Warner Brothers has confirmed it is working on a new Middle-earth movie. Joining the six extant films (nine if you count the animated features from the 1970s and 1980s), the Amazon TV show and incoming animated feature War of the Rohirrim is Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.
The new film will star and be directed by Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in Peter Jackson's movie trilogy. Lord of the Rings and Hobbit co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens will work on the screenplay, whilst Peter Jackson will produce and consult. New Line will helm the film for Warner Brothers, as it did the previous trilogies, and Weta will again provide visual effects.
The film has a tentative release date of "2026," suggesting that Warner Brothers will get the wheels moving on it soon.
The attention this year is on a cinematic re-release for the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, overseen by Jackson, and animated film Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim. Directed by Kenji Kamiyama, the animated film is set 260 years before the original trilogy and tells the story of Helm Hammerhand, the Rohirrim king who defends his country from an army of Dunlendings. Brian Cox stars whilst Miranda Otto returns from the trilogy in the role of Éowyn, who is expected to provide voiceover narration. The movie is set for release on 13 December.
Amazon's wholly unrelated TV series The Rings of Power is expected to air its second season before the end of this year, after a mixed reception for its debut season.
The Watch is "very loosely" based on Pratchett's source material, but has seen a raft of changes made to the books which have alienated the fanbase. These include creating a "young, sexy," crimefighting version of Lady Sybil Ramkin (a larger and older woman in the books) and turning Ankh-Morpork into some kind of steampunk metropolis rather than the Renaissance-level post-medieval city of the books.
Terry Pratchett's business partner Rob Wilkins and daughter and literary executor Rhianna Pratchett were originally both involved with the project, when it was a much more faithful adaptation with the UK BBC, but have publicly distanced themselves from the show since it was transferred to BBC America.
In a major showcase event at the E3 video games conference in Los Angeles last night, Bethesda Game Studios confirmed that their new Fallout game, Fallout 76 will be an online-only game set in West Virginia. The news surprised many commentators, as previous comments had suggested that Fallout 76 might still be a single-player-focused RPG with some kind of optional co-op or multiplayer component.
Fallout 76 is set in 2102, just 25 years after the nuclear war that wiped out civilisation in the Fallout universe, and long before any of the other games in the series (Fallout 4, by comparison, is set in 2287). The game casts the players as residents of Vault 76, a nuclear fallout shelter in West Virginia. The game opens on Reclamation Day, with players setting out to re-colonise the surface by building new settlements, defeating monsters and coming into conflict with one another.
A more in-depth and fleshed-out versions of the settlement-building mechanics from Fallout 4 is present, with a strong focus on players working together to build up impressive outposts, forts and possibly entire towns in the wasteland.
Something that has elected a lot of praise is the map and environmental graphics. Although still using the positively decrepit Creation Engine (originally the GameBryo Engine and first used by Bethesda for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released in 2002), the engine has been revamped to allow for larger forests. The game map is huge, a full four times the size of the Fallout 4 map, and covering the entire state of West Virginia. Players will be able to visit the ruins of the State Capitol in Charleston in the south-west of the state, the Greenbrier Resort (which in real life has a nuclear fallout shelter in the basement) in the far east of the state and West Virginia University in Morgantown, on the far northern border of the state. Point Pleasant, the site of the mysterious Mothman sightings of 1966-67 (a creature in the game appears to have been inspired by the fictional entity), and the New River Gorge Bridge are also present.
During the presentation, Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard suggested it would be possible to play the game solo, but later confirmed that there are no human NPCs in the game. Instead, everyone you meet will be another player, with the only computer-controlled entities being monsters. Apparently the game will have some quests and missions in the game, likely assigned by the Vault 76 Overseer, but otherwise the best single-player gamers can likely expect is radiant AI quests generated at settlements, as seen in Fallout 4 (of the infamous "another settlement needs your help!" meme).
The decision to make Fallout 76 an online-only game has proven controversial, especially among those who hadn't been keeping up with the rumours and had been expecting a proper follow-up to Fallout 4 in a similar fashion to how Fallout: New Vegas was a follow-up to Fallout 3. The online-only nature of the game also elicited a negative response from the modding community, as the game will likely not allow substantive modding. Previous Bethesda games have been released in a buggy or subpar state and it's fallen to modders to fix the games and add new gameplay features whilst waiting for Bethesda to release official patches.
Fallout 76 will be released on 14 November 2018 on PS4, XB1 and PC.
A leaked set photo from Star Trek: Discovery suggests that the show will feature yet another radical redesign of the Klingons, everyone's favourite psychotic-but-honourable warrior race.
The Klingons first appeared in the original Star Trek in 1967, in the first season episode Errand of Mercy, and were portrayed as humans with dark make-up. They appeared in six further episodes of Star Trek in a similar vein.
The Klingons as they appeared in the original Star Trek episode Day of the Dove (1968).
