So, yeah, Dragonriders of Pern flick.

That’s gonna be interesting.

Warner Bros. has, according to a story at Deadline, secured the big screen rights to Anne McCaffrey’s classic fantasy series, Dragonriders of Pern. The 22-book series will serve as the basis for a feature film that aims to launch a new franchise.

“Dragonflight,” the first in the series of novels, follows an elite group of warriors who take to the skies on the backs of giant, fire-breathing, telepathic dragons to save the wondrously exotic planet of Pern from a terrifying airborne menace.

Particularly since the books were… well, there’s some somewhat unusual stuff in them, as I recall. From what I recall, this was science fiction, not fantasy: and the overall plot of the series is not exactly a good fit for a standard action-adventure format. Still, dragons.

Hopefully it will not suck?

Via

Moe Lane

17 thoughts on “So, yeah, Dragonriders of Pern flick.”

  1. The first six books or so, as I recall, are only sci-fi if you kind of squint at them sideways, I’d say, but I think Dragonflight would work pretty well as a movie. Being from the late sixties, it’s not excessively long, it has a strong female lead, and you could certainly set up a bunch of set-pieces. After that? They get longer and less action-focused, so yeah, no.

    Of course Hollywood will probably ditch everything but the name and ‘dragonriders fighting thread’ and call it ‘Pern’.

    1. “Game of Thrones” …
      .
      That said, I am kind of wondering just how much good Science Fiction and Fantasy there really is.
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      Let me know when someone tries to make “A Wizard of Earthsea” into a movie.
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      Mew

        1. A far as adaptations of fantasy books go, it wasn’t horrible.
          Of course, that’s grading on one hell of a curve.

          1. IIRC that’s the movie Ursula Le Guin repudiated because they changed so much, including making all the people white.

      2. Define “good”.
        😉 I’ve seen you skulking around the bar, you know.
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        But seriously, they keep trying to adapt novels into movies, and it just doesn’t work. There are no shortage of good short stories that could easily be turned into 2 hour movies. But outside of Dick, they’re not much interested in doing that.
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        I’m waiting for Hollywood to realize that Two-Gun Bob and Ech-Pi-El are all but unfilmable, but Klarckash-Ton is a gold mine waiting to be delved.
        I’m pretty sure I’ll be waiting for the rest of my life.

        1. While I agree that HPL is very hard to put on the screen, the HPLHS productions of Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness were excellent.

        2. I do not skulk.
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          That said, I think I agree .. although modern CGI is pretty capable…
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          What’s missing (“Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”) is the idea that movies are storytelling… big F/X blockbusters and tent-pole movies will continue to bomb as long as they’re just pretty pictures, which means there’s an opportunity for “the next Star Wars” to slip through.
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          I’m waiting for someone** to try to figure out how to turn Cowboy Bebop into a functional live-action.
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          Mew
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          ** A case can be made that Joss Wedon already did, of course.

  3. I was about the only mudder back in the day that I knew that was neither on PernMush nor AmberMush.

  4. It’s going to be interesting to watch the double standard in action. Remember when certain … ah, sensitive members of fandom organized a boycott of the movie “Ender’s Game” because Orson Scott Card had spoken out against gay marriage? Well, let’s see whether they’ll be similarly outraged over a movie based on novels by an author credibly accused of child molestation — and who apparently aided and abetted her husband in molestation, too …

      1. AWK! *Hides head in shame*
         
        Boy, I’d REALLY like an EDIT (and DELETE) function for these comments.

    2. Yeah, wrong author. But the same crowd who disliked “Ender” will be annoyed at this too as McCaffery isn’t liked by them either. She irked some of the early fans of her books by noting that gay folks couldn’t be dragon riders since it messed up the dragons’ breeding habits. And in other conversations she expressed the thought that people became gay due to the actions of, well, folks like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s husband. So, yeah, thee might still be fireworks.

      1. Later on the Green dragon riders were portrayed as having same sex relationships.

        1. And that, right there, is why Hollyweird will make this .. and why they’ll muck it up.
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          Mew

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