season gonna be WILD if they stick close to the book I'm gonna take a guess that all the Nimue (sp?) stuff is going to be excised from the show entirely.
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Apr 22, 2024 19:59
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jokes posted:Big same. And what happened on the Witcher really elevated Cavill in the audience's eyes so the studio will likely defer to him especially since they just hosed up Rings of Power when left to their own devices. If they want goodwill they'll shove Cavill onto Tiktok as much as possible where he can gush about 40k. pretty sure they have recovered from the ROP backlash with the Fallout TV series. Yet another netflix L.
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Apr 22, 2024 21:01
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pentyne posted:The showrunner/writing team clearly wanted to do something more like Blood Origin, crazy characters, copious profanities, basically meme poo poo wall to wall. Cavill probably walked away after seeing it wasn't going to change and his own ability to influence the writing or producers had hit a dead stop. Netflix's The Witcher powered by AI blockchain!!!!!!!
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Apr 22, 2024 21:42
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More Fallouts, less Power of the Rings. Though I think PotR was doomed when Amazon could only get the appendices to adapt, rather than what I assume was meant to be the actual story. Or maybe the Similarian.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:36
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Rings of Power is really only notable because the whole cost ended up being over a billion dollars, and like 3x more expensive then the actual LOTR trilogy. Remember when Rome got cancelled for being "too expensive?" They spent $60 million per season.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:39
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pentyne posted:Rings of Power is really only notable because the whole cost ended up being over a billion dollars, and like 3x more expensive then the actual LOTR trilogy. man, that first season of Rome might be the best season of anything ever.
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Apr 22, 2024 22:47
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This is probably overthinking it. But. I'd hear the dead Roach/quipp story before. And I earnestly think a lot of streaming hacks believe they've worked out the perfect formula for a series. I think they show active disdain for anything that doesn't conform to it. When they say they hate the source material, I my first reaction is that they just don't get it because it's too Polish and fantasy. But in retrospect I don't think they really care. I think X quips per episode or The Betrayal Is In Episode 6 are what inspires contempt for the series.
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Apr 23, 2024 01:27
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Arc Hammer posted:"If" yeah no poo poo, insanely enormous IF there.
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Apr 23, 2024 05:28
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It’s wild that shows I thought were easy to adapt, Cowboy Bebop, The Witcher, or any grounded video game (death note as well) is just absolute trash. However, fallout and arcane exist and prove that creatives can take a setting and make a good show. Last of Us is kind of the exception but it also proves you can take a full video game story and adapt it straightforward or, in the case of fallout, make a story set in the world that isn’t addressed by the game. Talk about grasping defeat from the jaws of victory.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:34
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Lord Packinham posted:It’s wild that shows I thought were easy to adapt, Cowboy Bebop, The Witcher, or any grounded video game (death note as well) is just absolute trash. However, fallout and arcane exist and prove that creatives can take a setting and make a good show. I don't think anything is really easy to adapt especially if you are putting it into an entire different medium. Cowboy Bebop is weird because it doesn't seem like anyone involved loved the original series and wanted to make a modern quip show. One Piece is weird but works because it seems like the people involved love the series and are doing it completely differently while respecting the soul of the show. The jury is out on the new live action Avatar but they might manage to pull it off. Netflix's successes seem like a product of luck rather then coherent strategy.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:42
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pentyne posted:Cowboy Bebop is weird because it doesn't seem like anyone involved loved the original series and wanted to make a modern quip show. From what I've seen of the Bebop showrunners they liked the show but did not understand the show. One's on record as stating in front of God and everybody that he didn't think of the setting as a dystopia. They just saw cool fights and for some reason thought we needed more Vincent and Julia.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:36
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Didn't the showrunner for The Witcher also make Daredevil on Netflix? I thought that was a pretty good adaptation so I don't understand how they hosed this up so bad. Seems like hiring a bunch of writers with contempt for the source material is not a great strategy but Hollywood seems convinced it'll work.