Realising this was a little cheap, they were redesigned for their brief appearance at the start of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 and gained their familiar forehead ridges and long hair. This look was confirmed in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in 1984 and remained a constant design all the way to the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005. However, both Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) refined the look of the race further with numerous different forehead designs and hairstyles.
The Klingons as they appeared in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). With minor refinements, this look would remain constant until the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005.
For Star Trek: Into Darkness in 2013, J.J. Abrams gave the race another makeover, giving them a more symmetrical skull shape but overall still a refinement of the established look.
The Klingons in Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013).
The "new" Klingons appear to be hairless, with extensive ridges along the skull that go right round the head and sides, along with elongated and near-conical heads. They really don't look much like Klingons at all. This has led to speculation that these are either new aliens or a servitor race or sub-race of Klingons (something theorised in spin-off fiction but not the main series).
If they are Klingons, it is a baffling choice to redesign them. Much has been made of the fact that Star Trek: Discovery is set in the original or "Prime" timeline, ten years or so before the events of The Original Series. Using either of the first two designs would make sense (CBS do not have the rights to any designs from the Abramsverse movies, so would not be able to use the Into Darkness appearance), but redesigning them so they don't look like Klingons any more is both unnecessary and does little but alienate a fanbase already sceptical of the new show's poor design sensibilities and status as yet another redundant prequel.
Hopefully the producers will confirm what's going on soon.
Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat has quit. The next season of the show, the tenth since its return in 2005, will be his last. The next season will film this year and be trailed by a Christmas special, with the season itself expected to debut very early in 2017.
Moffat will be replaced by Chis Chibnall, who will take over for production of the eleventh season in 2018. This news has been less well-received, although the BBC has de facto confirmed that the show will be continuing for at least two further seasons and likely more. In fact, it sounds like the move to Spring 2017 has come from a combined urge to miss major sporting events in 2016, give Moffat more time to prepare scripts for the next season, give Peter Capaldi a longer break between seasons (Capaldi has noted that he loves playing the Doctor, but had indicated that he might only stay for three seasons due to time requirements and his desire to play other roles) and also to see if a move to the spring might help the first-run viewing figures. Although combined viewing figures (taking into account repeats and time-shifting) have showed little fluctuation from the show's ratings heyday under Russell T. Davies, the first-run viewing figures have almost halved since it moved later in the year. However, some fans and commentators have blamed the lack of a regular, predictable timeslot (the show's airing time changes almost weekly) for this, as well as a more global move towards streaming and viewing after the fact. Moffat also oversaw the show's global viewing figures passing 70 million, an absolutely enormous number. With the overwhelming majority of that number watching from outside the UK, through deals made with BBC Enterprises, that actually makes the BBC a significant amount of money and makes the show's cancellation doubtful.
The decision to replace Moffat with Chibnall is raising the ire of some fans, who were confidently expecting Toby Whithouse or Mark Gatiss to take over. Whithouse has an excellent showrunning pedigree with Almost Human, No Angels and The Game, has writing scripts for Doctor Who and was generally regarded as the favourite to take over. Gatiss has exceptional experience working on Who, having regularly contributed scripts since its return in 2005 as well as writing novels and actually playing the Doctor in spoof charity sketches. Some of his scripts have been less accomplished than others, but his drama An Adventure in Space and Time, about the creation of the show, was widely regarded as the highlight of the 50th Anniversary celebrations two years ago.
Chibnall, on the other hand, has written scripts for the show ranging from terrible to barely adequate and lives in infamy as the writer of Cyberwoman, a script for Torchwood thay may be the worst thing ever made in relation to the Who franchise (certainly in the top five). He also worked on the terrible Camelot. Chibnall had a reputation rehabilitation by producing and writing the brilliant first season of murder mystery series Broadchurch (starring former Who star David Tennant), but the second season was substantially weaker and patchier, with occasional flashes of brilliance.
If the Chibnall who gave us Broadchurch Season 1 shows up, then Doctor Who could be in reasonable hands going forwards. If not, things may start to get a bit rougher going forwards.
Moffat is expected to continue in his role as showrunner, writer and producer on Sherlock alongside Mark Gatiss. It is possible that this move may even allow more episodes than normal to be produced: whilst Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman's rise to international superstars has limited the time available to work on the series, Moffat's own commitments to Who (taking up to nine months of every year) have also prevented more episodes from being made. With additional time now available, we may hopefully see an upturn in production.
I never asked for this. You never asked for this. The world never asked for this. But we've got it anyway.
The film is set in 2016, twenty years after the original movie but in (obviously) a parallel timeline. The world came together to defeat the alien threat in the first film but the aliens did manage to get off a distress call before their mothership was destroyed. The world has spent two decades retrofitting captured alien technology to create new weapons and defences, including an early warning system on the Moon and advanced fighters using alien propulsion systems and weapons. Scientist David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) has been leading the attempts to prepare for the return of the aliens, but fears they are not ready. When a second, considerably larger and more powerful alien mothership arrives, his fears are soon realised.
