Why the cool tag subby?

Krymson Tyde: Good, now pitch it to AMC or HBO.

I don't think you can do this without significant budget.

I love the Game of Thrones TV show, but it deviates from the books conveniently when expensive scenes come up. Take for example when Tyrion first leads the hill people into battle. In the TV show, Tyrion gets knocked the f*ck out pretty much directly after putting on his armor and exiting the tent. The entire battle occurs off-camera, and Tyrion does no leading. In the book, Tyrion actually led and fought bravely, culminating in his eviscerating a war horse by ramming his head (and spiked helmet) from underneath the horse.

I don't know that AMC or HBO would ruin the show. Boardwalk Empire is beautiful and the set design couldn't be better. But it's one set, where DT would require a lot of different sets. And if you take the AMC example of say, The Walking Dead, it's not a remarkably artistic show outside of the makeup. I guess I think that you need studio-type money to do DT right, and although HBO and AMC do great shows, they don't do great expensive shows.

Babwa Wawa: Krymson Tyde: Good, now pitch it to AMC or HBO.

I don't think you can do this without significant budget.

I love the Game of Thrones TV show, but it deviates from the books conveniently when expensive scenes come up. Take for example when Tyrion first leads the hill people into battle. In the TV show, Tyrion gets knocked the f*ck out pretty much directly after putting on his armor and exiting the tent. The entire battle occurs off-camera, and Tyrion does no leading. In the book, Tyrion actually led and fought bravely, culminating in his eviscerating a war horse by ramming his head (and spiked helmet) from underneath the horse.

I don't know that AMC or HBO would ruin the show. Boardwalk Empire is beautiful and the set design couldn't be better. But it's one set, where DT would require a lot of different sets. And if you take the AMC example of say, The Walking Dead, it's not a remarkably artistic show outside of the makeup. I guess I think that you need studio-type money to do DT right, and although HBO and AMC do great shows, they don't do great expensive shows.

Half of the story takes place in New York City and Maine so I don't know if it would be THAT much more expensive than Game of Thrones. Plus Mejia is pretty much a stock western town with a few 20th century anachronisms thrown in, and Calla isn't going to cost much to film either. Outside of The Waste Lands and the final book, there's not a whole lot of stuff that is going bust the budget. Throwing a few CGI lobstrosities on a beach is pretty much doable on a SyFy original movie budget.

Tarl3k: Babwa Wawa: they don't do great expensive shows

You do of course realize that GoT has a HUGE budget, upwards of $6 mil per show, according to this source...

Link

Exactly - hollywood pays 40 times that to produce movies with significant special effects needs. The scale isn't even comparable. HBO pays $6M to produce 50-odd minutes of content. Studios regularly budget $250M to produce 110 minutes of content. Tangled cost more than that, for chrissakes. When was the last time you heard of a sci-fi/fantasy movie being produced for $12M?

Mad_Radhu: Half of the story takes place in New York City and Maine so I don't know if it would be THAT much more expensive than Game of Thrones. Plus Mejia is pretty much a stock western town with a few 20th century anachronisms thrown in, and Calla isn't going to cost much to film either. Outside of The Waste Lands and the final book, there's not a whole lot of stuff that is going bust the budget. Throwing a few CGI lobstrosities on a beach is pretty much doable on a SyFy original movie budget.

I've seen enough SK books ruined by a mini-series.

Babwa Wawa: When was the last time you heard of a sci-fi/fantasy movie being produced for $12M?

This costs $30 million.



This was $5 million.



This only cost $500k, and had some pretty nifty looking CGI creatures.

Mad_Radhu: This costs $30 million.

And minute-for-minute, it's 5x what HBO pays for GoT.

Mad_Radhu: This was $5 million.

Unbelievably great movie, but it did not require significant effects.

Can it be done on a budget? Sure. Can it be done well on a budget? Perhaps. But it's far easier to f*ck up franchise when you're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to effects talent.

This is an awesome series of books - a fantastic story. It deserves to be told well, because it will only be told once. It needs LOTR type treatment.

Babwa Wawa: Mad_Radhu: This costs $30 million.

And minute-for-minute, it's 5x what HBO pays for GoT.

Mad_Radhu: This was $5 million.

Unbelievably great movie, but it did not require significant effects.

Can it be done on a budget? Sure. Can it be done well on a budget? Perhaps. But it's far easier to f*ck up franchise when you're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to effects talent.

This is an awesome series of books - a fantastic story. It deserves to be told well, because it will only be told once. It needs LOTR type treatment.

I'm just saying that the way the story is constructed, you really don't hit anything expensive until well into book 3.

Book one is mostly set in a desert and a podunk town, and you really don't need much in the way of expensive makeup and effects until you get to the part with the Slow Mutants. Even the Gilead flashbacks wouldn't be any more costly than creating Winterfell.

Book two is mostly set on a beach and in New York. Depending on if they update Eddie to the present day or leave him in the 80s, you can do the bulk of the story on a Mad Men budget, with a little CGI and animatronics thrown in for the Lobstrosites.

Book three is where it gets expensive with the ruined city, but even that could probably be brought in at close to the budget of GoT. Even then, half of the story is set in 70s New York. The only buyer buster is the big bear and the train ride, and most of that can be CGI'd pretty inexpensively.

Book four is set mostly in either an alternate, plague ravaged Kansas City (Walking Dead budget) or in an old west town with a few oil derrick's and other modern touches. Easily accomplished on a Deadwood budget.

