Sony Pictures Has bought "Foundation"

[Admiral_Young]

An unknown writer is currently attached to the project. I seem to remember a couple of years ago that Roland Emmerich stated that a "Foundation" adaption was going to be his next project but I guess that fell through. This seems a long ways off though.

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Isaac-Asimov-Foundation-Series-Get-Big-Screen-Treatment-27289.html

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Asimov is (was) one of my favorite authors.

Unfortunately, Nightfall was a stinking pile, and while I, Robot was a marked improvement, it was still very disappointing to me. Consequently, I have no high hopes for this.

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

This is the Emmerich project. It's been set up at Sony since 2009, so Cinemablend and its sister site are off in their reporting here.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

I'd imagine Emmerich would strip out all of the rubbish about Psychohistory and logic vs. superstition and make a big budget disaster film about the planet Trantor as it falls into chaos and decay.

Of course, instead of this occurring over centuries it happens in a matter of hours.

 

[Draculasaurus]

The big question- Who's going to play The Mule?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The big question- Who's going to play The Mule?

Jack Black.

 

[Canadave]

The big question- Who's going to play The Mule?

Jack Black.

Nah. Dane Cook.

 

[Greg Cox]

Francis.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Francis.

In a nursing home somewhere, the one resident who knows how to use a computer is laughing.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

I'd imagine Emmerich would strip out all of the rubbish about Psychohistory and logic vs. superstition and make a big budget disaster film about the planet Trantor as it falls into chaos and decay.

Of course, instead of this occurring over centuries it happens in a matter of hours.

For this very reason, any adaption of Foundation has to be in the form of a TV miniseries. On the big screen it would almost certianly be downgraded to some kind of "action blockbuster".

 

[Klaus]

Francis.

In a nursing home somewhere, the one resident who knows how to use a computer is laughing.

I'm not in a nursing home, and I laughed!!

 

[Owain Taggart]

I'd imagine Emmerich would strip out all of the rubbish about Psychohistory and logic vs. superstition and make a big budget disaster film about the planet Trantor as it falls into chaos and decay.

Of course, instead of this occurring over centuries it happens in a matter of hours.

For this very reason, any adaption of Foundation has to be in the form of a TV miniseries. On the big screen it would almost certianly be downgraded to some kind of "action blockbuster".

Agreed. Without Psychohistory, there wouldn't be much to it as that's the whole core concept of the novels.

 

[Klaus]

This will never see the light of day...

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The idea of concentrating all of the Foundation trilogy into anything less than 3 movies seems implausible to me without losing or perverting the core Seldon and Psychohistory stuff. Apart from the Mule, I don't really see anything that has sufficient "meat" on it to satisfy an audience's attention - certainly not the surrounding stuff about nuclear power as religion, mayors, traders, and fighting the second foundation. Maybe they can squeeze more story out of it than I believe - I guess it's possible. They should certainly try to make it look impressive on screen - using Chris Foss's spaceships would be a good start.

 

[Kegg]

Foundation doesn't work terribly well as a movie. Not until we get to stuff like the Mule. Time jumps that keep establishing new characters... I suspect a movie would get right to the Mule plot or something.

What Foundation does have, admittedly, is images that'd work terribly well as a movie - Trantor comes to mind chiefly here, although Star Wars has already brought that to screen in a roundabout way.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The psychohistory stuff has to be reducable, dramatically, to technobabble that's used to set events in motion or motivate people. It's a macguffin - and in fact, despite Asimov taking some time to rationalize it in an interesting way, that's the function that it serves in the original stories.

 

[FPAlpha]

Foundation can't be done for mainstream movie audiences without sacrificing story.. all the main action parts, the fleet battles are just mentioned in passing because they're not very important to the main story.

It could be awesome as a miniseries where each season covers a time period ending with every reveal of Seldon's plan.

However Emmerich is totally the wrong guy for this project.. it would be like Michael Bay trying to film some Jane Austen novel.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Who are the continuing characters that the audience gives a damn about, again?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The psychohistory stuff has to be reducable, dramatically, to technobabble that's used to set events in motion or motivate people. It's a macguffin - and in fact, despite Asimov taking some time to rationalize it in an interesting way, that's the function that it serves in the original stories.

If it's a MacGuffin, it's a very unusual one...

Spoiler: psychohistory

...since part of the trilogy is concerned with the realizations by some of main characters that that MacGuffin is really a MacGuffin, in that Seldon's plan has been using the myth of psychohistory's effectiveness at long-term prediction on the whole Foundation as a distraction to keep their attention away from his actual plan.

This is a significant part of the intellectual content of the trilogy, so completely reducing psychohistory to the usual kind of non-self-referential "first order MacGuffin", if you will, would actually strip the trilogy of some of its content.

To keep this content, the supposed nature of psychohistory has to be clear enough for it to be realized as not living up to its expectations.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The Second Foundationists are effectively telepaths so their powers are going to be cinematically unexciting unless their abilities are beefed up to, say, Scanners level.