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Rumors of Pratchett Film

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the silver-screenings dept.

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."

21 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Disc World by eebra82 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would just love to see a movie about Disc World.. Ever played the game? It's hillarious.

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    Full Tilt
    1. Re:Disc World by grahamlee · · Score: 3, Funny

      Making the Discworld into a film would certainly put LotR to shame just in terms of length. Actually, it would be a much better screenplay too. But let's say they concentrate on one particular aspect; I wonder what it would be? Suppose the screenplay is novel[1], I'd expect it to be based on Ankh-Morpork, but probably with both the City Watch and UU involved somehow. Otherwise it would need to be the whole plot of one of the existing books, but one which is self-contained and also doesn't have too much in the way of explanatory passages. Pyramids would probably be right out, Last Continent would be doable but probably wouldn't make a good film. So I think in these cases they'd probably go right back to the start and make The Colour of Magic, or perhaps Wyrd Sisters.

      Out of interest, which game are you referring to? I've played the first two computer games but missed out on Discworld Noir. My overriding memory of playing Discworld computer games is "that doesn't work".

      [1]Puns, like Gods, are brought into existence purely by narrative imperative.[2]
      [2]As are explanatory footnotes.

  2. Johnny and the Bomb... by Thwomp · · Score: 5, Informative

    Is currently being shown (in the U.K.) on BBC1 on Sunday nights, serialised, for anybody who might be interested.

  3. All I can say is... by DreadfulGrape · · Score: 4, Funny

    CRIVENS!!!

    --
    sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
  4. PTerry's market clout ... by charlie · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ... 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.

    1. Re:PTerry's market clout ... by ian_mackereth · · Score: 5, Funny
      I was amused when PTerry was talking about the smug way in which the Hollywood ponytails dangled what they considered a huge payment in front of him, assuming that the starving writer would faint dead away at seeing that many zeroes in front of the decimal point.

      He shrugged and told him how much more he'd earned from royalties that month and they first goggled and then shut up!

  5. sweet by fractilian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "The universe is my dwelling place and my house is my only clothes! Why are you entering into my pants?" - Liu Ling
  6. Re:I'll... by jwilloug · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Intended audience, I'm sure. Wee Free Men is written for kids, it's not really supposed to stand against the "real" Discworld books. Presumably the movie is going after the Harry Potter crowd.

    And you didn't like the rats book? The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents actually won the Carnegie Medal for best children's book of 2001. I'm surprised it wasn't the one chosen for the movie (rats not photogenic enough?).

  7. What about Mort? by jjeffrey · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'd much prefer to see a film done about another Pratchett book - Mort.

    Everyone I know says that's the best of the Discworld books to start with, as it's the most accessible, and the characters are the most recognisable. Everyone for some reason identifies with Mort as he confronts, literally, death. It's funny, it's clever, and you don't need to be a discworld fan to love it - lets convert some people.

  8. what ever happened to good omens?! by DarkClown · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I guess Gilliam bailed out - funding I Imagine.
    But wee free men (and maurice and a hat full of sky) would be nice, they are fun offshoots from the discworld series that would lend themselves well to film - for that matter the bromeliad trilogy (truckers, diggers, and thieves) would be great as well. Seems like the main discworld strain would be spottyish - I think that all the guards and the witch books would do well, as well as some of the standalone ones, especially small gods..

  9. Pratchett on Hollywood.. by Channard · · Score: 4, Funny

    "A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which went down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said "Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centres of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton". The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys. Whereupon, I'm happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years." - Terry Pratchett. So either things have changed, or the movie will end up being a sequel to Charlie and Chocolate Factory or something.. 'Hey, Wee Free Men? Those are kind of like Ooompah Loompahs, right?'

  10. Re:I don't get Pratchett by PonyHome · · Score: 5, Funny

    I really want to get into him. Anyone, anything to be an (in)adequate replacement for Douglas Adams' sensibilities. God I miss that guy.

    I've read Kingdom For Sale

    IF you want to get into Terry Pratchett, why are you reading books by Terry BROOKS?

  11. Re:I don't get Pratchett by tjwhaynes · · Score: 4, Informative
    "Reaper Man" (The Death Series)

    Mort preceeds "Reaper Man" and is a better starting point.

    If you want to work out where to start for each of the various plotlines, there is a diagram of the various streams of thought involved. Check out the reading guidelines for more options.

