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Microsoft Wondering About This Movie Thing
Via some considered analysis at Joystiq, an interview at the Mercury news with Microsoft's Robbie Bach. The article touches on a number of pieces of the Xbox business, and is quite interesting, but folks are focusing on his comments re: the Halo movie. From the piece: "Does it make sense for Microsoft to be in the movie business? It's not what we do, nor would I anticipate us ever doing it. So it's a different business with a different business model. We happen to have great intellectual property with Halo that could be made into a great movie. The No. 1 criteria for us is we have to be confident a great movie is going to be made. It doesn't matter if Universal and Fox do it or somebody else does it. Frankly, if we didn't think a good movie would be produced, we would rather have no movie."
If we(microsoft) cannot make a movie that will pull in $300+ million, then we would rather not waste the effort to milk the fanbase.
"NASA's Rollercoaster For Moon Rocket Escape"
Xonk?
Consider, for instance, the Zune. Beyond being a potential flop, it showed the culmination of Microsoft getting sick of 3rd party partnerships and jumping it in themselves. PlaysForSure was M$ intellectual property (kind of) that they licensed out to try and leverage the market. Horrible failure. The Zune is a complete reversal, where they entered a non-MS-dominant market fresh and tried to win, getting directly in there. I think if it fails, it will because they waited way too long till the market was saturated, and not because of any product weaknesses.
Like the Xbox. They've taken industry titans head on, and well, they've won. This was once again direct involvement. Same with many of their video games, ie-Bungie. For those of you who didn't know, Bungie is owned by Microsoft. Direct involvement.
I really think M$ is going to set up a small studio to at least control the project, even if they don't develop it all the way. I can't see them just handing out the IP to Halo to a movie studio and saying have fun with it.
I can think of several Infocom properties that would make good movies. Planetfall, Zork, and the best one of all, Leather Goddesses of Phobos!
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
"We happen to have great intellectual property with Halo that could be made into a great movie." ...Anyone else wondering why they worded it so poorly? Who cares about intellectual property? You either have a great series or you have a poor series, the fact that you own some legal crap for it shouldn't be an issue.
"Halo would make a great movie, we want to give it a try" would be 100% better since it sounds human and not lawyer based.
I like muppets.
A huge number of them are pornographic in number and the fast majority of them suck. The problem is simple.
An original manga has characters with personalities and certain traits that make them characters. This is in any half decent manga more then just the base traits. To put it simple, Beldandy from Ah My Goddess is more then just a female with a complex hairdo and some funky facial makeup. Same as for instance spiderman is more then a guy in red and blue jumpsuit.
Most of the porn doushinji however does not bother in the least with any characterization beyond the barest physical resemblance. The author wants to do a porn because that is extremely popular and chooses a popular title to take base his characters on.
In the second frame the character drops their clothes, develops a pair of tits that would give a cow back trouble and behaves as generic slut A being raped by faceless guy B.
In a way this reminds me of game movies. They are not made out of a love for the original subject matter, all they want is to produce a movie to take in lots of cash and so they want to associate it with the a popular license but in the second take they loose all resemblence to the original material and just make what they wanted to make in the first place.
There are good doujinshi, fan material that wants to respect the original material and tells a new story but one that is firmly based on the original material. Were the characters look and act as you expect them too.
Some erotic 'fan' material is in fact made by the original author who just made some material not directly acceptable in his mainstream publication. I have read material by several european strip makers who did this.
The good fan art creators do not seek to redo the original authors work, they only make the barest minimum change (basically they ask "what if" and then let the original authors creations live that scenario out).
My rant above sounds confusing because while it will be obvious to anyone who ever read bad fanworks and a great one it is still hard to get across why the two are different.
But basically it is the reason WHY you make your version. Do you do it out of love of the original OR because you want to make a lot of money of its name?
Most game movies seem to follow the latter and it is why the Doom had so little in common with the real game. It was not made out of love of the game doom, it was made out of love for the money the Doom name could deliver.
Same with Tomb Raider. It wasn't Tomb Raider, the movies were closer to Tomb Raider 3 or 4 (she never had assitence in the original classic game only when the franchise died did she get those annoying brats tagging along, I leave it to you if they caused it or were a symptom)