Category: SF&F Movie Reviews

Science Fiction and Fantasy Movie Reviews by otherworldly critics

What’s the Perfect Science Fiction Story to Film?

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I’m cheating here.  I really don’t have some authoritative answer but I’m interested in opinions.  I mean I have my own but I’d like to hear from you readers.  I guess I’m trying to separate what people want to see filmed from what they think would film best.  For instance, someone might love the book Stranger in a Strange Land but think that it wouldn’t translate to the screen at all.  And conversely you might not care for a book but recognize that it would make an amazing visual spectacle.  So that’s the challenge.  What you pick could be your favorite sf book but only if you think that it would be a terrific movie.

So, to be fair I’ll have to pick a book and tell why the movie version would be phenomenal.  Hmmmm.

Alright, so I’ll pick a controversial book; Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers.”  And I’ll say why.  I’m basing my opinion on the 1997 film directed by Paul Verhoeven.  Verhoeven made the movie to be an ironic send-up of what he considered a fascist state.  So, he was mocking the military that makes up the whole story.  And yet, despite this hostile take on Heinlein’s book, the film is a staggeringly vivid visual spectacle.  The vistas of battle on planet and in space are remarkable even though this movie used CGI effects that are several decades out of date.  So, I try to imagine what could be done if someone who liked the story and the world it envisions wrote and directed it.  I think it could be amazing.

Now let me add that I don’t think this would happen in a million years.  Woke Hollywood has no interest in a pro-military sf war movie.  Ever since Vietnam they’ve made more than ten anti-war movies for every pro-military one.  But since I’m not asking, “what’s the movie most likely to be made,” I feel I can select the story that I favor regardless of its chances of actually appearing on the screen.  I think of the visual showing Buenos Aires being obliterated from space by the Bugs and I think of what the emotional impact of that scene would be.  And if the Rico character were presented as intended, I think it would be a sympathetic one for the male portion of the audience.  Of course, the jury is still out on whether I would keep the communal male/female shower facilities that Verhoeven introduced into his film.  It has its advantages and disadvantages as a cinematic device.  But I would demand that the movie stay as close to Heinlein’s book as possible.

So come on everybody, pick the story that is perfect for the big screen and give your reasons why you think so.  And I won’t restrict this by the book’s age.  It could be Frankenstein, War of the Worlds or anything else.  Even if it’s already been filmed several times, say why a new version would work.  But for pity’s sake don’t give me a woke book.  My stomach isn’t as strong as it used to be.

Replies:

 

Ed Brault:

Boy, this is a tough one. There are several I could choose from.

Larry Niven’s “A Gift from Earth” Set on a distant colony planet, it has action, suspense, political upheaval, and a rather unique social commentary on the impact of genetic engineering. The visuals would be well within CGI and other technical effects tech that has been around since Stargate SG-1.

Another would be “The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton. Crime and mystery in a not-too-distant future. Telepathy, psi powers, black market organ transplants, and a unique form of addiction that may not be that far off. All done in an almost-contemporary setting, just add automated flying cars, and a society so desperate for life-extending transplant material, they make almost any crime Capital, even False Advertising, sending the perp to the Organ Banks. Three short stories that put a creative spin on murder. The capper is the Jigsaw Girl, set on the Moon, with murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, clones, and interplanetary politics.

“The Children’s Hour”, set on the Wunderland colony on a planet of Alpha Centauri. Conquered by the felinoid race, the Kzinti, and it is used as a staging base for the planned conquest of Earth. Three invasion fleets have been beaten off, but a new Governor has brought a new philosophy of war. Instead of “Scream and Leap” he advocates careful study of the enemy, how he thinks, and how “inferior” technologies may be used in VERY sophisticated ways against a more advanced force. Earth’s GHQ wants him dead, and a special team is sent to get him, by a very fiendish, complex method, all set in a background very reminiscent of “Casablanca”.

 

Chemist:

We agree on Starship Troopers. I think it could be redone with more attention to Rico and his development – especially his reconciliation with his dad.
Another Heinlein – Puppet Masters. I know. Been done. I think it could have been done better. It already has a very strong female character without being woke. Robert set Puppet Masters up for a sequel but never wrote it. I’d like to see a sequel where the humans take the war to Titan. I think a focus on the man / dog teams would be excellent.
And we know how Hollywood loves sequels – here are two movies just waiting to be made.

