Why “Game of Thrones” Changes Everything

While Peter Jackson’s big-screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings really opened the door for large-scale adaptations of genre fiction (referring here to both fantasy and science fiction), it was David Benioff and Dan Weiss’s adaptation-for-television of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series that really changes the paradigm for long-format adaptations. Lip service must of course also be given to the Harry Potter film franchise, which demonstrated that it is possible to split a film into two parts without losing audience attention (a pattern later adopted by the Twilight franchise).

Still, long-time fans of Dune will realize that even splitting the first novel into two feature length films is the wrong choice if one wants to see the entire series on screen. If Dune is to be split into two films, Children of Dune must necessarily be split as well, and we’re looking at five films.

It seems, then, counter-intuitive to suggest 5+ 10-episode SEASONS for premium cable, but consider the cost (in dollars, not melange): a season of Game of Thrones costs HBO ~$60 million, whereas a single blockbuster film on the scale Dune would require–we’ll use ONE Lord of the Rings film for the sake of comparison–cost $94 million dollars (and that was in 2003).

More than that, though, is the time scale. Each installation of The Lord of the Rings lasts approximately 3 hours, whereas each season of Game of Thrones clocks in at just under 10. The extra screen time allows for much higher fidelity in adaptation to the source material, allowing more time for the nicety of detail required by a literary work of such complexity as Dune. Futhermore, Game of Thrones demonstrates that the audience is out there. Not that every fan of Game of Thrones is a fan of Dune, that’s absurd. No, I mean to say that the general audience, originally ignorant of both–but willing to the commitment of time and attention required by a monolithic series like BOTH Dune and Game of Thrones.

Before Game of Thrones, no one thought it was possible to faithfully adapt a set of genre fiction novels to the level of fidelity and at the cost-level given it by HBO to be worth the returns. Yet Game of Thrones is currently enjoying its third season, the most recent episode of which enjoyed the series’ highest ratings to date, with 4.72 million viewers in its initial airing alone.

I argue that this opens the floodgates to allow for even more series-scale adaptations to hit premium cable networks…Dune most of all.

Paul of Dune?

Brief Reflection on a key point of adaptation:

Some of the hard-line purists in Dune’s fandom like to pretend that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson never added a word to Frank’s mythos, and while a part of me can understand the sentiment, and I concede that nothing can even come close in narrative richness to that of the original six books, I don’t think the work of the younger Herbert and Mr. Anderson should be discounted out of hand.

Consider the great spans of time between Dune and Dune Messiah AND between Dune Messiah and Children of Dune: about a decade in each case. (Longer as we must necessarily make Leto II and Ghanima Atreides older than their 9-year-old selves as in the book, as they did in the ’03 miniseries–child actors being what they are.) These gaps in time would seem strange to those unfamiliar with the books, and Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Paul of Dune and The Winds of Dune help to fill these gaps, with the former going so far as to take care of a dangling plot-thread from the original novel whose unresolved status always bothered me: that of the bastard child of the Lady Margot Fenring by Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.

I’m not saying we should try to adapt Hunters and Sandworms of Dune, (assuming there’s even the possibility of making it that far to begin with). But Paul and Winds should definitely be used to bridge the three novels of Frank’s original trilogy. 

After all, as much as I’d like to one day see a Miles Teg on-screen, the latter trilogy, particularly the inconclusive Chapterhouse Dune, is very probably unfilmable, despite Heretics of Dune being perhaps my second favorite in the entire series.

Link

The Petition

In keeping with getting this done, I’ve created a petition over at Change.org to try and get the attention of our friends at HBO and Showtime. I’m hoping we can amass at least 100,000 signatures and see how far that goes towards inspiring the networks.

Dune for HBO

Frank Herbert’s Dune series is one of the enduring epics of Science Fiction: six original novels by Frank Herbert (and 11 and counting supplemental works written by Frank’s son Brian, and fellow novelist Kevin J. Anderson) spanning thousands of years of time with dozens of characters who remain some of the most complicated and beloved in the history of the genre. The first novel, Dune itself, has been adapted for screen twice: once by David Lynch for Universal Studios in 1984 and again in 2000 for the SyFy Channel (then the Sci-Fi Channel). The second two novels, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, saw adaptation in 2003, again for the SyFy Channel.

But that’s not good enough. We live in a world now where J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can be made into six outstanding two-to-three-hour long movies and where George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire can become a fantastic ongoing TV series on HBO, currently enjoying it’s third season. Why not Dune then?

Dune would be perfect for a network like HBO (or Showtime, since they need something to compete with Game of Thrones’ rising star). With over a dozen novels to draw from, and a near-mythical collection of notes written by the original author–from which Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have been drawing material for their own instalments–the show could run for nearly as many seasons as Game of Thrones, if not even longer.