Hollywood needs to re-think itself

Books and movies! Movies and books!!  WAIT!!!  Let's take some anime and make it into a movie as well!!

Why do we as a culture have such a hard-on for movies?

I can say that, in my 40 years of movie-watching and book reading, I have seen MAYBE 3 dozen movies that I consider "amazing feats of story-telling"... but I've read literally HUNDREDS of books that are absolutely AMAZING feats of story-telling.

But my question is - again - WHY do we feel that EVERYTHING would be better as a movie?  Because, lets face it, statistically speaking - most movies suck.

We need to think bigger. We need to think more episodic. We need to get away from the idea that everything needs to be boiled down into a 90-120 minute long, trite representation of an amazing work of someone else.



Current example - Ready Player One. The book is a solid 8.5 out of 10. The movie AS a movie is 8 out of 10... the movie as a representation of the book - is like a 3 out of 10.

On the other side of that spectrum we have "Altered Carbon" and "The Handmaid's Tale" - both of which were optioned as a short series. And while they didn't exactly mimic the book, they totally NAILED it for feel, tone, story, characters, etc... We need to take this model and freaking run with it.

Movies - in this man's humble opinion - are a dying art. They're too short, too contrived, too homogenized... and WAY too Hollywood.  And Hollywood is full of people who don't understand the fans of the things they're creating. They always think it's cool to do the same thing - over and over and over and over again... The same cliches, the same crappy screenplay writers... it never ends.

Netflix, HBO, AMC and a few others have totally nailed it with turning great stories into live-action... uh... things?  I don't have a good word for it. "Films" doesn't seem to fit.

I have a short list of things I would LOOOOOVE to see picked up by HBO or Netflix for production:
Starship Troopers
14/The Fold
Old Man's War
Lock-In/Head On
The Time Traveler's Wife
The King Killer Chronicles
Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained

These stories would all make FANTASTIC visual dramas/series. And They'd allow for a whole new set of people to enjoy literary story-telling like HBO's "Game Of Thrones" did for George RR Martin.

So - there ya go. Hollywood needs to change their way of thinking. The closest they've come is the MCU. Marvel has created an expanded universe bordering on "serial" that they can. And it's amazing. Everyone else... is basically jerking off.