Book five. Small rural town with a few CGI robots walking around, and an underground bunker. Throw in a few vampire flashbacks and you're still well within TV budget based on what Battlestar Galactica could do.

Book six. New York and Maine mostly, with a few scenes at the Crimson King's castle.

Book seven. You get a few big budget scenes here and there, but you still spend a lot of time in New York and Maine. Still can't think of much you couldn't shoot on a Game of Thrones budget.

Maybe constantly having to do CGI for Oy would bump up the budget, but overall the Dark Tower doesn't have a lot of spectacular battles or exotic locales. For a story spanning universes, it is pretty limited when it comes to spectacular action scenes. You just don't have anything like the Battle of Pelennor Fields to have to depict that requires tons of CGI and thousands of extras.

I'm of the belief the only way to make a Dark Tower movie series that's actually good is animation. Do the animation in a style that resembles Afro Samurai's and release a 50 disk set as only the Japanese know how to do properly.



The Dark Tower just too much in it to do it theatrically, or even as the theater/TV series hybrid idea (which I sort of like) without cutting a lot out, and it's just too awesome to go around cutting parts out.  Get the Marvel guys working with the Afro Samurai guys, then lock them in a production studio for a few years until they churn it out.

If I could do it, I'd have Roland with the Horn of Eld at the beginning, and then just tell new stories, deviating from the books entirely. It's implied that's how it goes down anyway. The whole thing would be like the Star Trek reboot, the writers could then do whatever they wanted and not have to worry about writing Stephen King into their TV show at some point.

Show Eld's horn on Roland's horse in the first scene and you can deviate any way you want. Ka is a wheel after all.

Babwa Wawa: Mad_Radhu: This costs $30 million.

And minute-for-minute, it's 5x what HBO pays for GoT.

I was just thinking about it, and I don't think you can directly compare the minute to minute costs of a movie and a TV show. For a movie, pretty much everything is a one time cost and unless you do sequels most everything you have paid for is used just that once. For a television show, the cost of everything is spread over many episodes, so 6 million an episode for GoT goes a lot further than 12 million for a two hour movie, because you have things like costumes, sets, and CGI models that are reused over tens or sometimes even hundreds of episodes. Actors' salaries are also spread over the entire season, so the per episode salary of a GoT lead is nowhere near the salary of a movie lead.

For example, on GoT they have the huge set for the Great Hall of the Red Keep. The cost of that building that set was most likely charged against the first season expenses, so in the second season you only have the costs associated with renting the studio space and redressing the set to be more Joffrey's style, so the costs of using that set for two episodes in the second season is dramatically lower than what it would cost if you had to build that set from scratch for a two hour movie.

Mad_Radhu: I was just thinking about it, and I don't think you can directly compare the minute to minute costs of a movie and a TV show. For a movie, pretty much everything is a one time cost and unless you do sequels most everything you have paid for is used just that once. For a television show, the cost of everything is spread over many episodes, so 6 million an episode for GoT goes a lot further than 12 million for a two hour movie, because you have things like costumes, sets, and CGI models that are reused over tens or sometimes even hundreds of episodes. Actors' salaries are also spread over the entire season, so the per episode salary of a GoT lead is nowhere near the salary of a movie lead.

For example, on GoT they have the huge set for the Great Hall of the Red Keep. The cost of that building that set was most likely charged against the first season expenses, so in the second season you only have the costs associated with renting the studio space and redressing the set to be more Joffrey's style, so the costs of using that set for two episodes in the second season is dramatically lower than what it would cost if you had to build that set from scratch for a two hour movie.

Legit argument. But the fact is that the GoT producers have changed the storyline of the books in some pretty impactful ways (for example by removing Tyrion's first battle alongside the hill people), and in a way that just happened to make production less expensive.

Now, was it right or wrong? Not sure. On the one hand, it sucks that the story was changed. On the other, it might have sucked more to see a cheesy battle staged on a budget.

It's exactly the kind of choice that Peter Jackson didn't have to make with LOTR, and why I think DT needs a feature film and not a TV budget

lilplatinum: Meh, GOT cut a battle to save money - it was relatively plot insigificant and didn't effect the overall story.

Peter Jackson cut the entire actual ending of LOTR to save farking money - thats more of a salient problem with moviemaking.

(If you are going to complain about budget cuts and GOT then complain about things they actually cut that negatively affected the story - like just gutting the House of the Undying and the prophecies that Dany gets which are kind of relevant).

It was an example to illustrate the fact that despite the quality of their output, HBO and AMC do not have any track record of putting on productions anywhere near the scale of feature films.

I didn't think this was a point for point comparison of books to film. But carry on.

lilplatinum: For CGI effects no, but I would argue that those are rarely what is necessary to actually tell a story properly. I would posit that the time constraints of feature films are far more of an impediment to telling a story well than better battle descriptions.

Fair point, but there's a huge list of shiatty TV series based on SK concepts. Some of the worst TV ever made is based on pretty good raw material from King.

/I disagree about the insignificance of that battle. In the book, the whole time Tyrion spends in King's Landing he is a battle-proven leader of men - just as much a Lannister as his brother. In the TV series he's no leader, but a manipulator of men, no different than Varys. Tyrion is probably the single most compelling and interesting character in the story, and the development of that character was f*cked with so as to save some production money.
//Again, it's a good TV series, and GoT would not be a good movie or movie trilogy. But you can't ignore the effect that budget realities have on the illustration of a story

I agree with the idea of an animated series being the only way this ever happens. I don't know if there's an American studio that would commit to it, but surely they could partner with a Japanese studio for a television series or series of OVA movies.