Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: nfo1234 on May 17, 2012, 11:30:13 AM
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Sign this if you're interested in a well-made Animorphs full-length movie! After seeing The Avengers, I actually think an Animorphs film could be a fun experience. Link:
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/kaamovieformorphs (http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/kaamovieformorphs)
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I've seen petitions for this exact thing come and go. Another petition won't do jack.
I'll sign it, but it won't do jack.
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I love Animorphs. I really do. I feverishly collected every book and was nearly killed running home to read four of the 52 books when I crossed the street without looking both ways.
But, as much as I loved the books, as much as I'm happy that a new generation is getting to read them again, I do not think you can compare Animorphs to The Avengers.
The major difference being that far more people know about the Avengers than the Animorphs. The Avengers was long in coming after The Hulk, Ironman, Captain America, and Thor all got their movies. It was the natural conclusion to finish it up by bringing those characters together in the medium that fans have been pining for ever since they saw those movies.
Saying an Animorphs movie should be made because the Avengers did so well is like saying they should bring back the Baby Sitters Club because so many people went to see Star Wars Episode One in 3D.
I'm sorry, but that is where I stand. If you had said, "Hey, I've got fifty thousand dollars as a downpayment towards the first episode of an Animorphs series and I want to generate enough interest to get other investors on board" then yes. I would sign the petition. But as it stands no, I will not participate in this petition.
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If they were to make a movie (or even a short series of movies), there's no way they could possibly make a movie that covers the content of multiple books.
The first movie could be the first book, with certain elements of other early books incorporated into it, but the movies would have to be distinct in and of themselves.
I also agree that the comparison with the Avengers doesn't really make sense. Movies aren't made unless there is something sufficient out there to indicate that the movie will be economically viable. There simply isn't much of a market for an Animorphs film, and any such film would have to have a very high budget to do it justice. Nobody will pay for a movie like that to be made, and a group of fans of the book signing a petition won't happen.
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Sorry but...
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There's no guarantee that it would be a good movie. You'll get people who want to change things, like make the Animorphs twenty at the beginning of the series or something (wait . . . they already did something like that, didn't they?)
I mean, look at the Percy Jackson movie -- which pretty much threw out much of the content of the book it was based on. They might do that with an Animorph movie.
If they were to make a movie (or even a short series of movies), there's no way they could possibly make a movie that covers the content of multiple books.
Yeah, look at what happened in The Last Airbender! Granted that was based of a television show, and not a book, but still.
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Hello, again.
I feel as though my previous comment was slightly d**kish. So I'll show some respect by providing an actual argument.
There's not a whole lot I can say that hasn't already been said here, or elsewhere on this or any other Animorphs forum. I just can't see the film doing well; unless, of course, MAXIMUM effort was put into it. I can just see the film being handled half-assedly, and the fans will just end up bashing it like they did the show. And, let's be honest, we don't need another Ani-Tv incident.
If we WERE to have an Animorphs film produced, I would want somebody like Joss Whedon to produce/direct/write (whatever) it. He did Cabin in the Woods AND Avengers, and I'm pretty sure both did great (I've only seen the former). Even an Animorphs TV Show--I'd deffinitely want Whedon himself having something to do with that project.
But we all know what would happen if the movie were made. They would lump a few books together to form a "plot", write a sequel in the same manner, and end it with a poorly done trilogy. Fans will tear it apart from the get go for being loosely faithful to the series, and you just know they producers/director/writer will just put in a bunch of cheesy jokes that will (like they did with Ani-Tv) that won't do the subject matter justice.
My two cents.
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^ You could do all those things and still have a good/great movie. You have to change things when adapting a book. Unlike a lot of people I accept that there are some things that work in books than don't translate well to the big screen. Whether it turned out good does not depend on how literal of an adaptation it is.
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It would take hype, and lot's of it. Enough to get millions of people excited for a movie. Reprinting the entire series. Commericals, toys, incentive to get people interested. This would be risky beyond belief for any studio.
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Again, this has probably been mentioned ad nauseam but it has always seemed to me that the Animorphs content and format would be far more conducive to some kind of animated movie (or series). I don't know why everyone seems so insistent on a live-action movie/series (we all saw how that worked already...). Am I missing something?
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If we WERE to have an Animorphs film produced, I would want somebody like Joss Whedon to produce/direct/write (whatever) it.
I'll do you one better. I've always said the UK answer to Joss Whedon is Steven Moffatt. And my feelings are rewarded everytime I watch the new Doctor Who. The BBC is the company that gives us Primevil and Being Human, both shows that are effects heavy and generally have quality writing and acting.
Joss would be great, but I think he's graduated from TV and will most likely be sticking with films from here on out, mainly because he hasn't had a lucky break a TV series since Buffy and Angel. Every show he's produced thereafter has either been online, a single season, or it never made the screen because TV execs are too full of themselves to know when they have a good show on their hands.
Moffatt has a proven track record with Doctor Who and Coupling and I think he could definitely pull off a newer attempt at Animorphs.
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What about Peter Jackson? The man's an artist.