Judd Hirsch, Bill Pullman, Brent Spiner and Vivacia Fox are reprising their roles from the first film (in Spiner's case, it's unclear how as his character was fairly graphically killed off) and will be joined by a new cast of actors, including Liam Hemsworth and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Will Smith will not be returning, the studio apparently balking at the $50 million he demanded to appear in the film and a potential sequel.
This time, they're ready for us.
At the moment only Independence Day: Resurgence has been confirmed, but the project was in development as a two-part film for many years. If this remains the case and a third film is expected, I would be concerned that the film may end on a cliffhanger.
Apparently the film will play up the role of other nations fighting the alien threat as well as the USA. For example, a Chinese fighter squadon is expected to play a role in the plot.
Square Enix have announced that Final Fantasy VII Remake has been split into multiple episodes (probably three) because it needs to make more money.
Players of the original game will remember that it came on three CD-ROMs on its original release on the first PlayStation in 1997, making for a then-astonishingly huge game given its graphical prowess. However, Final Fantasy VII was also a rather modestly-sized game in overall terms by modern standards. I beat the game in 32 hours on my first playthrough (not doing all the sidequests or grinding for chocobos) and 37 on my second (doing all of the sidequests and a bit of grinding). Most of my friends finished it in around 40 hours or so, which also seems to be the generally-accepted length of the game. For comparison's sake, a complete playthrough of the two-and-a-half BioWare Baldur's Gate games could take 200 hours when all sidequests and faction-specific missions were taken into account. The likes of Skyrim and Fallout 4 have well north of 100 hours of content apiece. Even the very linear and relatively modest Dragon Age II has a length of around 25 hours.
Trying to justify the split, Square have pointed out the fact that the original game had a lot of unique art. Transforming that into original 3D graphics for each location, with limitations on how much assets can be re-used as the game moves from urban to desert to tropical to jungle to arctic environments. This, to be fair, is a reasonable point. 3D games get away with their sizes by cleverly recycling content. Older 2D games (Final Fantasy VII had 3D characters moving over pre-painted 2D backdrops) could have unique art and assets in every location as the backdrops were simple paintings.
To give more bang for players' buck, Square have confirmed that each chunk of the game will be expanded, with new story material, side-quests, perspectives and other elements added. They pointed out that Midgar will now be a large, open-world hub rather than a series of distinct, linear sections, giving you more freedom to move around. Presumably other parts of the game will get the same treatment.
No release schedule for Final Fantasy VIIRemake has been set, but one piece of good news about the split is that it means we might get the start of the game sooner. Square would be silly not to be aiming for the game's 20th anniversary in 2017 for the release of the first part.
Kevin Bacon is helping to relaunch the Tremors franchise as a TV series. This will mark his first involvement with the franchise since the original film in 1990, which will allow him to Six Degree himself across the same series.
Tremors, objectively one of the Greatest Films Ever Made™, featured the inhabitants of the small town of Perfection being menaced by subterranean "graboids", ferocious burrowing monsters. The original film pitted a cast of characters led by Val McKee (Bacon), Earl Basset (Fred Ward) and Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) against the creatures. Ward would return for the sequel, Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996) but only Gummer would go on to appear in every appearance of the franchise, which to date comprises five films and a short-lived 2003 TV series.
The new TV series will apparently reboot and reintroduce the franchise, but with Bacon reprising the role of Val McKee 25+ years after the original film, it would appear to be set in the same continuity. How many other actors or characters would reprise their roles is unknown.
CBS have announced a new, official Star Trek project for television! Is it a big-budget, flagship show with a lot of money and marketing behind it, led by a talented and in-demand creative team, thus befitting the venerable franchise on the anniversary of its first half-century? Er, not exactly.
The new Star Trek project will debut in January 2017 and will apparently consist of an opening episode that will air on CBS proper. However, the rest of the series will be exclusively locked to CBS's risible digital platform CBS All Access at $6 a month. No word on budget, but it's questionable if an online-only series is going to get the fairly large amount of cash a new Star Trek series needs.
The person behind the new project is Alex Kurtzman, a co-writer behind the underwhelming movies Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). Oddly, Kurtzman will not be writing the new series and is looking for a new writing team to help him work on the project. Kurtzman, to be frank, isn't a very good film writer (he's also behind such recent scriptwriting smash successes such as the Transformers movies) but some of his work for TV has been better, particularly his role in launching the excellent Fringe.