Now if you want to make a serious romp movie – any of Harry Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat” books would do. If I were writing it, I’d lean into the anti-government aspect. I think it would play well today.

 

Tregonsee:

Well I would like to see Starship Troopers done correctly. I imagine RAH is still revolving in his grave or haunting Mr. Verhoeven over the 1997 travesty. I think The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress MIGHT work. I’ve always thought the first of Zelazny’s Amber Series Nine Princes in Amber might make a nice movie, or better an 8-10 1hr show series (with other Amber Books to follow if it works). Larry Niven’s Ringworld or Protector might work, although Ringworld will have to be edited lest it skate into deep R or NR rated territory. For romps I favor Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing Of The Dog it is eminently filmable, though again a series might work better. The time travel nonsense is just absolutely beautiful and hilarious; there is a romance (or three), and we rescue an extinct species (spoilers 🙂 ) of great interest. And last but not least, the first couple of the Honor Harrington series might be fun, In particular On Basilisk Station and Honor of The Queen . I’d love to see it get to Field of Dishonor but that’s 5 books in and because of prolong our heroine does not age, but whatever star we choose to play her will age.

Oh and of course given my handle I am for a version of E.E. Smith’s Galactic Patrol. Though I fear modern Hollywood would mangle it more than Mr Verhoeven did Starship Troopers. Many of its features (in particular Lenses being MALE only with one special exception) would not sell in the modern world.

A big issue is that a 2-2.5 hour movie requires 200-250 pages of script. a 150 page book EASILY fills that amount of script, but modern Novels run 300-450 pages (And I’m Not even talking to You Mr. Sanderson…). the series/miniseries model doesn’t make as much cash as a successful movie, so it can’t fund as many physical effects (which still are needed for convincing SciFi c.f. Hail Mary Project ). Hollywood has been leery of NEW SciFi with the soft returns on several Star Wars sequels (doesn’t help they were really weak) and the catastrophe that was John Carter, which I thought was a fairly decent rendering of the Barsoom series start (it essentially being A Princess Of Mars reworked a bit). Maybe Hail Mary Projects‘ success will disabuse them of their SciFi fears, at least until they screw some other pooch big time…

 

TomD:

Every SF book that I’d like to see as cinema combines the elements of imagination, extrapolation, character development and world building. Problem being that doing all that implies a movie too long and convoluted to be doable or effective.

The book that I’d most like to see is Robert Silverberg’s “Lord Valentines Castle” but it would take a Tolkien Trilogy’s worth of effort to do and quite unlikely.

Tregonsee replied to TomD:

Tom D said

“Every SF book that I’d like to see as cinema combines the elements of imagination, extrapolation, character development and world building.”

I think that is true of a great deal of SciFi/Fantasy. For a film or even a series, we like to have a character or two to focus on, both because star power helps sell films and because with a cast of thousands, filming costs go up and engagement goes down. For many years, The Lord of the Rings and Dune were thought unfilmable. Lynch’s Dune and Bakshi’s LOTR nearly proved that true. I Think Peter Jackson did exceptionally well with LOTR and Denis Villeneuve has done well (albeit mangling the timeline a bit and gender swapping a character unnecessarily) with Dune. It helps to have a producer/director/writer that loves and understands the material.

I don’t remember enough of Lord Valentines Castle to be able to comment on it reasonably, but I think you are correct it probably is to obscure and would perhaps feel derivative of other scifi/fantasy. I wonder if we don’t have two separate classes here: films we’d like to see made and films that could be filmed. The latter class has grown with Computer Special effects reducing costs and making some things possible (e.g. an anatomically correct Puppeteer or Kzin is impossible without modern special effects). I wonder how large the Venn diagram of the overlap of those two classes is. And of course there is a third class, interesting to the general public. without being in that class the chance to break even on production costs goes WAY down.

 

 

 

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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“It! The Terror from Beyond Space” (ITTFBS) is one of those marvelous science fiction movies that are so awful that they can be enjoyed entirely for the camp value.  It’s really hard to overstate how cheesy the movie is.  And unless you’re a connoisseur of B movie bit players you’ve never heard of the cast.  Now, you’ll probably recognize several of them from old tv shows of the time period like “Superman” and “The Twilight Zone” but none of them were movie stars.  But they do gamely soldier on with the plot and dialog, such as they are.  But when the set is a “space ship” that looks like one room in an industrial building and the “monster” is a guy in a rubber suit you can only do so much.