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You're still aiming too high. Remember, Animorphs is still at the core a relatively unknown book series that has all ready had one major page-to-screen failure. The man responsible for The Lord of the Rings, King Kong and The Hobbit is not going to chance his reputation so quickly.
To give Animorphs the credibility that it was denied, you need a director that's still down here on the planet Earth but can create the Andalite homeworld so to speak.
Step one is to get the rights to the series. Step two is to sell them to a competent director who is relatively unknown to the world but has a proven track record of gluing butts to the couch when his work airs. You also need a team of writers who give a crap, which you could find here, naturally.
The only hope anyone has of getting either of those things done is to hope that the relaunch proves that kids still want to read Animorphs as much as they wanted to read Goosebumps and Harry Potter.
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You can tell it has somewhat of a following since their are 4846 fanfictions on it for fanfiction.net. If it was written when that website even existed their would likely be thousands more. To put that into perspective, hunger games has just under 19,000.
Number of fanfictions might be a poor way of measuring fan following, but it may be all we have. Oh and sales numbers too.
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While I would love to see an Animorphs movie (provided it's well-done, we don't need another AniTV), I would tend to agree that a petition probably isn't the way to do it. The key would be to get the attention of the right people. People with money to back something like this, people who have connections within the film industry, etc. Without people like that on board, I can't see something like this going anywhere.
You can tell it has somewhat of a following since their are 4846 fanfictions on it for fanfiction.net. If it was written when that website even existed their would likely be thousands more. To put that into perspective, hunger games has just under 19,000.
Number of fanfictions might be a poor way of measuring fan following, but it may be all we have. Oh and sales numbers too.
Keep in mind, though, that the number of Animorphs fanfics was probably heavily inflated by the ambiguous nature of the series' ending. IE, a lot of people wrote fanfics that they would not otherwise have written, because they sought closure that the books didn't provide.
Granted, I also agree that if fanfiction.net had existed when Animorphs books were written, there would be more. But I still don't think it would have been comparable to the following behind the hunger games.
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I'll make you guys a deal. If I ever become an indipendently wealthy millionare, I'll see what I can do about makign an animorphsm movie.
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You can tell it has somewhat of a following since their are 4846 fanfictions on it for fanfiction.net.
I guess another way to see how popular animorphs is is to consider amount of forums/fan groups, and amount of members in them. Like RAF has 4560 members. On FG, an artemis fowl forum I go on, there's 156815 members.
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Again, this has probably been mentioned ad nauseam but it has always seemed to me that the Animorphs content and format would be far more conducive to some kind of animated movie (or series). I don't know why everyone seems so insistent on a live-action movie/series (we all saw how that worked already...). Am I missing something?
I don't like the idea because most animation studios are so embarrassingly incompetent. If you had someone like pixar doing it, sure I'd bite. but your not going to get a studio of that caliber. Its a lot more realistic to get at least a tolerable adaption in live action than animation for something like this. Plus I bet they did animation they would do it with motion capture, which sucks the life out of everything.
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I disagree, I don't think motion capture is that bad at all.
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If we did make this live action we would need a CGI budget big enough to feed my ex-wife* for a week.
*Please note that this is assuming that in a future where I am indipenently wealthy I will have an ex-wife.
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Again, this has probably been mentioned ad nauseam but it has always seemed to me that the Animorphs content and format would be far more conducive to some kind of animated movie (or series). I don't know why everyone seems so insistent on a live-action movie/series (we all saw how that worked already...). Am I missing something?
I don't like the idea because most animation studios are so embarrassingly incompetent. If you had someone like pixar doing it, sure I'd bite. but your not going to get a studio of that caliber. Its a lot more realistic to get at least a tolerable adaption in live action than animation for something like this. Plus I bet they did animation they would do it with motion capture, which sucks the life out of everything.
I don't imagine Pixar would take a project like this.
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While it would be a lifelong dream to see Animorphs make it to the big screen, it does have a lot of things going against it.
Really, I think the best thing that it has going for it is going on right now: a re-release of the book series, generating new interest. I don't really know how well they are doing in the book stores, I think if KAA actually rewrote the series (as in, redid the books that the ghost writers did) then the popularity would explode with both people who felt disappointed in the series and those same people wanting to get their kids into the series.
I think as a Fandom, Animorphs has a really solid base, the problem is it came out in a time when fandoms were just being born to speak, when internet was new and fanfic was basically unheard of. I think if the series came out at the same time Harry Potter did, then it would have been as big as Harry Potter. Even scholastic/KAA said they were surprised that the series survived as long as it did and I can vaguely remember an interview saying that she didn't know why fans were still buying the books late into the series. (Which may be why she kind of rushed an ending because she wanted to write other series.)
But as it is now, Animorphs is really eclipsed by other, newer fandoms because they had that strong base right off the bat.
So, I guess to finalize my TL:DR, there can be a little bit of hope for the series to be put on the screen in a not-so-fail fashion. It's hard to tell what will hit the box office next, some movies have put famous books and books series on the screen, and if an entrepreneurial director saw the potential in the animorphs fanbase they might pick it up. What it would take to prove to them that it is worth it, I'm not really sure, I bet a lot of that is going to depend on how well the book sales of the series are doing now.