For fans, the most horrific prospect for the new series is that it will be set in the "Abramsverse" of the new films. Unexpectedly, it appears that this may not be the case due to rights issues between Paramount (who have the film rights to the franchise) and CBS (who have the TV rights). The new series may be set in the Abramsverse or the timeline of the original series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, although the latter may be considered to be carrying too much baggage for a new show. It's also possible that this new series will launch a third universe or be simply set a lot further in the future than either existing timeline. The only comment on this so far is that the new TV show will not be connected to Star Trek Beyond, the next movie which will hit the screens in the summer of 2016.
More news is expected shortly, but it has to be said that this cursory and muddled announcement is not really showing Star Trek the respect it deserves on the eve of its 50th anniversary.
To recap, way back in 1994 TSR, the company that created D&D, ill-advisedly sold the film rights to the game to a budding film student named Courtney Solomon for a song. Solomon went on to make the extremely unimpressive D&D movie released in 2000, starring Jeremy Irons. Solomon's company went on to produce two even weaker sequels, released in 2005 and 2012 respectively.
In the meantime, TSR was gobbled up by Wizards of the Coast, a company on the rise thanks to its Magic: The Gathering card game. WotC was then in turn acquired by Hasbro, one of the biggest toy and hobby companies in the world. Neither WotC nor Hasbro seemed impressed by TSR's decision to sell the D&D film rights to Solomon, but did lend promotional support in getting the films released. However, their support over the third film appeared lukewarm. In particular, Hasbro believed that by releasing the third film to TV (instead of cinema or a home video-first release), Solomon was giving up his legal rights to the franchise. Hasbro entered negotiations with Universal to develop a new D&D movie. Solomon disputed this, more vociferously after Warner Brothers acquired Solomon's rights for a very large sum of money and began developing their own film.
The battle lines were drawn, with neither side willing to back down. Fans didn't really have much to pick between here: Solomon's films had been utterly terrible, but Hasbro's excruciating Transformers movies (despite their high profitability) didn't exactly fill them with confidence either. The one bright spot to Hasbro winning the battle was that it would at least reunite the disparate parts of the film licence together: Solomon had only bought the rights to the core D&D rules. The rights to the iconic worlds (such as Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance) and all of the novels remained with Hasbro. If Hasbro won, they could make a film set in one of the iconic worlds without having to worry about removing elements covered by Solomon's licence.
Fortunately, the new deal eliminates such problems. Universal are the big losers here, having been tossed aside by Hasbro as they have entered into a new deal with Solomon and Warner Brothers. The new deal allows all three parties to collaborate on a new, big-budget D&D film. Interestingly, the announcement confirms that the new film will be set in the Forgotten Realms. This suggests some nice gaming strategy by Hasbro: if the new movie is a huge success and Warner Brothers try to pull out at a later date, they won't be able to make any more films set in the Realms, as Hasbro firmly retains the rights to that setting.
Whether the new film will be any good or not remains to be seen. I have argued before that, despite numerous weaknesses, the Forgotten Realms novel The Crystal Shard could make for an acceptably entertaining action film. However, Hasbro may be keener to create an original story that can more decisively help shift copies of the new Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition game. It'll be interesting to see what direction they take.
In a surprise move, Sony has acquired the film rights to the Robotech franchise and has fast-tracked a live-action film based on the property. They are hoping to develop a big-budget franchise which will attract old-school fans of the original animated series as well as a newer, younger audience.
Robotech was developed in the early 1980s by producer Carl Macek and his team at Harmony Gold. They bought three separate, unrelated Japanese anime series - Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA - and, through careful editing and dubbing, transformed them into one epic story unfolding across three generations. Airing for the first time in 1985, the Robotech TV series and the subsequent novels by James Luceno and Brian Daley (writing as Jack McKinney) and the roleplaying game by Palladium Books all became extremely popular. Combined with the arrival of Akira later in the decade, Robotech helped pave the way for the growth of the anime business in the United States.
However, the franchise has also proven controversial. In Japan, Macross became an enormously successful franchise in its own right and has spawned a large number of sequel and prequel series, including Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Zero and the non-canon Macross II. Harmony Gold has blocked any of these series from being officially released in the USA, not wanting to dilute the Robotech brand. Harmony Gold's own attempts to continue the franchise - most recently through the Shadow Chronicles animated film and an eyebrow-raising attempt at crowdfunding a new series - have floundered in comparison. Harmony Gold blocking the export of one of the most successful and popular anime franchises of all time to the USA, not to mention the release of the original, unedited Macross, has earned it the ire of many anime fans.
There are also significant legal obstacles to overcome. The original Japanese creators of Macross won a court case securing the live-action film rights to most of the franchise. This means that the American film cannot use storylines, characters or mecha originating from Macross. Or to put it another way, this is going to be a Robotech film without the Veritech fighters, Rick Hunter, SDF-1 or Minmei. Needless to say, the exercise sounds completely pointless.
