Now that you mention the swamp dragons… If you are adapting the Discworld, shouldn’t there at least be SOME remainder of the fantasy elements? This does not look or feel like the world of Rincewind, the luggage, Librarian, GREAT A’TUIN, Nac Mac Feegles, DEATH…etc
(I guess the burning man hints at a possible fire/levitation magic?)
The characters look more like they are from the world of Blade Runner.
Have no idea how this ends up being good at this point.
I’m never going to understand people who take on a well-loved property, only to strip out half or more of what makes that well-loved property recognizable.
Yes, THAT is what Sybil looks like. Wagnerian is the perfect evocative adjective.
To be fair, Discworld took on a weirdly modern and almost steampunk-y flavor in the later books. Though with magic taking the place of tech. Vimes had a demonic PDA, The clacks was a pseudo-internet, the dwarves had flamethrowers and ancient technomantic devices, Vetinari wanted to build a subway system, etc.
Alternatively, what’s the point of making something if it’s just going to be a recreation of a series of books that we have already read?
Let’s see what happens when we aren’t forced to conform to rigidly to the source material. It’s not like the old Discworld Movies we all that great. They were okay, but only okay.
It’s possible to translate a story into another medium without completely butchering it. Vimes isn’t some chav with a fauxhawk. He just isn’t. He’s a world-weary beat-down drunkard copper when he’s first introduced. Looks like Bourdain in the mid-2000s.
And Cheery is a fucking dwarf. Looks like Gimli, except she’s secretly a woman.
It is possible, but is it what is best for the story?
I want a good story, I don’t need a faith adaption of the source material, if that gets in the way of a good story.
Or a better story.
And maybe this will suck, but I won’t complain that creators want to make something original. They are doing the work, unlike the audience, which is just consuming it.
Yea, I mean the next Star Wars movie should take place in the Wild Wild West. And when Hamilton is made into a movie it should take place in France.
Couldn’t be worse then the original trilogy we got.
Which is a ripoff of a Japanese film.
No one complained about that.
Maybe they did. And film is different in that no remake is done identical, whereas when the original material is a well known book series there are expectations. Look at how the Hobbit Trilogy was accepted compared to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
The Lord of the Rings movie made a few changes to the book.
The Magnificent 7 made changes to the original 7 Samurai.
Changes happen. Sometimes they are good, despite what a small section of the fanbase think
Minor ones compared to what the Hobbit movies did. How did that work for them?
I guess I would like to see a competent movie based on the books than have someone completely re-invest the wheel and call it Discworld. If you change it because others have failed you really don’t have much confidence in your own ability.
I didn’t see the movies. By the time that it came out, I had kids, and wasn’t going to the movies.
Well, the Hobbit sadly sucked, mainly because it went completely off script, if you will.
I think they could make very good stories using the original source material and meet expectations of the core audience. Having to change things around so they can write, what, better stories than their creator?
Maybe.
Making a television show is something I have 0 experience with, but if someone wants to come along and give it a try, especially built around a series that I personally enjoy, but have only seen failed made for television movies of, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
If it sucks, I’m no worse off then I was before it was being made. If its as good or better, then I get to see something that isn’t just a cash grab for nostalgia.
Well, it has been pointed out upthread that the Pratchett estate has disavowed this adaption, so they are obviously also not happy with where this has gone.
It seems to me that despite all the advances in cg and effects, it’s still too early to try and adapt a property like this with a low budget. The sky TV movies struggled with it and this show also looks like it had no money thus requiring it to toss all the fantasy / supernatural characters / aspects.
My answer would be then just don’t do it!
This makes no sense whatsoever, if you think a little about it.
You don’t like cash grabs. But the only reason to take a name like Discworld (or Lord of the Rings or Earthsea or whichever other property people have a nostalgic affection for) and then slapping it on a product that has no real relation to it, is for cash grab purposes. It’s pretty much the worst kind of cash grab for nostalgia imaginable, because it’s not even honest about it.
No one is preventing the show runners from making a police procedural set in a faux-Victorian-fantasy city. But if you don’t want to use characters or storylines that are recognizably similar to the original, go and make your own property - don’t spoil an existing concept. Like Carnival Row, for instance (which also lifted majorly from existing popular IP - but at least had the self-confidence to create their own fantasy world).
And we are worse off, if this sucks. Because itrampling across someone else’s IP and producing something which - 99% of the time - ends up significantly worse than the original, makes it take that much longer before someone else comes along again to try and make something good. Not only because it makes the IP less interesting to work with if the last attempt is crap, but it also makes the owners of that (and other) IP much, much less likely to consider letting others work on their stories again.
I mean, that assumes that we want to the IP to be used to make of versions of the media. Which, looking at how crappy the movies where, maybe we don’t. Maybe we should just enjoy the time we had with the books, and just leave it with that.
I doubt that the widely popular Discworld IP can’t survive a few interesting failures along the way. It survived that horrible Color of Magic Movie, and the barely passable Hogfather and Going Postal Movies. It will survive this (if it is bad) or benefit from this (if it’s good).
If anything, the further they get away from those movies, the better.
The fact of the matter is though, we are only in this crappy position because our copyright laws are really fucked up. Nobody should retain the rights to this stuff that long, especially not after they are dead, and we should have dozens of creators trying their own hand at their own version of what they think Discworld is, not feel obligated to follow what every restrictions are placed upon them by the IP holding, or by a fan base that is only interesting in retreading ground that the books already had done with success.
I don’t view it as a cash grab if the creators want to do something new or original with the property. I realize this goes against how some fans believe it should be.