I won’t warn you about spoilers because you can’t spoil this movie.  The dopiness of the “science” defies any concern over spoiling the resolution of the dilemma.  It has something to do with the monster having very large lungs from living on Mars and therefore emptying the ship of air will kill the monster faster than if he had smaller lungs!  But none of that should be held against this movie.  If you watch this movie, you embrace the dopiness.

The plot is basically that the first manned mission to Mars is attacked by a monster that kills eight out of the nine astronauts.  A rescue mission is sent to bring back the survivor who is believed to have murdered his shipmates.  Of course, the monster stows away by walking into an unlocked entrance and then begins picking off the rescue crew.  Once the crew figures out that the survivor was telling the truth about the monster, he seems to become their leader and they combine forces to kill the really hokey looking monster.  They try guns, hand grenades, “gas bombs,” electricity and even radiation from their engine.  But no soap.  Finally, when the monster breaks through the last bulkhead protecting the handful of survivors, they empty the cabin air into space and the monster dies quite dramatically.

So, what makes this movie so special that I don’t pan it.  Maybe it’s the two women in the rescue crew.  They appear to be nurses who have been sent along to treat victims of the first Mars expedition.  They spend most of their scenes holding hands with various crew members and looking soulfully into their eyes while asking them whether the monster is going to eat them all or not.  And that’s another great thing about this movie.  The monster kills its victims by removing all oxygen and water from their bodies.  But since he likes to snack all day long, he drags them around while he’s feeding on them.  Then there’s the crew’s space suits.  They look like they’re made of wool.  And finally, there’s the view of space from the ship.  In addition to stars, there are what must be meteors flying by.  They look like a few Fourth of July sparklers tied together and pulled along on a string.

So, all in all this is a terrible sci-fi movie by any standard.  But for the connoisseur of this sub-genre, it’s a treat.  ITTFBS is highly recommended schlock.

Keanu Goes to the Devil

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Keanu Goes to the Devil

I’ve mentioned the movie “Constantine” tangentially while discussing comic book movies and some other topics that occupied me back a few years ago.  This 2005 movie stars Keanu Reeves as a Los Angeles based exorcist and general enemy of demonic forces.  He’s a sort of angsty noir character who is angry at heaven since he is doomed to hell because he attempted suicide as a teenager over the horror he experienced as a psychic.

The movie follows a “logic” about the rules in place for angels and demons that makes absolutely no sense but allows for the plot devices that move the story along its arc.  And much of the action is plodding and mechanical.  And yet I find myself watching this turkey (or parts of it) over and over again.  Why?

Well, the two aspects of the movie that stand out in my head are two very different things.  The first item is the visualization of Hell.  You could say this is just a special effects technique but it really is a rich imagining of the underworld.  The idea of Hell as our own world but turned into a burned-out husk makes for a vivid background.  And then the demons as these mutilated corpses with the tops of their heads sheared off is bizarrely fitting.

But the second item is, I think, the more compelling.  It is the representation of Lucifer during his arrival to harvest the soul of Constantine.  As promised in the country song, the devil wears a white suit.  As played by Peter Stormare, Lucifer is a witty, amiable fellow who enjoys chatting with his old acquaintance Constantine prior to bringing him back to Hell where he claims he has “a whole theme park full of red delights” for Constantine to “enjoy.”  He even helps Constantine light his cigarette when the exorcist can’t manage his lighter because of the cut finger tendons incurred when he slit his own wrists in order to summon up Lucifer.  Of course, the devil can’t help pulling the flame away two or three times just for fun.  It’s this pettiness and banality that adds interest to the part.  It’s contrasted with the menace that shows through whenever Lucifer’s plans are challenged either by demon, angel or divine law itself.  But it’s the human face of evil that makes Lucifer compelling.  His vindictiveness, cruelty and pride show up as the proof that angels, devils and man are all creations of the same maker.  We all have the same stamp.  We’ve been given free will and we can use it to reach a higher ground or fall off the mountain.