It could be that Sony have a masterplan in mind where they strike a deal with the original Japanese creators of Macross, possibly getting licensing rights to the story in return for allowing the Macross franchise to be released in the United States. Otherwise, the appeal of a Robotech movie which can't use any iconic Robotech characters, vehicles or locations is questionable, to say the least.
Also of concern is the talent being assembled for the film. Previously Tobey Maguire, Akiva Goldsman, Lawrence Kasdan and Leonardo DiCaprio had all been attached to the project when it was being developed at other studios. However, this new take is being helmed by producers Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton, whose only works of note are 300 and The Immortals, with the script in the hands of Michael Gordon (300, GI Joe). The presence of Harmony Gold producers also does not bode well for any attempt to secure licenses to use the classic characters and vehicles from the Japanese creators of Macross (who have long resented Harmony Gold for preventing the release of their series in the States).
Whether this project can be a success given everything that is stacked against it is highly questionable. But there is quite a good and strong story at the heart of Robotech/Macross that would resonate strongly with a modern audience, if it can be told in an entertaining way.
There's a new Terminator film out in a couple of months, but I've so far avoided learning anything about it because it seemed about as needed as a new outbreak of diphtheria. This may have been a mistake, because it looks gloriously nutty, revelling in the insanely convoluted backstory of the previous films. This fan trailer is not only funny, but it kind of actually makes sense (almost) of the history outlined in the first three films (but wisely ignoring Salvation, like the rest of humankind).
Both the serious and fan trailers hint at the natural endpoint of the Terminator franchise: a universe in which SkyNet and the rebels have sent back Terminators to all points of history to kill all of the ancestors of the Connors going back to single-celled organisms. The result is a place where there are millions of Arnies occupying all points of the space/time continuum, fighting one another with shotguns. Forever.
Remastering old TV shows in high definition is apparently the new thing. With new generations of TV viewers growing up who have never seen a show in anything less than pristine high-def, the value for studios of dusting down their old series and sprucing them up for a new generation has never been clearer. Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, Star Trek: The Next Generation (and the original series), The Sopranos and The Wire have been given such make-overs and The X-Files is on its way. However, sometimes remasters go a bit...wrong.
A few months ago the Pivot Network in the United States began airing Joss Whedon's seminal late 1990s drama-horror-comedy (drahorcom?) series Buffy the Vampire Slayer in high definition. Fox had given the show a much-needed update for repeats, streaming and likely a future Blu-Ray release. And, to put it mildly, they've screwed it up.
Pretty much.
To clarify a few terms before we get into this discussion:
Definition refers to how many lines of information (pixels in the digital age) are used to make up the image. The more lines, the finer and more detailed the image. Older American TV shows used to have 480 lines of information running horizontally across the image. This is standard definition (SD). Modern TV shows have 1,080, which is referred to as high definition (HD) and is the current industry standard.
Aspect ratio refers to the dimensions of the on-screen image. Older TV screens had an aspect ratio of 4:3, resulting in a mostly square image. For TV shows filmed for 4:3, this is the original aspect ratio (OAR). Modern TVs have an aspect ratio of 16:9, resulting in a screen that is almost twice as wide as it is tall. This is what is generally referred to when the term widescreen is used (there are other widescreen aspect ratios, but they are not relevant to this particular discussion).
Remastering is the expensive and time-consuming process by which a SD image is replaced by a HD one. This process is complicated by the fact that most older TV shows were edited, finalised and distributed on video tape. Video tape is a locked SD format from which it is impossible to create a more detailed image. This means that the video master tapes for TV shows cannot simply be converted from SD to HD. However, most American TV shows were (highly fortunately) shot on 16mm or 35mm film. This is the same type of film used to shoot movies, which of course need to be displayed on massive cinema screens and contains high-quality, high-definition images by default.
As long as the original camera negatives have survived, it is possible to go back to them and extract a HD (or even super-HD, known as 4K) image which looks a hell of a lot better than the SD image you are used to from TV and DVD. The problem is that whilst TV shows were shot on film, they were mastered on video. So this means that every single episode of a TV show must be edited again from scratch, with music, sound effects, dialogue and any post-processing filters manually re-added. Editing is an enormous and expensive part of the process of creating an episode of television. For example, a typical TV episode spends as much time in editing (also called post-production or post) as it does being filmed in the first place. When CBS recently remastered Star Trek: The Next Generation, they spent a massive $9 million per season on the project, or about one-sixth the cost of actually shooting the entire series in the first place.
Remastering is thus an incredibly complicated thing to do and TV companies will only do it for shows where they feel there is a market for it. For enormously popular and prestigious shows like Star Trek and The X-Files there is clear value in doing a top job as these are programmes that were ahead of their time and will likely remain popular for decades to come (the original Star Trek is still being watched and making money today, fifty years after it was made, so updating it makes sense). Other shows like Babylon 5 are more cult and niche, and it's highly questionable if a HD remake will ever be attempted.
For vampires, going to sleep at 2pm in front of partially open blinds would appear to be a bad idea.