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Apr 24, 2024 00:52
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Niwrad posted:Didn't the showrunner for The Witcher also make Daredevil on Netflix? I thought that was a pretty good adaptation so I don't understand how they hosed this up so bad. Seems like hiring a bunch of writers with contempt for the source material is not a great strategy but Hollywood seems convinced it'll work. There's a difference between taking a CHARACTER and doing stuff with them and taking an already written story and fully adapting it. Comics are all about doing different stuff with characters made by other people, after all
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Apr 24, 2024 00:57
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Comics more easily translate to a screen because the comics are largely just a storyboard that writers use for tv/movies anyways. You can even have shot-for-shot scenes that 100% mirror the comic. A book? A video game? A little different. A video game has pacing problems, largely because of player agency so the easiest video games to turn into a movie are the ones that are essentially walking simulators where pressing forward moves the plot along, or are more about exploring a place that has its own characterization (like a fallout wasteland). A lot of books have a LOT of poo poo that just won't show up in movies, and are extremely dense if they tried to do so, so it's up to the director/writers to figure out what's important, what would make for good scenes to film, etc. Pretty much every movie just has less poo poo go on than the books (usually). An anime -> live-action is hard because they're not exactly a comic, they are still weirdly not mainstream despite being hugely popular so a lot of people don't "get" them, and a lot of the times the anime is more an exhibition of style/vibe/artwork, as was the case with Cowboy Bebop or, like, Ghibli movies. You can do live-action with a ton of style but it's totally different. Like, 30% of Ghibli movies are close-ups of lovingly animated/drawn food and environments, and minor animation-only details that wouldn't be as attention-grabbing were it live-action (like hairs bristling, and absurd bursts of speed/violence). Most Ghibli movies would be a boring live-action movie. So you get a classic conundrum where someone loves Bebop but doesn't know how to turn it into a movie. Or worse someone doesn't like or give a poo poo about Bebop so they are essentially making a movie based on a game of telephone with someone who watched it, so you get whatever the gently caress the live-action Bebop was. They're all weird media with different pros and cons, but live-action rarely has aesthetic overlap with films. Maybe boring-as-gently caress slice-of-life ones where it's a bunch of white people sitting in a parlor talking about who's loving who, but even then translating those to live-action would be a massive flop. I'm personally very thankful that Netflix is torching their own reputation by trying to adapt poo poo so that someone else can do some research to see what works when translating from one to the other and what doesn't. Sometimes it's okay, sometimes it's not. The Fallout TV series seems like good video game -> movie, and a big chunk of that is respecting the source material since the people interested in a Fallout TV show are probably people who liked the Fallout Video game. Witcher, clearly, just assumed people who liked the Witcher would watch it and support it so they're going for some weird other market and trying to make their own thing (but they're bad at it). jokes fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 01:41
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jokes posted:They squandered it because Cavill was the most enthusiastic character choice. I really like Cavill and wanted the show to be better, but tbh this just sounds like bog-standard production on a middling show by a poorly fitted team. The whole If You Read Between The Lines You'll See The Nasty Toxic Writers And Showrunner Hated The Book And Were At War With Henry feels like some combination of fanboy projecting and Cavill having a good publicist.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:52
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she wrote two episodes of daredevil
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Apr 24, 2024 02:53
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It seemed like the showrunner was told, “Make us a Game of Thrones,” and not, “Make a Witcher adaptation,” and that’s a fundamental problem no one is going to be able to fix.
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Apr 24, 2024 13:01
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Tender Bender posted:I really like Cavill and wanted the show to be better, but tbh this just sounds like bog-standard production on a middling show by a poorly fitted team. The whole If You Read Between The Lines You'll See The Nasty Toxic Writers And Showrunner Hated The Book And Were At War With Henry feels like some combination of fanboy projecting and Cavill having a good publicist. That's pretty much where I ended up with it, stopped watching after S2. It's just a poorly written, corny show. It is/was a popular IP and had a big name actor in it so it got more attention than it ever deserved, and therefore more backlash when it failed to live up to expectations. I don't think it's symptomatic of everything wrong with streaming/adaptations/anything because there are plenty of examples of those things which structurally resemble the witcher but are far better.
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Apr 24, 2024 13:22
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Alexander Hamilton posted:It seemed like the showrunner was told, “Make us a Game of Thrones,” and not, “Make a Witcher adaptation,” and that’s a fundamental problem no one is going to be able to fix. I don't think they wanted Thrones specifically, but definitely some mix between Thrones and the Netflix house structure, and the people they hired did that job rather than make something particularly impressive or accurate or whatever. So essentially, yeah, this is where I sit on the issue.
