TV limited series adaptations of The Culture novels. Amazon obviously made a start before giving up but they picked absolutely the wrong one to start with.
Yes Consider Phlebus is the first chronologically but a TV series where you have to replace the main character every episode does not work when you are already trying to adapt a very difficult IP. Player of Games is where you want to begin. Clear storyline, no tricky time/universe/world jumps. Spends most of the time in an Earth-esque civilization. If you can successfully adapt PoG then you can try something more challenging like Phlebus or Use of Weapons.Did the (anti)protagonist shape shift that much in Phlebas? And even then would it have been a problem for the series? Money no object after all…
Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating on the “every episode” but you’re still going to need at least three actors to play the main character, plus intermediate appearances as they transform which lasts an episode or more. It’s definitely a significant additional problem that you just don’t have to deal with if you start with one of the other books.
The other challenge if you are thinking about doing multiple books and you start with Phlebas is that the Culture are the baddies. You spend a (most) of a series presenting them as such and then flip.
Iain M. Banks’ Culture.
I’m deathly afraid of the day some big studio manages to buy the rights and produce a Hollywood version of the Culture. Mostly because it is very easy to flip through the Wikipedia entries and then take the superficial aesthetic of the Culture and misunderstand or ignore the rest.
For an example on how easy it is to do this: I remember vividly when the German translations of the later books came out, and they all had some variation of
The Culture is the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind. Unbeknownst to its citizens however, their supposedly benevolent machine gods are about to dispense with the needs for humans at all"
in the blurb. Someone scanned the wiki page until they read something about “superhuman AI” or the like, then went “ah, got it, I’ve seen Terminator”.
In a similar vein, I cannot imagine that Hollywood would portray the Culture as an unquestionably good Utopia. They’d not be able to resist to paint the luxury gay space communists as “…with a dark secret / actually dystopian /…” tones.
I want a The Magicians video game, or movie, or another show set in the same universe.
It has to have the same energy though. Dong have to be the same characters, doesn’t have to feature Brakebills for Fillory, but needs the same “we’re broken and magic doesn’t make it better, but hey, here’s a canonical musical” feeling
I like the “we’re broken & magic doesn’t make it better,” but I wanna fit all, or most, of the musicals into their own episodes. Though, an action-musical sequence in a The Magicians game would go hard af.
Interesting. I always loved how they fit the musical entries into the story in a way that it makes sense that everyone is singing all of the sudden, lol
That’s why we have to make it a time-fuck. You don’t even know what’s going on, but the musical episodes tie it all together, and are the key to escaping the spell…
This! 👏
Ayo, fuck whomstever downvoted my homie zabby!
Farscape.
Modern visuals, Muppets, a team of good writers and the core cast returning could be really good. Black and Browder wouldn’t be too old yet to make the characters work.
That chaotic universe could provide so many posibilities to explore if done right.
Someone made the point previously about Disney owning Muppets now and doing live action adaptations of all the animated films when they have the opportunity to do muppet versions instead.
Although I would absolutely want more farscape.