Something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer falls between the two stools. It was a hugely popular show at the time of airing and kick-started the career of someone who is now one of Hollywood's top directors and most influential creators. It has a passionate and dedicated base of fans, but its broader awareness has dropped off over time. This puts the creators, in this case Fox, in the quandary of either: 1) shelling out a large sum of money for a remastering project which could result in a renewed lease of life for the show on Blu-Ray and (more importantly) services like Netflix, or 2) simply remaking the show from scratch with a whole new cast. 1) is expensive, but not as expensive as 2) and less controversial. In this case, Fox has elected to remaster the whole show.
Furthermore, Fox have, at least initially, done it right. They've gone back to the original camera negatives and have re-scanned the whole show in HD. The image quality and detail is hugely improved, more important for Buffy than most shows as the first two seasons were filmed on a particularly poor stock of 16mm film and the resulting SD image looked grainy and blurry even on TV and DVD. Extracting a HD image makes these seasons look hugely better (they're still not as good as the later seasons, shot on 35mm, as the original film was the limiting factor but it's a still a vast improvement). They've even re-shot the early CGI shots involving things like vampires turning to dust, which is reasonably impressive.
That's where the good news abruptly halts. As the above video shows, they've also made a huge number of mistakes and introduced a large number of problems to the series, most of them resulting from poor editing.
The video goes into this in much more detail, but briefly, TV shows and movies often 'cheat' when it comes to things like time of day and weather. Filming a scene at sunset on a beach sounds great, but not when that means you literally have a window of a few minutes to nail the shot and if anyone messes up, you have to wait 24 hours and hope it works better that time. One dream sequence in Buffy required a sunset beach shot, so they cheated. They filmed Sarah Michelle Gellar walking on the beach earlier in the day and applied filters after the fact to make it look like sunset. Except that for the HD version of the same shot, the new editors forgot to add the same filter, meaning it now looks like it's taking place on a autumn afternoon rather than during a summer sunset.
More common is the cheat of filming scenes at night. Night shooting is hugely expensive (everyone's on overtime) so TV and film will instead shoot the scene in the day and then apply a filter to make it look like night. This is most noticeable in the third Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King, when Pippin finds Merry after the Battle of the Pelennor. In the theatrical version of the film, he finds him in daylight. In the Extended Edition, the filter has been changed and the scene is now set at dusk to indicate more time as passed. It's the exact same scene, just changed from one time of day to another thanks to the simple use of a filter.
In Buffy this practice is used to shoot interior scenes during the day and change them to night in post. Again, this has not been followed by the new editors, leading to scenes where Buffy appears to be going to bed at 2pm and where Angel (a vampire) happily looks out the window without being incinerated.
"EXTREME CLOSE-UP! EXTREME CLOSE-UP!"
These problems are annoying but also easily fixed by a simple further editing pass. Much more problematic has been the decision to change the show to a widescreen image.
As mentioned earlier, to turn a 4:3 image into a 16:9 one requires that the image be zoomed in so it expands out and fills the sides of the screen. This cropping is a massive no-no for most viewers, because it means that information that was originally on-screen is lost simply so the image can fill the whole screen. This also often wrecks shot composition, and if actors are already near the top or bottom of the screen, risks chopping off heads. Fortunately, going back to the original camera negative means that this problem can be avoided. As well as being shot on film, most older TV shows used widescreen cameras anyway, so the native film image is a widescreen one. So you don't have to crop images, you just get a wider image showing more stuff on the right and left hand sides of the screen.
"Hurrah!" you may say. Well, not quite. You see, most American TV shows in the 1980s and 1990s were "shot for TV" even if they used widescreen cameras. What that means it that the camerman had a square image on his viewfinder which showed the limits of the 4:3 TV image, and knew that anything outside that image would not be seen on TV. So using the full widescreen image becomes hugely problematic because you often find light stands, crewmembers, extras, boom mikes or even the edges of the set coming into view (the Friends HD remaster was particularly criticised for occasionally showing the edges of the sets on-screen). As shows entered the 21st Century and widescreen home TVs became more common, this problem was solved by the cameramen "protecting the image for widescreen", i.e. ensuring the entire image was clear of obstacles.
Buffy aired just at the time this transition was beginning (1996-2003), and later seasons are protected for widescreen. In fact, the later seasons have been available in widescreen even in SD on DVD for a few years now. There are a few incidents where extras, equipment can be seen but these are relatively few and far between. In the first three to four seasons, however, the problems are far more commonplace. In a few places Fox have solved the problem by using digital effects to 'paint out' equipment or extras where they shouldn't be, which is laudable as it is both time-consuming and expensive to do. However, far more often the editors have simply cropped the image instead to remove the offending obstacle...and also sometimes taking off the top of the heads of the actors in the process. Even more weirdly, they seem to have cropped some images and then used the original image in the "Previously, on Buffy..." segments, showing that the original image was completely fine to use.