So that’s why I guess I enjoy watching this silly movie (or at least parts of it).  Not for the absurd plot or the goofy take on Christian theology as it relates to Hell.  I guess I just like to think about Satan being this provincial, bureaucratic apparatchik fighting with humans and God to protect his turf and cause as much mischief as he can.  It just seems to fit what I’ve seen of human nature.  At least some of it.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 12MAY2026 – Good Stories for the Movies

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Interesting thought what would make good Sci-fi/Fantasy Movies. Previously much of sci-fi and fantasy was off limits as the settings (and other races) were unachievable at any price. Movies like the Avengers pictures, Project Hail Mary, Lord of the Rings and the recent Dune show that the capability is there (although at a steep price in some cases.
Some I can think of are:

Lensman series: Start with Galactic Patrol, tweak SOME of the characters (e.g. make C. MacDougall a full blown doctor instead of a nurse). The No Female Lensman will be a hard sell (with one exception) but I think it has to stay. At one point J Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame was looking at this in the early 2010’s but I think the rights expired

Zelanzy’s Amber Series. Nine Princes in Amber starts as a noir pulp mystery and then goes weird. Casting will be hard, the initial movie shouldn’t be too hard/expensive, though, as we move through things, the movie cost goes up. Do it right, and it will be no problem

Heinlein The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, No aliens, mostly indoor shooting, a rogue AI this actually might be a cheap one and done right would be a stunner.

Connie Willis To Say Nothing of the Dog . Again mostly indoor shoots and outdoor in some equivalent to the River Thames River C. 1890. Get all the Victorian costumes from the BBC for a few pence. A comedy, a time travel story, a mystery, rescuing an extinct species, and some romances rolled all into one. It’d make a great date movie. Again, I think casting will be critical, people are going to have to really sell their roles and the number of modern actors who do that well are limited.

Matt Dinniman Dungeon Crawler Carl series: I just ran into this. It is a riot about how Earth and its populace get turned into a reality show of a dungeon. all the fantasy animals will be a bear and having a magically enhanced Persian cat as a main character may present issues, but again, limited sets, and this will draw the male/gamer audience back to the theater (and their Dates may just enjoy themselves in the process)

Any other thoughts on these (or others)?

More Movie Talk

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So, I had some fun re-imagining “THEM!” as a 2026 sci-fi reboot.  Alright what’s next?  Well, John Carpenter beat me to the punch with “The Thing.”  That was a reboot that in many people’s minds outdid the original (“The Thing from Another World”).  But a whole bunch of classic sci-fi movies have already been redone (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars, War of the Worlds).  So maybe we don’t need another reboot.

As I said in my discussion of Weir’s “Project Hail Mary,” what we really need are new movies.  Sure, they’re mostly just variations on the million science fiction stories that are already written but even small differences can freshen up old ideas.  Instead of any more trash from the Star Wars industry why not give us some pulp?  Burroughs or Doc Smith or Howard.  Those stories were made to be put on the big screen (or the smaller one in my living room).  And I read where they’re working on bringing back Schwarzenegger as an older Conan.  That would be perfect.  A beat-up old Arnold playing a beat-up old Conan with the right writer and the right director could be the perfect swan song for him and a wonderful treat for us if they abandon all the woke crap and let Conan be the barbarian he’s meant to be.

And if we digress into fantasy, I wish they’d try again to make a movie or a series out of the Dresden Files.  Jim Butcher’s series of books are some of the most entertaining and filmable stories in urban fantasy.  Of course, I wish they’d start by doing justice to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series first.  With the combination of interesting characters, vivid monsters and high caliber weaponry they would make a very exciting series of movies.  But I suppose instead we’ll get more nonsense like “The Rings of Power.”

But of course, what’s really needed by both the larger movie audience and the film-makers’ bottom line is a cable series based on Jake Barter’s “The Sniper.”  The combination of economically but vividly drawn characters and remarkable plotting make this story the most cinematically perfect vehicle for a studio to reap the harvest of multi-billion-dollar profits.  Joseph Boghadair is an iconic figure and the many fascinating sub-plots and characters will spawn a whole series of sequels and spin-offs that will explore the multi-faceted world that the author is creating.  New technologies and industries are waiting for Paul Connors’ empire to recover from the ravages of war and reap the benefits of the new political situation that Bogey’s “war” has created.  And the political changes that will sweep across North America will change life on the whole planet as better ways for humans to cooperate and socialize and organize themselves politically emerge.

I am toying with the idea of including some short stories in this “world” I’ve built and putting those out next as a short-term addition to the saga.  That will allow me to push off in several directions at once before I commit to any one story for the next novel.  Well, that’s enough for now.

