Fantasy seems to be the new buzzword for commercial success and critical acclaim. Film adaptations of the popular fantasy book series such as Harry Potter and Lord Of the Rings were humungous commercial hits as movie franchises, despite occasional complaints (the Percy Jackson series comes to mind).
Game Of Thrones , based on George R.R. Martin’s bestselling Songs of Ice and Fire series was one of the first fantasy novel series adapted for TV. An intricate plot featuring knights and dragons, violence and incest, Game of Thrones has people plotting for the Iron Throne. As the fifth season of the show gets underway, one wonders why some fantasy series get made into movies, while others makes it big on telly? Daniel Portman, who plays a squire in the series speaking at the recently concluded Comic Con in town said, “ Game of Thrones is not a battle of good against evil as such. It is peopled with grey characters and politics that normal people can relate with unlike Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings . I doubt they would have been as successful as Game of Thrones , had they been serialised.”
Software professional Pawan Kumar contends, “ Game Of Thrones and The Walking Dead are the best examples of the crossover from book to a TV series. They are both based on very successful book series. I feel that the reason no one attempted this with Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series was that television programming in the West was not what it is today in the early 2000s.
The budgets were much lower for TV shows and producers saw little sense in adapting a series for television when they might as well create a million dollar movie franchise.”
He adds, “I am pretty sure that if adaptations were being planned now, a TV series may well have been planned. However, I do feel that since neither Game of Thrones nor The Walking Dead fit a linear narrative, it makes much more sense to adapt them into TV series, as opposed to a Harry Potter, which despite the surfeit of characters and incidents is a linear story.”
Samit Basu, the author of the super cool Gameworld trilogy says, “I think Game of Thrones in itself is too huge and complicated; a movie series may not do justice to it. TV is emerging as the best large scale storytelling medium over film in the West over the last decade. That is not true of India. Content on Indian TV is still mostly mediocre.”
Architect Rajiv Pant says, “I think that apart from commercial reasons, a TV series ensures that complex ideas, relationships and a number of subplots manage to make it to the narrative. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have been extremely successful as movie franchises, but I doubt they would have worked as a TV series. A linear narrative with not many grey characters is excellent for a three-hour movie, but may not work as a long drawn TV series, where most characters have shades of grey and a principal antagonist is never really in the picture.”
Software engineer Nithin. M is a fan of the Harry Potter books and feels that the movies do not do justice to the text. “I used to wonder at that juncture, whether a TV series based on Harry Potter would have been a hit. With the budgets that shows now get, I am sure something like Harry Potter would have actually made a superb crossover into TV. As telly continues to grow, I hope we would see many of these series being adapted for television.”
