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Neil Stephenson on Batman Beyond Project?
Alkaiser writes "Hey, get this. According to Altavista, who got it from Variety, Neal Stephenson is negotiations to work on Fox's Batman Beyond movie. " This is a whole lotta rumor and speculation, but its still worth a thought. I mean batman and stephenson? Yum.
They're apparently only negotiating to bring him on as a consultant on the creative aspects, according to the article. Given Stephenson's love of descriptive narrative and detail, this should be an ideal use of his talents.
K.N.E.E.L.
KAY EN EE EE El
kneeeeel
Not Neal
If you Neal before me, your lord and master, I will be mightily offended.
Oh, do you mean "In the Beginning was the Command Line"?
Now, is it just me, or is this is too much of a coincidence for Stephenson? Hmm?
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Her ass size is even bigger than signal11's karma
...and the Penguin will be driving a tank.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:Oh, no. She sucks. Yea, I know.
What changed my mind?
From the cell: Jennifer Lopez sitting in her undies in front of her I Mac taking a slow hit of a fat doob.
Um... Now I'm thirsty. I'm going to get a Mountain Dew.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
"Creative Consultant" == "Some guy we hire to make it look like we have 'street cred', but who we will ignore completely".
The cake is a pie
Don't hold your breath.
I heard rumours of a movie right after the book was published. I have a 1997 PC Gamer saying the PC game and the movie are coming RSN (like 2 months). I heard about it again in early 1999... and I still see nothing.
I'll wait for my Cryptonomicon sequel instead.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
Well that's just great. What I want to know is how many actors played Batman?
My favorite villain death scene is still The Joker.
Gotta agree with you. As a Linux user, I hated when they killed off the Penguin. Maybe in the next movie, they can have a villian in a red devil's outfit holding a pitchfork. Wearing a Red Hat. Doing battle against a lizard doing the samba. With a gnome as his assistant. Who seeks enlightenment. While being chase by the Batmobile doing Maximum RPM's. With the final battle in a sawmill. Used to cut pine. And elm.
Why is it people are posting about this as it were a live movie?
It's animated! People are writing and talking without background, without reading the links, without doing any follow through...
So what else is new?
Anyway, cut it out. It's just adding more noise, and I know most of you aren't intentionally trying to be clueless. But really, the series Batman Beyond is pretty good, it's animated, it's related to the Batman animated series, and it has nothing to do with the last 3 Batman movies, except maybe the animated one ^^
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Yeah but what's with this libertarian-wishful-thinking nonsense that governments will simply up and evaporate in the immediate near future? It's a neat SF idea and it does simplify the plot somewhat but still it's as much a baseless fantasy as Frodo or something.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Why does everyone seem to have a compulsive need to see Snowcrash turned into a movie? Can't a really great novel remain just a novel and yet remain great? Does everything have to be de-literatized and turned into visual goop?
Books and movies are two different art forms. They don't have to cross-over.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Ahhh, grasshoppah, you're dealing with two decidely geek characteristics here, and you must know that bad spelling trumps idol worship...
Cheers,
if they even come close to the writing and characterization that the animated series (beyond and "present") had, you won't be dissapointed. Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, among the numerous others who have worked on Batman, know it better than anyone else. Check out this book which Paul Dini wrote, it really captures the essence of who Batman is in a way that few others have. The artwork is excellent too. It's short, so you might want to just take a quick read through it at your local bookstore if you can find it.
Hopefully Stephenson will bring a sense of reality and plausibility to the "future", and not just the usual gimmicky technology you see in near-future stuff like this (something that i felt hurt the cartoon, but not by much).
. . .and cerimonially burn all copies of "BATMAN FOREVER" and especially "BATMAN AND ROBIN" on opening night. As for "BATMAN BEYOND," I have high hopes--it's a good show, and with a decent script could be made into a truly great movie. I would love to see "BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS" and "RED RAIN" up on the big screen as well some day.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Have you seen Batman: Beyond? Its gothic Cyberpunk stuff, with techno music, cybernetics, hover vehicles, VR, AI's, robotics, and most of the other fun trimmings of a cyberpunk setting (save for some lack of a consistent Metaverse-style network). Stephenson is in his element in Batman: Beyond, he's just gotta add the tights and supervillains. Besides that, Stephen originally intended Snow Crash to be a comic book. With that in mind, doesn't it makes sense that he work with a comic-book turned movie?