    Cheers,
    Toby Haynes

    --
    Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
  12. terry pratchet is the most shoplifted author... by know1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... in england, and has been for ages.
    honestly officer grimes, i've just left me thieves guild card at home!

  13. Re:And all *I* can say is... by atrocious+cowpat · · Score: 5, Funny


    "So, what rating are they going to put on the movie, PG-13?"

    Er... that would be "Pray to the Gods (all 13 of 'em)", right?

    --
    sig? Oh, that sig...
  14. The choice of book makes sense.. by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Wee Free Men" is one of his so-called childrens' books. It skews slightly younger while still being deep enough for the adults, it stands alone well even to a total Discworld newbie while still containing enough threads of the Discworld universe to please fans.. if done right this could be a Narnia-level of family fare that doesn't dumb things down too much for everyone else.

    --
    Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
  15. Converging lines by svunt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, as Pratchett's Discworld series has been getting more predictable, less thought-provoking and generally less entertaining for several years, it's no surprise that the film industry has decided that his time has come. Finally, he's nailed the mediocrity demanded by cinema, bravo Mr P!

    1. Re:Converging lines by NoMaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd agree with you, in general - it seems like, for a while at least, he listened too much to the sad inbred clique of a.f.p. and wrote books that tried to fit everybody's favourite characters and bits in. After the first one of those, they became formulaic - every book had to have the Watch, A-M, the Wizards, at least a passing nod to the witches, etc.

      But it seems in the last couple of years he's woken up. "Going Postal" is a brilliant piece of work, capturing a clash between the public servant culture, modern business "ethics", and the engineer / hacker ethos. "Thief of Time" runs a close second to this - the description of the spinners going wild is the stuff power plant engineers nightmares are made of, while the whole thing is a nice piss-take / homage to a thousand martial arts movies (Rule One - heh! ;-).

      But still, the best stand-alone books would be "Pyramids" or "Small Gods". The latter, however, is probably too deep - it was my least favourite to start with but, having read it maybe a dozen times, each time I find some new deep cutting insight into organised religion, and enjoy it more and more...

      (It has to also be said that, for a long time there, the man couldn't write a decent ending to save his life. The later books, however, are much much better in this regard.)

      --
      What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
  16. Re:Hope this follows for more ... by Thumper_SVX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I think Guards, Guards would actually make the best "first movie" in a Terry Pratchett set. Here's why;

    1. The narrative is strong, and although not everyone loves an action movie, Guards Guards is probably the most "action-oriented" of the earlier books. A lot of the others tend to be more cerebral, and later in the series the comedy becomes subtler.

    2. Dragons! Come on, how can you go far wrong with Dragons? OK, I'll grant you Dragonheart... ;)

    3. Characters. Many of the characters introduced in this book either occur later in the series or are referred to (sometimes obliquely) in later books. GG is where Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler is introduced... adn while he's a minor character here he becomes a major character later.

    4. Theres a love story. Movie studios love that stuff...

    5. Ankh Morpork. To me, AM was bought to life in GG in ways it hadn't been before. You got to see the REAL city, and not from a distance. Even later books often focused on specific aspects of the city (the university for example), rather than on the city which is itself a character in the books.

    Unlike the poster I replied to, I started with The Colour of Magic and just continued reading. I got away from the books for many years but returned to them recently and started reading them all again. So far I'm up as far as Small Gods and I'm working on it... but I definitely see how the narrative of a movie series would benefit from starting with Guards, Guards. While it wasn't my favorite of the series, it was definitely the one I think is most "movie-like" and most likely to appeal to a wide audience.

  17. Re:you're saying he outsells Tolkien? by po8 · · Score: 3, Informative

    You're joking, right? Terry Pratchett's been putting out an average of a book a year for maybe 20 years, and continues to do so. Tolkien's entire (salable) ouevre consists of four books that have been on sale continuously for something like 30 years. Sure, those four are insanely great books, but market saturation is by now pretty much complete.

    You're only a best-selling author as long as you keep writing things to sell. Stephen King has reportedly stopped writing now. J.K. Rowling reportedly plans to stop after HP #7. If Terry Pratchett keeps turning out books, it is quite likely he'll be the #1 best-selling SF/Fantasy/Horror author in the US in a couple of years.

  18. Re:Hope this follows for more ... by Winlin · · Score: 3, Funny

    But would you want to be the casting director who had to audition the Nobbs hopefuls???