This has only a tenuous comic-book connection, in that a handful of author George R.R. Martin‘s books have been adapted in comic form, but reading this news made me say “holy crap!” (actually, something less suitable for print):
Variety reports that HBO will turn Martin’s best-selling epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire into a TV drama to be written and executive-produced by David Benioff (Troy, Wolverine) and D.B. Weiss (Halo).
Martin will be a co-executive producer of the series. No target dates are mentioned.
According to Variety, plans are for each novel in the planned seven-book cycle to provide a season’s worth of episodes. Martin is currently writing the fifth novel, A Dance With Dragons.
In his website’s slightly outdated FAQ, the author had dismissed a television or film adaptation of as unlikely.
“Anything is possible, of course, but the sheer size and complexity of the books would make them very difficult to film,” Martin wrote. “Peter Jackson is doing an astonishing job of bringing Tolkien’s trilogy to the film, but he’s needed three movies to do so. All three volumes of Lord of the Rings put together are about as long as A Storm of Swords. By that standard, it would require nine films just to cover the three books I’ve published so far, and probably nine more for the rest of the series. No studio is ever going to commit to eighteen films. A more feasible approach might be to shoot the series as a television miniseries, but it would need to be a long miniseries, along the lines of Roots and Shogun, and the networks seldom produce series of that length these days.”
Thank goodness for HBO, I guess.
January 17th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Well, Martin has worked in TV before, so he knows the ropes… Maybe it could work. I like to see them getting ambitious, anyway.
February 2nd, 2007 at 3:26 am
I’d love to see it, but it’ll be tough casting the Stark kids. I can’t think of any young actresses out there that I can see as Arya.