"Adding space to the sides simply for the sake of trying to look more
cinematic would betray the very exact mise-en-scene I was trying to
create. I am a purist, and this is the purest way to watch Buffy. I have resisted the effort to letterbox Buffy from the start and always will, because that is not the show we shot." - Joss Whedon
For Star Trek: The Next Generation, filmed rather earlier (1987-94) than Buffy at time when there was zero expectation of there ever being a widescreen home TV market, CBS didn't even bother trying to create widescreen images. They instead just stuck to the OAR of 4:3 and left black bars down the sides of the screen for people with widescreen TVs. It certainly doesn't seem to have done them any harm. Joss Whedon himself has also been unequivocal in starting that Buffy was shot for 4:3 and should stay in that format.
Even more impressive, when Universal re-released the original Battlestar Galactica on Blu-Ray, they included both the 4:3 and 16:9 versions on the same disc, with the option to switch between them. This would be the most ideal solution for Buffy as well.
The hope is that the current version of Buffy airing is a test run for a future proper re-release, with these problems fixed and cleared up. There is some evidence that this might be the case: The X-Files has been airing in HD on a German network and also on the El Rey network in the USA and apparently early problems with the remastering have been fixed in later airings of the same episodes, so hopefully the same will be true for Buffy.
In the meantime, the Buffy HD/Blu-Ray Facebook page is monitoring each episode as it airs for issues and is collecting all the information together. It's worth a look to see what Fox are doing wrong - and in some cases right - with each episode.
In unexpected news, Beamdog have announced they are making a new Baldur's Gate game using the Infinity Engine, the old 2D engine used to create the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, along with the classic Planescape: Torment.
The new game is an 'interquel', set between the two Baldur's Gate titles, presumably in the few months that elapsed after the end of the first game and before our heroes are captured in the wilderness and taken to Amn to begin the events of the second.
This is a curious decision, likely driven by budgetary and licensing constraints. Beamdog are working with Atari (the D&D licence holders) and Wizards of the Coast (the current owners of the D&D brand itself) and apparently getting them to all work together has been a nightmare so far. Given they are working together on the re-releases of the Infinity Engine games, it may make sense to try to squeeze a new game out whilst there is a window of opportunity to do so and while the isometric RPG market is seeing a resurgence in popularity due to the high sales of Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2, not to mention the upcoming Pillars of Eternity. On the other hand, using the Infinity Engine in all is creaking glory is probably not the best idea, there is no real narrative gap between the first two games that needs to be filled and apart from its head, Trent Oster, Beamdog has very few personnel working for it who also worked on the original games. Certainly most of the major writers and creative forces are now with other companies, or still at BioWare.
Beamdog plan to release the new game later in 2015, so it'll be interesting to see what direction it takes. Meanwhile, Obsidian, who do have many of the writers and creative forces behind the Infinity Engine games working for them, are due to ship Pillars of Eternity, a modern 'spiritual successor' to the Baldur's Gate series, in the next few months.
Spike TV are developing a TV series based on Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars Trilogy of novels. The proposed TV series will take the its name from the first novel in the series, Red Mars, with Kim Stanley Robinson serving as a creative consultant.
Consisting of Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996), the trilogy spans almost two hundred years (between 2027 and 2212) and depicts the colonisation of Mars by the initial First Hundred group and subsequent waves of immigration. As the years pass, socio-economic tensions rise between the original settlers and later arrives, and between Mars and an Earth increasingly desperate to offload its bloated population (threatened by viruses and climate change) on the new world. The rising threat of war, independence and the impact of a new medical science that retards the ageing process are all key storylines in a story that involves dozens of major characters.
James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd worked on a mini-series idea based on The Mars Trilogy for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This project was not tremendously faithful to the novels - rumours abounded of a 'sexy female android' character when no such entity exists in the books - but it did wind up being developed for several years at AMC. It was not greenlit, but it did introduce Hurd to the team at AMC that eventually ended up making The Walking Dead. Five years ago, AMC resurrected the project with writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh on board (Die Hard with a Vengeance, Welcome to the Jungle, The Punisher, Armageddon), but eventually passed.
Spike TV are best-known for their reality programming, and news that this project was in development with them came as a surprise.If Spike treat the subject seriously (i.e. don't turn it into a revolutionary shoot 'em up) and put some serious money behind it, this could be both a very good TV series and mark a change in direction for the channel. The potential for this going horribly wrong is very high, however.
MTV has greenlit a ten-episode TV series based on Terry Brooks's Shannara novels. The first season will be an adaptation of the second novel in the series, The Elfstones of Shannara, presumably on the basis that trying to adapt The Sword of Shannara would result in near-instantaneous lawsuits from the Tolkien Estate and Peter Jackson.
