Rumors of Pratchett Film

kongjie writes "The BBC reports on the rumored possibility of Terry Pratchett's novel Wee Free Men being made into a Hollywood film, with Raimi attached to it. This would be the first, although in the past his stuff has made the television screen."

Comments

PTerry's market clout ...

[charlie]

... in the UK, at least, is huge. To put it in perspective; in the fantasy field, only J. K. Rowling out-sells him -- I'm not certain, but I think he may be ahead of Stephen King, and responsible for a visible percentage of all UK fiction sales.

This suggests to me that, like Rowling, he now probably has enough clout to prevent his work being butchered by the studios.

By way of illustrating this point, he tells an amusing story about the first time round the Hollywood block. Someone had optioned "Reaper Man", and was actually putting some money into scriptwriting, preliminary planning, focus groups, and that kind of thing. One evening, he got a phone call from a studio executive. Who began like this: "hi, Terry! Great to talk to you, we here at XXXXX studios really like Reaper Man, and we're looking forward to making it a great movie. However, we'd like to make a few changes. We ran the outline past a focus group in rural Iowa, and they weren't very positive about this 'Death' character. If we just replace him with Tom Cruise ..."

This is how Hollywood typically deals with SF/F fiction properties.

And that's why you didn't see a big-budget production of "Reaper Man" (probably re-titled "Die Hard 4: Reap Hard") during the mid-nineties.

sweet

[fractilian]

I love his books. I think Small Gods would be great to see. If that made it to screen the religious community would go bonkers!(did I mention I like to instigate) Some of his book would make a great Anime feature too.