Giant Ant Suspension of Disbelief

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War Pig mentioned the rumor that there is a studio remaking “THEM!.”  My reaction is an unqualified, Yeah!  But I immediately thought to myself, “Hey wait a minute.  This isn’t 1954, it’s 2026!  What about the illogic of an insect fifteen feet long weighing thousands of pounds, breathing by passive diffusion of oxygen through spiracles?  And how about the other unscalable aspects of its anatomy and physiology like weight and strength of exoskeleton vs. the thick bones found in large land animals like rhinos and elephants.”

Sure, I’m being a spoil sport.  If we want giant ants living in the sewers of Los Angles we should get them.  And look how timely it would be.  Imagine a nighttime forage of giant ants finding it’s way to a homeless encampment just by smell alone.  Now, there is the danger that this could be considered cruelty to animals.  And most homeless could be considered poisoned bait.  After all, if an ant ate one of these denizens of the City of Angels might it not die from a fentanyl overdose?  I mean, that’s not really fair, is it?  The ant is just doing what millions of years of evolution (plus a century of radioactive fallout) has taught him.  It’s not his fault that Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom have put these temptations in his way.  To him they’re just appetizers.

So, maybe there should be some hand-waving and exposition to provide an infodump to explain how rapid evolution adapted the giant ants so that they now have an internal skeleton and an efficient circulatory system but somehow have preserved the external appearance of an ant.  And here’s where AI can come in handy.  In order to have the necessary gravitas to sell the audience on this cockamamie science of giant ant biology we will need Santa Claus.  We will need an electronic avatar of Edmund Gwenn to play Dr. Harold Medford.  He alone can walk us through super 8 film clips of ants.  However, we can recast the part of Dr. Patricia Medford.  For this part I would recommend Sydney Sweeney as she possesses unique personal assets which will not lend her scientific gravitas but which will boost the movie’s financial bottom line significantly.

All in all, I think a remake of ‘Them!” could be an enormous hit.  I think to make it more topical; it would make sense to recruit Donald Trump to play himself as the President who employs all the massive resources of the US military to combat these deadly and terrifying creatures.  Perhaps we can shift the anti-nuclear message of the movie if we show how nuclear weapons can be used for good.  Perhaps the outbreak in Los Angeles proves too far advanced and a decision must be made by Trump to nuke LA.  It can be stressed that almost all of the human population escapes (maybe only Bass and Newsom are being held hostage by the ants).  And so nuclear weapons become not only the cause of the problem but also the solution!  Then we can have Santa Claus and the hot chick give that speech where they talk about opening a door into a new world where anything is possible, even giant crickets in the inevitable sequel.

Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.

Project Hail Mary Box Office Update: $616,588,738

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Well, it’s official, Project Hail Mary is a moneymaker for Amazon.  The info says it cost $200 million to produce.  Even if they spent another $100 million to advertise (which they wouldn’t have to because, of course, they’re Amazon!) that still puts them in the black.  And this is all in advance of what they’ll make streaming the movie on their own platform after the end of the theatrical run.

Box Office Data

Well, well, well.  So people will go to the movies if you give them something that isn’t woke slop.  If you give them entertaining story telling they’ll pay you money to watch it.  Shocking.  Wake up Disney.  Amazon is eating your lunch, you fools.

Keeping My Options Open

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One of my oldest friends has been advising me on the possibility of making a film treatment out of my book and sending it to Hollywood to become the next “Project Hail Mary.”  What immediately came to my mind was Hollywood taking the story and making the evil president, Donald Trump and making Bogey a leftist trans-woman.  Yikes!

But what was surprising is that there is actually an AI capable of taking my story and converting it directly into a film treatment.  And it has an enormous capability to annotate the details necessary for actually filming the thing.  There are notes on casting each of the characters (appearance, age, personality, voice), locations, special effects, visual effects, weapons, special personnel (e.g., armorer), special equipment, weapons, etc.

And then it used the dialog from the book and adapted it for the screen; shortened and elided from it to bring the screen time into a realistic movie length.

Now I haven’t finished going through this document but so far what I’ve seen seems very interesting.  It’s basically my book.  And that’s exciting.  I was assuming the story would be too long for a movie without very serious pruning of scenes that I’m attached to.  But we’ll see.

Now, I’m aware that Hollywood doesn’t make movies from books that don’t sell millions of copies.  They’re looking for a built-in fan base for their product.  So, no studio in their right minds would take a chance on spending potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown story.  But it’s always fun to dream about these things.