Al Gough and Miles Millar, who produced Smallville, will work as showrunners on the new project, whilst Jon Favreau (the director of the first two Iron Man movies) will act as a producer. Jonathan Liebesman, the director of Battle Los Angeles, Wrath of the Titans and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, will direct the first two episodes.
Wizards of the Coast have detailed their launch plans for the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. It's been confirmed that the name 'D&D Next' was just a placeholder and has now been ditched: the game will officially just be called D&D but '5th Edition' is an informal description for it.
The launch schedule is as follows:
15 July: D&D Starter Set
19 August: Player's Handbook, Hoard of the Dragon Queen (adventure)
30 September: Monster Manual
21 October: The Rise of Tiamat (adventure)
19 November: Dungeon Master's Guide
Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro are betting a lot on the release of the new edition, especially as their plans for a tie-in movie franchise were torpedoed by a legal challenge by the previous rights-holders. 4th Edition, release in 2008, was a financial failure (after an initially promising start) and its mixed critical reception tore the core D&D fanbase apart. Many D&D fans have moved onto games like Pathfinder, 13th Age and Numenera, not to mention various 'retroclones' (games by third parties based heavily on older editions of D&D). The high price of 5th Edition ($50 each for the rulebooks and $30 for the adventures) isn't likely to do much to tempt them back.
One factor in D&D's favour is that its primary competition (and the pen-and-paper RPG market-leader for the last few years), Pathfinder, has now been going for over five years and is starting to get a little long in the tooth. With no proper second edition on the horizon for that game, D&D 5th Edition may tempt some fans to at least take a look. However, if 5th Edition fails to do well, we might be looking at the retirement of the D&D game for some time to come.
Richard Morgan's novel Black Man (known as Thirteen in the USA) has been optioned as a feature film by the team behind the recent Johnny Depp vehicle Transcendence.
Transcendence producers Kate Cohen and Marisa Polvino are helming the adaptation, which is being written by Kenny Golde, the writer of Walking with the Enemy and a long-gestating film based on Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity.
The novel was released in 2007 and went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award the following year. The book is set in 2107 and features a United States that has been torn apart into three separate nations by religious and political strife: the ultra-rich Pacific Rim, the fundamentalist Republic (aka 'Jesusland') and the liberal North Atlantic Union. Carl Marsalis, a 'thirteen' or genetically-engineered soldier hung out to dry when the war he was designed to fight ended, is recruited to help track down a rival thirteen who has gone on a rogue killing spree after visiting Mars. Carl teams up with a Turkish-descended policewoman, Svegi Ertekin, to track down the rogue thirteen.
With its no-holds-barred commentary on the state of America and its graphic violence, the book will not be easy to adapt to film whilst maintaining both its integrity and the high budget and adult rating that will be required to do it justice. This is a dark, brooding story which is singularly unfit to be turned into a summer popcorn blockbuster, so I'm interested in seeing how the producers tackle it.
Roland Emmerich's Foundation project has moved from the big screen to television, with the director confirming that his next film will instead be the unasked-for Independence Day sequel.
According to Emmerich:
"We're trying to do it as a big mini-series, but even there you would
have to change the story itself and set it in a time when the galaxy has
fallen apart - and then you're pretty much making a TV show with all
these characters and playing all the scenes out. You can [do that] and
we'll see what happens. We tried so hard [to make it into a movie],
honestly, because it's one of my most favourite books. I just love it."
Here's a thought. If you love the book so much, why not just do an adaptation rather than arse around with it? If anything, the episodic structure of the books (the first three 'novels' in the series are actually linked collections of short stories and novellas) would map onto a TV series very well.
This is still early in development, with no writer or studio yet attached.
Guillermo Del Toro is executive producing a new TV series, The Strain (which depicts an infection of New York by creatures that are somewhere between vampires and zombies), based on a trilogy of novels he co-authored with Chuck Hogan. The project originally began as a TV series and became a book series when the original network passed on the project, so it's come full circle.
A non-broadcast pilot was produced last year, directed by Del Toro, with John Hurt starring as Professor Abraham Setrakian. Sadly, Hurt elected not to play the role full-time in the series and will be recast. The other castmembers, most notably Corey Stoll as protagonist Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, will be retained. Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings's Sam Gamgee) will also have a recurring role alongside Kevin Durand (Keamy from Lost).
The series has been picked up for a 13-episode first season by FX. Apparently they envisage the show running for either three or five seasons, depending on ratings. On top the normal series budget, FX are also dedicating $500,000 to the creation of the creatures that will be needed for the series.
Del Toro's day-to-day involvement in the show is likely to be limited, especially if the Pacific Rim sequel is greenlit, so the show will be primarily run by Carlton Cuse, the former co-showrunner on Lost.
The books aren't great, but they are serviceable popcorn entertainment. Hopefully the TV series will be a bit better.
