J.J. Abrams is admitting defeat with The Dark Tower.
He’s bailed out. Done. Star Trek II: The Return of Khan, or whatever he ends up doing with the new Trek saga is his immediate film future, as well as producing another Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise. For now, Stephen King’s magnum opus goes back on the unproduced shelf once again.
I’m blaming Abrams’ decision on what I call the “Watchmen effect”.
“The Watchmen effect”, by the terms of the OWF dictionary is as follows;
A phrase that encapsulates an epic sized book/graphic novel which if to be adapted 100% faithfully to film from the source material, would lose it’s soul in the process and simply become a check-list of quota’s to satisfy the fanboys who would bring out the knives if anything, even the most minute detail, was missing.
“The Watchmen effect” has the problem of not actually being able to please anyone. I say that as someone who liked Watchmen quite a bit back in March but I believe I’m totally in the minority on that one and for most, Zack Snyder’s movie wasn’t really all that.
Which is why the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek was so smart. It had all the recognisable Trek traits but also added a lot of new things, explored some unanswered questions from Trek’s past and first and foremost… was a brand new story for film.
An intelligent article I’ve stumbled across at The ByGone Bureau explain this better than I ever could…
The recent trend of filming every remotely popular Marvel and DC Comics character has yielded a handful of successful adaptations, but there’s a difference between superhero movies and comic book movies. While superheros are found in comics, their movies are adaptations of their mythology rather than a direct interpretations their stories. The films take bits and pieces from decades of serialized plot lines and, even then, bring them together to tell a new, unique story. Spider-Man 2 has familiar conflicts and villains, but the story itself is completely new; The Dark Knight is a brilliant composite of several recent renderings of Batman.
Separated from superhero movies, the number of comic book films gets much smaller. The few successes are easy to count, and even then, they seem like exceptions. Ghost World, A History of Violence, and Road to Perdition, all excellent, deviate heavily from their source material. More importantly, all these examples are adapted well.
The failures, on the other hand, make up a big chunk of Alan Moore’s bibliography: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, and V for Vendetta.
5 Comments
V for Vendetta kicked ass; was that a box office failure?
@ immature: It grossed $70m -ish domestic, $130m -ish global, so not a total flop. Just generally accepted as a failed adaptation. As Matt points out, these things are inevitably slated by anyone who enjoyed the source material before they saw the movie.
Whilst I do tend to be among the baying masses when something I love is adapted I have to confess that the attention the original material gets after a movie comes out almost makes butchering it on the big screen worthwhile! Did you read the graphic novel after? That rules…
I think the problem with the watchmen is that it simply wasn’t a marketable action packed movie. I was very happy with it and I think it was one of the better comic book adaptations even though I haven’t seen the comic before the movie. I hear a lot of people talking about other people disliking watchmen but I’ve never met someone who actualy did.
Gotta rant about Matt’s analysis. I don’t know if I’d ride that horse about “sticking too closely to fanboy demands” etc to glory. That line is usually used as a crutch by filmmakers who are too stupid to adapt material correctly.
They have a powerful property on their hands whose handling is readily obvious, but because the material is smarter than the people handling it they instead demand some imaginary right to devolve the material into the mundane juvenile horsehshit they are more accustomed to.
See Batman & Robin or Bayformers –er, Transformers.
No –repeat NO– fanboys complained about Batman Begins or Dark Knight, in fact they LOVED it. Why Matt? Why would the fanboys love it if it deviated so much from comic book continuity?
Because it stayed grounded in the gritty dirty believeable atmosphere that fanboys wanted. As long as they did that the rest were details.
And might I add Michael Bay deviated from Transformers as much as he could. Do you think either of those movies any good? And before anyone goes running for the old standby talking point “It’s a movie based on a toy/cartoon” Batman is a movie based on a comic book about a guy in a costume chasing some dude who is literally a clown.
So you can get off that horse.
Fanboys are not the problem, never have been –and I say that as somebody who hates Stephen King and his “books.” You can use that as a shield for incompetent filmmaking if you want, but it don’t fly out in the world.
If you were right then Sin City should have bombed. Or at least should have been a crappy movie. It wasn’t. It stuck to cannon and audiences in general loved it.
Shouldn’t Lord of the Rings have been the most hated movie ever? It wasn’t. It deviated wildly from the books and fanboys loved it.
So what does that tell you? The “Watchman” effect is all in your mind. Either the material is screen-worthy as-is or it needs to be altered. That has nothing to do with “fanboys.”
If the studio isn’t sure how closely they should/can stick to the material, fine. But don’t give them license to blame their own hesitance –based on their own incompetnece,– on those who are the least responsible for it.
These studio hacks drag their asses just as a matter of course. Doubt me? Then tell me where that Wonder Woman movie is hiding at? Maybe the fanboys have blocked that one too?
BTW, isn’t it interesting how nobody ever says a word about Harry Potter, even though that franchise sticks to book cannon almost word for word. And when they deviated a scintilla with Voldemort the fangirls went nuts?
Still waiting for somebody to eviscerate the fans of Potter for their rabid obsession with the film directly mirroring the books, and why they’re so successful.
Hey, I just wanted to say I Love the fact that you used my picture in your post(the_dark_tower)!! I’m the original author/artist who adapted that version of Finch’s Comic book cover. The Comic cover version had a Shotgun, but Roland never carried a shotgun with him, So I photoshopped it into a pistol and changed the colors to a deeper golden/orange tint from it’s original yellow/brown hues! I put it on Photobucket for all the DarkTower fans out there to enjoy! It was kinda cool to see it and go, “wait a minute…I Made that!!!!” Thanks for using it!