New Asimov Movies Coming

bowman9991 writes "Two big budget Isaac Asimov novel adaptations are on the way. New Line founders Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne are developing Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation, the first in Asimov's classic space opera saga, which has the potential to be as epic as Lord of the Rings. At the same time, New Regency has recently announced they were adapting Asimov's time travel novel The End of Eternity. Despite having edited or written more than 500 books, it's surprising how little of Isaac Asimov's work has made it to the big screen. '"Isaac Asimov had writer's block once," fellow science fiction writer Harlan Ellison said, referring to Asimov's impressive output. "It was the worst ten minutes of his life."' Previous adaptations include the misguided Will Smith feature I, Robot, the lame Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams, and two B-grade adaptations of Nightfall." This reader also notes that a remake of The Day of the Triffids is coming.

Comments

Re:Oh, the potential

[Daniel_Staal]

>>>misguided Will Smith feature I, Robot, the lame Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams, and two B-grade adaptations of Nightfall.

I have to disagree with this statement. Yeah the B-grade movies were bad, but I thought Bicentennial Man was faithful to the original text, and I Robot was an original non-asimov story, but still stayed true to Asimov's original Four Robot Laws (1,2,3, and 0). I saw that movie three times and enjoyed it every time. I wish they'd go back and adapt a few more (but this time stick to the text).

Bicentennial Man is probably fairly faithful - to the book, which wasn't actually by Asimov. (It was inspired by a short story he wrote.) I liked it, mostly.

I Robot... It may have been true to the wording of the four laws, but it completely missed their point: To have a world where robots weren't the enemy, and weren't running amok all the time. Which is where SciFi was when he started writing, and where SciFi movies still are. Instead he had robots who were machines, went wrong in predictable (non-destructive, usually) ways, and could be fixed.

Sure, he eventually went back and subverted that, but only after everyone else had started to write good robot stories, and it was then a subversion of his own rules.

So, to me, it just completely missed the point. If they'd called it what it was: Just another Hollywood robot movie, I'd have thought it decent, and liked it. But it wasn't an Asimov story, and calling it that was just a shallow marketing ploy.