I couldn't think of anything that would make me lose respect for this highly respectable author quicker.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
I was tryin' to remember the kid's first name... Tim didn't sound right, o'course Bruce always calls him by his last name anyways.... damn, if they don't get a good actor for Bruce Wayne then this movie will suck. Still, Beyond is a great series, and with Stephenson giving pointers on cyberpunk it'll make a must see.
Oh, and to all you guys who keep making posts about Robin and the previous Batman movies - Read The Fscking Article, its only a page long, it wont kill you.
We need a -1 -> Impatient moderation, to stop the first-posters and people who just want to be opinionated so they don't bother to actually read the articles.
Remember, snowcrash was origianlly designed as a VISUAL multimedia project.
Batman beyond, if it follows the kickass cartoon added with some of Stephensons techno-themes will be a very cool movie... think batman as badass as Hiro and a villian as wacked out as Raven...
of course, thats just my opinion, i could be wrong.
--Ks9
but wouldn't it be awesome to see stephenson pull some of the crypto theme from cryptonomicon... as long as they dont use Finux, ill be happy.
--Ks9
Stephenson->Crypto->PGP (pretty good privacy)
Batman->Nonlethat weapons->PGP (pump-action paintball gun)
Laugh, it's funny. It's a pun. Relax.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
My favourite villain death scene will be when a crazed fan disembowels Joel Schumaker with a fork for taking Tim Burton's great dark gotham city and filling it with stupid neon lights, and putting nipples on the batsuits, and casting a blonde girl as Batgirl, and casting a blonde guy as Robin, and ... (et cetera et cetera et cetera)
Even Tim Burton got it wrong, though. You don't kill the Joker. You send him to Arkham. Movies which kill all the villains soon run out of villains.
In the cartoon the new batsuit is strength-enhancing, has powers of flight, infrared vision, and a ton of other neat gizmos. To see that translated into movie "magic" would either bring about a really great movie, or a really cheesy one. I hope they do a better job showing _Terry's_(Not Tim, regardless of what the article said) suffering over his fathers death. After all that's probably the only thing that makes Wayne sympathetic to him in the final analysis.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
I doubt he'll actually touch the movie script.
Well, I don't know much about the screen creds of Neil Stephenson, although I've enjoyed his writing, but ... comparing Kurt Russel (isn't that with two L's?) to Ben Affleck is like comparing a two-bit hoodlum to a don. No comparison.
...
...
On the other hand, Kurt was a star in my fave movie, where he battled the forces of the underworld of Chinatown, so he's not quite that bad, especially when he's wearing lipstick
And they do look kind of similar wearing bad polyester suits and glasses, as you might recall
Will in Seattle
You probably mean John Romero. He's the one who helped add the gore and goth to DOOM and Quake. John Carmack is the head programmer. He's more into building 3-d engines.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Is it just me or does anyone else have a really hard time reading that article? I mean, using arial font at such a small text size makes web sites such as these virtually unreadable. (At least to a non-MS web user) Don't these webmasters believe in viewability across browsers? Sorry to complain but I hate having to change my character set from Western ISO 8859-1 to Western ISO 8859-15 and back every time I go to read one of these pages.
:-) Just hope they do it right this time.
Ok... and for the moderators... I'm seriously looking forward to this movie. I've been a Batman fan as far back as I could open a comic book and look at the pictures.
At least /. has a Quake section.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
if it was frank miller, well, that would really be exciting
Neil Simon, maybe?
Aw, shucks, too bad Matthau is gone, he and Lemmon would have made a killer team for "Batman IV: Grumpier Old Ubermensches"
I could just hear Walter say, "Why do I still wear this cape? Because I'd look like hell in these tights without it, that's why!"
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I would, but those are so good. I'd hate to have them ruined just because Stephenson hadn't gotten his feet wet in the movie industry.
On the other hand, letting him make a few films first could also lead to him making something like The Phantom Menace...but you take your chances, you know...
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Now I know that her ass is certinly, how ca I say, ample, but comparing it to the size of sig11s karma is just over the top. If it were true, Ms. Lopez would have an ass large enough to be given electoral votes in the upcoming election.
(I say this knowing full well that people would actually have to live in the famed ass of Ms. Lopez to get electoral votes, but I'll glaze over that detail for a weak, very weak attempt at humor).