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Apr 24, 2024 13:28
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The difference between Witcher and GOT politics is how they play into the story. The books and games are littered with little vignettes of the different players making world stage decisions but they're mostly there to set up other scenes where characters have to react to the sudden changes brought on by war or diplomacy. Politics in the Witcher is very much depicted as "a thing that happens whether we interact with it or not" and everyone is stuck dealing with the consequences. Game of Thrones is much more about how those movers and shakers use politics to gain advantage over their enemies. It does dip into how policies affect the common people and there are consequences that spring from their reactions, but on the whole it's definitely more fcused on the high level court machinations compared to Witcher's ground view. For the North, Ned Stark's execution is a matter of pride that needs to be answered. For Geralt, the invasion by Nilfgaard is a frustration because now it means there's a bunch of rear end in a top hat soldiers blocking the road between him and his daughter. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 13:59
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Niwrad posted:Didn't the showrunner for The Witcher also make Daredevil on Netflix? I thought that was a pretty good adaptation so I don't understand how they hosed this up so bad. Seems like hiring a bunch of writers with contempt for the source material is not a great strategy but Hollywood seems convinced it'll work. She was credited with 2 episodes I think but seemed to be a main writer for The Defenders which sucked tremendously And somehow that warranted a promotion to showrunner
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Apr 24, 2024 15:20
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TBF I enjoyed season 1 of Witcher a lot. There were some shlocky bits of course - but the books have a fair amount of schlocky stuff and maudlin pseudo-philosophical blather in them, so I didn't mind. The Yennefer magic school stuff was definitely almost 100% a heap of crap, and also just kind of bizarre (eels??). But a lot of the season was just stuff from the short story collections, which was adapted well and came out pretty awesome IMO. Then in season 2 they went totally off-piste, making up a bunch of new stuff or trying to produce like half the season out of events which happen completely off-screen in the books. That's when everything got hosed, because their writers are bad (and had weird/bad direction from the showrunner & producers) so they produced bad original material. The same thing is happening with the Wheel of Time show, except that they started off already departing massively from the books, and also the writers are somehow even worse than the Witcher - they genuinely don't seem to know how to set up any of the significant lore and plot points, or even the most basic stuff like important magic item macguffins. That has resulted in a show where a lot of things just kind of happen randomly without any explanation or set up. Like, an important magic horn which is the entire impetus behind the whole of season 2, is just suddenly found under a chair in the season 1 finale without anyone ever having mentioned its name or even hinted at its existence before that moment. And there are amazingly awful lines of dialogue used to cover obviously-nonsensical plot holes; lines like, 'Moiraine has a tell', and 'now here's where my eidetic memory comes in handy' (actual lines from the show). I think part of the problem is the streamer studios have no real idea how to create good content and seem to be extremely over-bearing on showrunners and writers. Another part is that some showrunners and writers take on these fantasy adaptation jobs for the benefit of their career when they just don't understand or, in some cases, give a crap about the source material. And finally and most importantly... good writers are just extremely rare. Seems to me like good writers are gold dust and there aren't nearly enough out there who have any interest in adapting fantasy books. The fact we got good adaptations of (the early parts of) GoT, and LOTR, is kind of a fluke. Almost every TV/cinema fantasy adaptation every created, has been terrible or at the very least, cheesy in the extreme. The chances of getting a genuinely great Witcher or WoT adaptation was next-to-none and here we are. El Grillo fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 19:04
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I think you could tell it wouldn't turn out well from the first scene, where the Cintran troops are getting slaughtered in a series of one on one historical reenactment duels, then Calanthe's husband finds her on the battlefield and screams "we're losing!!"
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Apr 24, 2024 19:09
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Remember how the showrunner said the story of the Emperor wanting to find Ciri was just a tale of a loving father seeking to reunite with his daughter? Yeah either they did not read the books, or have the media literacy of the average twitter enthusiast and completely missed all the subtext and I believe actual text.
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Apr 24, 2024 19:20
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Open Source Idiom posted:I don't think they wanted Thrones specifically, but definitely some mix between Thrones and the Netflix house structure, and the people they hired did that job rather than make something particularly impressive or accurate or whatever. They absolutely wanted that and they swung and wiffed
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Apr 24, 2024 20:25
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I know it's not fair to compare the work of a TV writer to Sapkowski. They're just on entirely different levels of the craft and beyond that... Sapkowski is an artist who wanted to tell you beautiful stories from the world he invented and a given netflix writer just got told they need to have 30 pages done by the end of the week and I don't care how just make it loving happen we have a deadline You can have a creatively inept but workman-like writing staff translate a talented writer's work into something incredible (e.g. GoT) or you can have a very talented staff adapt interesting/flawed work (not necessarily bad, but that wouldn't work straight-up in film) that they don't fully understand in a way that excels in their particular medium (like... I dunno.. say Jurassic Park or Blade Runner or something) But you can't have untalented writers adapting work they fundamentally don't understand or care about on a deadline and expect that to work it's hubris
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Apr 24, 2024 20:56
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A big issue with almost all TV adoptions for a while was they'd hire people who have experience with TV writing but not people who knew the source material, and didn't care to research it. Maybe it's due to the only TV writers I know intimately are simpsons writers, but writers tend to come off as huge nerds and they couldn't find people who even cared about the source material? I mean thus is a huge issue with star trek. I bet there are hundreds of writers who grew up loving tng and ds9 and you couldn't hire them for the new series? Witcher is a bit more obscure than star trek or marvel, but there is probably a decent number of writers who are at least familiar with the games if not the books?
