News Foundation Adaptation Series Officially Ordered by Apple

So brilliant that Goyer has based two TV shows and a movie franchise around it in the last decade alone


I enjoyed the Emperor portions more than anything else, but it's just Goyer repurposing his Kryptonian genetic dynasty.

 

Hari Seldon came from Helicon, not Halcion (or Halcyon).

The Three Laws can be overridden by the Zeroth Law, which takes precedence "A robot may not injure humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." The Zeroth Law and the genetically modified Spacers are taken from Robots and Empire and Foundation and Earth that Asimov wrote after the original trilogy while tying together his Robots, Foundation, and Galactic Empire novels.

In the original Foundation trilogy, the Mule searches for the Second Foundation, believed to be on Star's End, whose location is unknown. It's not Helicon. I won't spoil where it actually is located.

I wouldn't call this series an adaptation. If anything, it's more "inspired by" Asimov's work, using some of the same characters and locations with only traces of the original plotlines. It's diverting enough but its plots are flawed due to too many convenient coincidences. It's not essential viewing for me.

 

Bear in mind, the producers of Foundation specifically don't have the rights to adapt Asimov's robot stories. It's entirely possible part of the motivation for the backstory including "the Robot Wars" and the only robot character being quite capable of murder was to be overt that they aren't a Three Laws story, so they can't get in legal trouble with whoever holds the adaptation rights to "I, Robot" or the other novels and stories right now.

 

I would have expected that Prelude and Forward's use of the Three Laws, etc. would have given them the necessary rights there. But hey, lawyers, so who knows.

 

I'm sure there were Avengers comics that mentioned the Scarlet Witch was a mutant or Magneto's daughter, but the X-Men/Avengers split in the movies seemed to have provisions for that sort of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the contract for adapting Foundation went into some detail about what elements of the crossover novels were included in the license and which character, concepts, and events were part of the "Robots" universe.

 

It typically depends on what books have specifically been licenced. It was a similar thing with the LotR movies, where they could only mine background material from the appendices, not the Silmarillion.

Comics are way more complicated by comparison since a novel is fairly easy to ringfence. It's either in the book, or it isn't. Comics are spread across potentially thousands of individual issues, across several decades, and interweave with many many other properties.

In the case of Foundation, what they can use is probably limited only to what is in the Foundation books, not the "Robot" works . . . unless they licenced those too, which I seriously doubt.

 

The Three Laws of Robotics (actually four including the zeroth law) are covered in some detail in the Foundation books and in more robot stories than have ever been adapted. So they should not be limited by any licensing. In a similar situation, the rights for James Bond were split into 3 for many years and there was never an issue with any regular part of the Bond world appearing in any of the adaptions.

Their use in Bicentennial Man and I Robot were with different studios and totally different books rights.

 

There were totally issues with elements of Bond being split in the rights disagreement. The main, Eon Bonds could no longer use Spectre or Blofeld (which is why Moore's Bond dumps an unnamed character that looks like Blofeld down a chimney stack) and the other licensed was only to remake Thunderball. This is why Quantum wasn't Spectre at first until all the rights were finally combined under the same ownership.

There is no way to know what is included and not included in these license agreements. They'll be written out in 1,600 pages of legalise. The only people who actually know are the rights holders, and even they can each think they have different rights than the other has and end up in court fighting each other for decades.

 

The rights for Bond for certain things were complicated by Thunderball being developed for film and not being an actual adaption of a book (or the claim to that effect). That project did not impact Casino Royale at all in 1967. It was only later when Fleming's co-writer on the film claimed rights. So the Bond issue has nothing to do with book adaption rights. The LOTR rights issues reveal what all is included with the rights. There was no issue using Elrond, Bilbo, Gollum, or the Shire in LOTR when they did not have the rights to The Hobbit. The concepts and characters that the two books share in common were never an issue. The Three Laws of Robotics are a concept that so many of Asimov's works share in common that no one of them could claim to hold the rights to that concept. I would even say that the three laws could never be limited by rights because Asimov talked about them incessantly in interviews and shared them with the robotics industry. It is hard to claim rights to something that has spread so far from its original source. The Zeroth law could be restricted to rights because it is only found with the characters of R. Daneel Olivaw and R. Giskard in 4 books.