Yeah, I know. I also know that I wasn't the one who spelled it that way. My story submission just says "Stephenson on Batman Project". The /. guy who added it is to blame. It's not my bad code. =)
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Government is becoming less important everyday. The biggest indication of this is the lack of differentiation between the Republicans and Democrats. They are puppet parties controlled by the same corporate puppet-masters, as evidenced by the funding of their little conventions by the same mega-corporations like AOL and Exxon. Stephenson may have been a little off with his prediction of these corporations as being like different ethnic brands of the mafia that advertize with huge neon lights. The corporate government of today is much more insidious, choosing to hide behind cute slogans like 'Just Do It' and their hitmen are disguised as are supposed idols, the movie stars and sports heroes. Government will always be around for infrastructure, but their power has been shifted into the hands of Microsoft and the like.
I actually thought Cryptonomicon was a great book. I didn't consider any of the writing dry, but then again I'm very interested in the topic.
I also don't think you can call it "dry techno-babble" if it's based on real technology (as apposed to typical Sci-fi).
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
Maybe now we(most of us) will all see a Batman that we can identify with. A Batman who spends the entire time in front of the computer coding, read slashdot, jerk off, read slahsdot, jerk off and then wears a mask just for kicks.
I thought the dialog in the WWII era sections of
Cryptonomicon were just fine. The geek explanations could easily have been left out though, making the book about 1/3 smaller.
Maybe in the next movie, they can have a villian in a red devil's outfit holding a pitchfork. Wearing a Red Hat. Doing battle against a lizard doing the samba. With a gnome as his assistant. Who seeks enlightenment. While being chase by the Batmobile doing Maximum RPM's. With the final battle in a sawmill. Used to cut pine. And elm.
And the villain will only walk in through backdoors and crashed windows.
Feel free to ignore this. :)
http://gabrielcain.com/
batman and stephenson? Yum
Usually I dont agree with trolls... but is this a sign of Taco's homosexual tendencies surfacing?
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
What about those hour-and-a-half commercials known as Pokemon: The Movie and Pokemon: The Movie 2000?
:)
Don't forget the Digimon movie! I'm really looking forward to that one (seriously!). Though even the regular cartoon is basically a commercial.
So, what are the villains this time? And will they actually die or get killed this time? I think that "BatClooney" really ruined it by having both villains live at the end. }:(
My favorite villain death scene is still The Joker. Gotta love that laughing bag.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
it turns out that Batman is an emacs user, while Robin uses pico. That would certaintly explain a lot!
Batman beyond, if it follows the kickass cartoon added with some of Stephensons techno-themes will be a very cool movie... think batman as badass as Hiro and a villian as wacked out as Raven...
:)
Nobody ever admits that they just want a chance to see YT naked (hmmmm... maybe get Anna Paquin to play YT... yeah, I like it).
I actually thought they were links to the *animated* movie; I didn't actually know they were links to the *live* movie.
Oops.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Actually, this could be a good movie, so long as they don't do what they did in "Batman & Robin". Batman Beyond is a cartoon that even I like, it keeps a bit of sarcasm for amusement value, and has a more gothic flavor (i.e. the first Batman movie). Done right, this movie could rock...here's hoping.
Yahoo/E!
VERY LOW SODIUM
If Joel somehow gets involved, I think I'll go crazy. He singlehandedly drove the Batman movie franchise into the ground. Gotham is not a carnival!! Anyway, with someone else at the head, hopefully, this will bring back some quality to the name of Batman.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
...and 1/3 less interesting. I love geek parts, they makes the book so unique.
--
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
My big hope for the film is that they will flesh out some characters. The last few films have had very little character development (and too many big name star, IMO), which has made them poor films (IMHO also). I would like to think that Hollywood could be bothered to spend some time on character development and stop treating movie-goers like 2nd graders.
All I've got to say is Batman Forever(c)....
Anyone know of some exceptionally good metaverse type worlds in film?
i'm afraid you're right about the bad acting. according to the internet movie database, actors from both "boy meets world" and "sabrina the teenage witch" will be appearing... jdc.
That's a different movie entirely - a straight to video cartoon. These talks are about a live action Batman Beyond movie.
Does this mean that the Batmobile will run BeOS?
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I'd much rather have him working on "Snow Crash" or one of his other masterpieces than some piece of warmed over dreck like Batman...
Okay, so if this is set 40 years in the future who will play the elderly Bruce Wayne?