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Apr 24, 2024 21:26
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pentyne posted:Remember how the showrunner said the story of the Emperor wanting to find Ciri was just a tale of a loving father seeking to reunite with his daughter? He explicitly says that he wants to have a male heir with Ciri as the mother multiple times, so it was text written in gigantic flaming letters. Hell, if the Emperor of Nilfgaard didn't want to gently caress his daughter, like half of the plot in the Witcher wouldn't have happened.
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Apr 24, 2024 21:29
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Field Mousepad posted:They absolutely wanted that and they swung and wiffed Not having read ASOIAF or any of the Witcher books, I can't overstate how wildly different the two shows turned out in terms of the quality of their inter-kingdom nobility feuding. All the GoT houses have distinct locations and families and they do a great job of conveying who they are and what they're up to in the show. With Witcher it felt like we were going from one poorly-established castle to another with thinly-drawn characters doing something (???) about something else (?????). Without clear stakes or emotional connections with any of these characters these scenes pretty quickly end up as moments to zone out between far more entertaining scenes of our witcher family witching around.
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Apr 24, 2024 21:51
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Lt. Lizard posted:He explicitly says that he wants to have a male heir with Ciri as the mother multiple times, so it was text written in gigantic flaming letters. Hell, if the Emperor of Nilfgaard didn't want to gently caress his daughter, like half of the plot in the Witcher wouldn't have happened.  I also saw older news articles about Hissrich making a lot of public statements promising S3 was going to be a lot more book accurate. At best they saw the backlash from S2 and Blood Origins and realized this wasn't turning into their GoT franchise they way they wanted. Sticking to the books 'faithfully' to at least finish out the series would go a long way to improving people's opinions of the series even with the recasting and hopefully take less work then trying to write original material. 16 hours is a lot of time to tell a story in, they could easily cut a lot of the side content to laser focus on the core main cast. 5+ hours per book is plenty.
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Apr 24, 2024 21:53
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Did S3 end up being more book accurate? Need I have to ask? S2 soured me on the show pretty good and I liked the show more than the rest of the thread at the time so I never bothered with season 3 despite really liking the cast.
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Apr 24, 2024 22:00
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Good Soldier Svejk posted:And somehow that warranted a promotion to showrunner I think her husband is a big shot in Hollywood, and nepotism-based hires are standard for that industry. It's kind of funny going through shows that bombed and looking up the writers. It's always the son of some famous exec or something like that. They just aren't hiring good writers for many of these shows.
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Apr 24, 2024 22:04
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Jimbot posted:Did S3 end up being more book accurate? Need I have to ask? S2 soured me on the show pretty good and I liked the show more than the rest of the thread at the time so I never bothered with season 3 despite really liking the cast. Hate, hate, hated it. EDIT: Also, I only read the first book and played Witcher 2 and 3, but I much preferred the "Geralt kills a monster of the week" approach. I know, that's not the books apparently, but it was the strongest aspect of the first season to me. The endless focus on new characters doing back-stabbing politics behind the scenes was awful. JazzFlight fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 22:06
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I liked in Season 2 when they traveled 2000 miles on horseback in a scene transition. All the way from Cintra back up to Kaer Morhen.
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Apr 24, 2024 22:15
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JazzFlight posted:EDIT: Also, I only read the first book and played Witcher 2 and 3, but I much preferred the "Geralt kills a monster of the week" approach. I know, that's not the books apparently, but it was the strongest aspect of the first season to me. The endless focus on new characters doing back-stabbing politics behind the scenes was awful. They absolutely could have done a season of that and then slowrolled into the whole Ciri thing (basically how Justified worked) and they would have been much better off. I wonder if they only had Cavill for a set period of time or something so he couldn't be the focus of every episode.
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Apr 24, 2024 22:20
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Just redo a witcher series as a fantasy x-files. Don't base it directly off the books just use the world. Have actual episodes.
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Apr 24, 2024 22:25
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roomtone posted:Just redo a witcher series as a fantasy x-files. Don't base it directly off the books just use the world. Have actual episodes. That'd be lots of fun and basically is what Last Wish is. And why adapting Last Wish worked
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Apr 26, 2024 16:45
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roomtone posted:Just redo a witcher series as a fantasy x-files. Don't base it directly off the books just use the world. Have actual episodes. Ghostbusters inspired The Witcher. just a working-class exterminator of ghouls and ghosts
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Apr 26, 2024 16:53
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jokes posted:Ghostbusters inspired The Witcher. just a working-class exterminator of ghouls and ghosts And I will be forever grateful for the three or four episodes we got of that premise across the show's run. The show was at its best when it was just Male Xena: Warrior Himbo.
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Apr 26, 2024 17:11
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One thing I was disappointed with in season 2 that had nothing to do with the narrative choices is that we never got another awesome and incredibly choreographed fight like in the first episode of season 1.
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Apr 26, 2024 17:22
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