And that brings me to Andy Weir’s story.  He self-published “The Martian” on Amazon and only eventually got a book deal when he had already built up an audience for it on his own.  And now he has two hit movies made from his books.  Think about that.  Someone who couldn’t get a publishing contract ends up with a smash hit movie that everyone in Hollywood probably hates because it has a white guy as its hero and he doesn’t have the usual diversity cast to allow the movie to be an Oscar contender.  They broke all of Hollywood’s rules to make this movie by not having a girl-boss as the hero surrounded by the usual multi-cultural struggle session ensemble.  It just brings tears to my eyes.

Chances are I won’t be duplicating Weir’s experience.  My book is not an uplifting tale of human endeavor.  Mine is a tale of revenge and destruction.  I openly attack the Left and my heroes are identifiable people on the Right.  So, no.  I won’t be getting a Hollywood deal.  Ever!

But despite all that I’m excited about what is now happening in Hollywood.  The Ellisons bought Paramount and have now shut down the travesty that was Star Trek – Star Fleet Academy.  They’re buying Warner Brothers and they’ll probably shut down the people making terrible stuff like “Supergirl” that’s coming out soon.  And now we see Amazon/MGM making stuff like “Project Hail Mary (PHM).”  That’s a pretty good chunk of Hollywood already.  And with PHM looking like it’s going to break the $600 million mark and become a big moneymaker, even places like Netflix and Disney will say to themselves, “Hey, why can’t we get into some of that “normal film-making” that those other guys are doing and make money for a change?  Let’s call that photog guy and get an option on, “The Sniper” before the Ellisons scoop it up.”

Or something like that!

Cleaning Up the Wreckage

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For years people have said in my presence that despite the leftist leanings of Hollywood, the people running it were there to make money.  But despite that I watched as Hollywood produced bomb after bomb that preached the leftist creed above all other ingredients in the film.  They sacrificed entertainment, artistry and certainly profitability on the altar of woke propaganda.  Probably the most egregious of these studios was Disney that sacrificed the virtually unlimited money-making machines of such franchises as Star Wars, Marvel Comics and even the classic Disney princess movies to bang away at woke agenda elements like LGBTQ identity, anti-white racism and feminist dogma.

Well, maybe, just maybe, the tide has turned.  I think this week we received two data points that signal a definite reversal.  The first is the news today that Sky Dance has cancelled the third season of “Star Trek – Starfleet Academy.”  This was a two-season installment that has been estimated to have cost somewhere between two hundred and four hundred million dollars.  Now that is an enormous amount of money but what makes it astonishing is that when this show ran it wasn’t one of the top ten shows on Paramount Plus.  It was regularly beaten out by reruns of “Everyone Loves Raymond” and “Sponge Bob Square Pants.”  In fact, it was even worse than this.  In order to build up buzz for the first episode, it was put on YouTube for free and less than a thousand people watched it the first day.  Think about that.

Paramount was bought by Skydance last year so they didn’t order this show.  And the production company (Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout) is finishing its contract with Paramount in April and it’s looking like they won’t be doing anymore Star Trek for Skydance.  And Skydance is probably going to purchase Warner Brothers this year and that may have a very great impact on how the DC Universe movies look going forward.  So, there is an example of changing sensibilities going forward in Hollywood.  Enormous costs for productions that no one wants to watch are ending.  So that’s the negative case, what won’t be happening anymore.

As for what is happening on the positive side let’s look at what Amazon/MGM have released this week.  Andy Weir (the author of the book turned movie “The Martian”) wrote the book “Project Hail Mary” in 2021.  It cost two hundred million to make.  It made $141 million on its first weekend.  This is one of the biggest openings in the last four years.  And it is predicted to be a big hit.  It’s a movie whose only human character is a white male.  The only diversity casting is an alien creature that looks like a pile of small rocks.  There’s no woke elements at all.  Just an adventure story about a man light years from Earth cooperating with an unearthly creature to save both of their planets.  From all of the reviews I’ve read it’s a solid movie that the whole family can and probably will enjoy and it doesn’t say anything about the LGBTQ or how white people stole America from the Indians or enslaved black people.  And the fact that the astronaut is not a girl boss but a young white man I take to be aspirational for every white American boy who has been told for the last couple of decades that they shouldn’t get a turn at being the good guy.  So that’s the positive side.  Hollywood can make good movies and people will come to the theaters to see them.  And they can make money doing it.

Maybe the tide has turned.