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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."

5 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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!

  3. 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?

  4. 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...