Variety have an interesting article today discussing the future of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series now that New Line has folded to Warner Bros, ironically with the first movie in the series The Golden Compass being pretty much the last nail in the coffin.
Remarkably, the mega A-list fantasy flop will cross $300 million worldwide by the time it’s run has finished (it’s doing gangbusters right now in Japan, $264 million and counting) whilst not being able to reach $100 million domestically in North America. Which for New Line meant nothing of course, because they sold off the rights to the series worldwide to help fund the movie in the first place.
So Warner Bros. would be stupid NOT to go ahead with a continuation of the series after the box office numbers of the original worldwide. It’s pretty clear there’s a huge audience for this and if they could just market the movie better in their own country and stop promoting it as the next Lord of the Rings (which personally, is one of the big reasons why the screwed up) it could be a success on par with Harry Potter and Batman franchises. And remember, Harry Potter is ending soon… Warner Bros. have made several spec deals looking for it’s replacement…
You can read Variety’s whole article on The Golden Compass and New Line’s demise RIGHT HERE.
Do you want to see the His Dark Materials be given a second chance at Warner Bros, maybe with a different writing and directing team? Would you like to see any of the main players re-cast? Would it be wise to maybe reduce the budget next time around?
2 Comments
I’d say the main problem in the US wasn’t the advertising campaign (which was rather bland) nor the product itself, but rather the Christian right and their effect on the movie. The movie had clearly been watered down to some degree to alleviate fears that the Christian groups would have problems with the movie and yet they boycotted the movie anyway without ever having seen the thing.
This led to a movie that missed several of the great theological points raised by the novels, while the overseas success proved that it was only the American Christian groups who had a problem with it – the boycotts meant that people in many parts of the US couldn’t see the movie so I expect some of the revenue to be recaptured on DVD.
So, where does this leave the sequels? I have no doubt that they can be made and there’s already footage out there that’s left over from the first movie that was cut to shorten the running time that can be re-used. I also see no reason why the sequels can’t use the same cast (as I recall, neither the Nicole Kidman nor Daniel Craig parts feature much in the second book) although if the excellent Dakota Blue Richards is going to feature then they will want to get the thing up and running before puberty hits.
The writing’s going to be the main issue – are they going to pander to the Christian groups with the next movie and neuter the meaning of the novels, or do they give us a full-blooded adaptation and depend on overseas momentum? I’m hoping for the latter but fear the former.
I think the movie might have done better in the US if they had remained true to the novel.
Instead they opted to pick it apart and put it back together again all out of order…missing the point in many cases…and then decided to end the movie a good chunk of narrative short of the proper ending.
It was a god awful disaster…not because of marketing or anything else…but because it was simply a god awful disaster of a film.
I loathed the final product. My 11 year old daughter hated it. I’d purchased the omnibus collection of His Dark Materials for her in July of 2007 so that she could read the novels before we went to see the movie in December.
To anyone who was actually a fan of the series, the movie couldn’t help but be a terrible disappointment.