How about Clint Eastwood?
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
It's a common trick. The entertainment industry hires well-known experts so they can use their names, listing them as 'advisors'. It doesn't mean they listen to them, or even think of taking advice from them, they just want to use the name.
[hands Shoeboy a chocolate-covered coffee bean]
Nice work, Princess.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Snowcrash is an excellent book. Actually, it's on my top ten list of sci-fi novels. The setting of Snowcrash was a richly-painted view of a future Los Angeles. Being a current LA resident, I enjoyed his prognostications of the evolution of some of LA's idiosyncracies. For example, the overwhelming size and speeds of our freeways and our tendency to form socially and ethnically stratified enclaves that dot the metropolitan area like fast food chains.
The characters in Snowcrash had depth and were interesting. My roomate enjoys the main character so much that all of his email addresses and logins are 'Protohiro'. The new Batboy in Batman Beyond actually reminds me of the pizza delivery chick, YT, sans breasts. Hopefully Stephenson has thought of some new ideas to add to his repertoire of techno-jargon pioneered in Snowcrash, without lapsing into the dry techno-babble that bored the pants off of me in Cryptonomicon. Did anybody out there actually like that big piece of crap?
Anal nitpick of the day. :D
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
"Holy crypto, Batman! He's got a PGP gun!"
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
John Romero? Wasn't he the dude who did Night of the Living Dead? Or was that the guy who played Joker on the Batman TV show?
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You guys need a new picture. I'm startin' to get numb to that one.
http://overwhelmed.org
Terry McGinnes is the new Batman. He's a well-off teen with a life beyond the bat, now mostly gone thanks to his "employment" by Bruce.
While Paul Dini was on all of the named films, Burnett was not. This is a minor oversight.
Outside of the nits, I'm a little excited to see how this plays out. The Beyond world is great. Best character? Max, Terry's computer geek friend who stumbled onto his secret. When she makes it clear that she has no intention of being called "Robin", Terry responds, "OK... Alfred." Nonetheless, as a sidekick, in many ways, she (and Bruce, and the 60ish Commisioner (Barbara) Gordon) tremendously outshine the basicly-good-but-oh-so-shallow teenaged Terry.
Most of the villains are also more complex than the primary hero, but this is hardly a slight on him. Unlike most hero characters today, Terry is not terribly prone to angst (and a Batman, yet!), even after his father's murder. Me, I find that a little bland. I'm rooting for Maxine in the suit...
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
if Stephenson will have any say on the relative Codpiece sizes.
Canadian Mountain Dew has absolutely zero caffiene in it!!! I bought a twelve pack of it a few weeks ago in Thunder Bay, and I'm gonna slip it to some of the hard-core programmers at work and see how long it takes them to catch on.
Oh, yeah. I can't wait for all the asides, like where they pop the hood on the Batmobile and somehow wedge in a half hour of geek dialogue talking about how the engine works.
Yeah, Stephenson will bring much needed substance.
How about GREATEST LIVING AUTHOR? In my humble opinion. Have you read all his books?
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Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
Sure, they were shit, and, sure, they were little more than toy adverts, but they were anime.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
This is as close as we have gotten, so far, to Anime on the big screen.
Go rent The Iron Giant. Now. I mean it. Right now. Don't keep reading this -- go watch that movie. Best American animated feature in gopod knows how long. Stands up against anything out of Japan -- and I'm a rabid Japanese anime fan.
--------------------
WWW.TETSUJIN.ORG
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
John Romero was one of the programmers in Id Software for a little while, before leaving and forming ION Storm. He helped develop DOOM, Quake, and the now infamous Daikatana.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
First I think that is a great series. They are coming out with more great movies these days. I just can not wait.
..hmm, I can't imagine Stephenson, one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century, to write a story for a batman movie.... I don't think that it would fit him.
just my 2
al
"NOTHING CAN STOP ME NOW." - al@vampster.com
I love Stephenson's work, but I don't see anything to lead me to suspect that his gift will translate well to screen plays. The kind of authors that go well into the realm of screenplays are very dialog oriented authors, and Mr. Stephenson, while excellent, is more of a narrative guy. Think of the pages and pages of geek explanation in _Cryptonomicon_ and all the inner dialog in _Snow Crash_, and it's not terribly encouraging. That said, I hope it's true and it rocks.
--
Neil Stephenson working on a tired project. Woo! It'll be starring Kurt Russel or Ben Affleck or some other two-bit actor (Batman died when Keaton left), and direct by Joel Schumacher or some other creme puff directory.
Great, where do I sign up?
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
This is as close as we have gotten, so far, to Anime on the big screen.
Everything else was *import* and translated; Mononoke Hime and Ghost in the Shell.
I would be very happy if the movie were as good as some of the better TV episodes.
Anime is somehow edgier and cooler than anything else right now; like Matrix was to live action and Hong Kong martial arts, Batman Beyond could be to animation and Anime
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
That festering pusbag of a movie (you know, the one with Chris O'Donnell, Arnie Swartzenegger, and Alicia Silverstone, the unholy trinity of acting craptitude) has ruined the Batman series forever. Not that the Batman with Jim Carrey/Tommy Lee Jones was all that great to begin with.
I have two favorite Batman & Robin moments--the first is the part where Alicia first rings the doorbell looking for her Uncle Albert, and mumbles, "Bees stung my lips." Unfortunately, that was just Tom Servo saying that in the MST3K Summer Movie Preview, so that one probably doesn't count.
The other favorite part is when Robin is underwater fighting some plant monster (Feed me Seymor!) and the editor decided they needed a shot of Robin struggling in the water. Lacking such footage, they took the footage of Robin leaving the water, and play it backwards and forwards several times, thinking we won't notice that the splash defies the forward arrow of time. Hint: WE NOTICED!
Neal, I sure hope you don't get pulled into this hellhole of a series.
I liked how, in "Batman and Robin," the cinematographer somehow managed to make Alicia Silverstone look just like a Cabbage Patch Kid.
Ultimate Geek NanoNovel: Acts of the Apostles at www.wetmachine.com Fear the Future! Defrock the Infodruids!
She is witty, she is erudite, she CAN act, and Sabrina The Teenage Witch is without doubt one of the best programs on TV currently.
~ppppppppö
N.E.A.L.
EN EE AY EL
neaaaaaaaaal
NOT Neil.
When it comes to getting (un)substantiated movie rumors my pick is filmforce
It says here that Dini (the guy associated the cartoon Batman Beyond) is working on the script and stuff. And there are two movies - a prequel (sic!) and a batman beyond flick.
Now just get Tim Burton to direct it, and you got one awesome movie :) Of course it would take a lot of convincing to get Burton back in a movie franchise that he defined, and was subsequently destroyed by the pathetic effors of the newer teams. But I'm sure he can always use the money!
"I live in a world of make-believe, with faeries and leprechauns and tiny little frogs with funny hats."
>>Now, if they were to make a Batman movie with the help of Frank Miller or Alan Moore, that would be something I'd like to see.
Eh, Frank Miller wrote the screenplay for RoboCop 3, the worst in the series.
Je ne parle pas francais.
If you've ever watched the Batman Beyond series you'll find that its biggest problem is the awful plot lines. Stephenson will certainly bring much needed substance to the Batman of the Future.
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
God I hope they don't try to do the Metaverse in a crappy Batman movie. uggh!
While I'm reasonably certain it will never happen, I'm still holding out for a film version of Snow Crash, where the Metaverse and a lot of other cool concepts from the book can be given full attention.
Doing the Metaverse in a batman film will just be a goofy side bit.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
In negotiations to consult on the story's various creative aspects is cyberpunk sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson (''Cryptonomicon'').
Wouldn't that mean that he's not writing it, but just being like an advisor? I think it all makes sense though. Stephenson can have a vision of certain aspects of cyberpunk and it would fit the future setting of the Beyond series.
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
How the hell is this offtopic? I long for the day when it when it doesn't just take the ability to click a mouse button, but instead some thinking skills to moderate a slashdot post.
Now even if the Writing is magnificent, does it really matter with the likes of Clooney and O'donnel acting it out?
-
Starsucks
Let's face it. Being a good writer does not automatically means you can also be good ad screenplays.
I mean, how many good sci-fi books and stories have been turned into Hollywood-esque crap? Admittedly, sometimes without the writer's approval.
Now, if they were to make a Batman movie with the help of Frank Miller or Alan Moore, that would be something I'd like to see.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
On another note, I'de like to nominate the star of 'The Cell', Jenifer Lopez, as the new /. grrl.
The bad news is they spent all the money on him.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."