Just around the corner from the main Thought Bubble venue, New Dock Hall (its less-than-imaginative name perhaps a symptom of how fast ‘Savile Hall’ was renamed, rebranded and redecorated) is the Alea Casino, also a regularly-used part of the acclaimed comic-convention geography. In front of a packed cinema at the Alea, the panel looked back at the last year and the changing landscape of the action -entertainment industry. This year the guests were: Charlie Adlard (artist: The Walking Dead), Jock (artist: The Losers, Batman, Dredd, Snapshot) , Robin Furth (author: The Dark Tower: A Concordance, research assistant to Stephen King) and Phil Noto (artist: Jonah Hex, X-23, Batgirl).
John Mosby: Let’s look back at the last year. Can we agree that it’s been a very strong year for the comic/films relationship. There’s been a raft of projects and The Avengers alone started setting records…
Jock: The bubble hasn’t burst yet. Just when everyone thought that you had to do really dark and moody Batman-style movies, here comes a really talented film-maker that makes a really-enjoyable film that celebrates superheroes and comics as they should be done… and it becomes, what, the third biggest grossing film of all time? It’s amazing. I remember when we did this panel a few years ago, they were making Iron Man and I thought ‘Okay, the honeymoon’s over and these films could die a death and it turned out to be one of the best ones. Here we are… and it’s all still going strong.
On the flip-side, something more personal that I worked on… with Dredd… it was good to see it happen but it didn’t find the same audience at all in America. There’s always a ‘you can never tell’ factor.
Robin Furth: On a personal note, with The Dark Tower projects I’ve been involved with…it’s been a roller-coaster. This time last year we thought it was going to be made by Universal, but that didn’t work out. Then there was Warner Bros. and THAT didn’t work. There are other possibilities now. It makes me think about that transition from a book and comic… it can look like a sure thing but it’s an education for me to see how changeable things can be. When you see things make it to the screen, there’s a ‘Wow, they got there!’ I guess I was naïve. People warned me about ‘turnaround’ . You think that when a studio is putting out so much money to get things done, that there’s NO way they’d turnaround and let that money wash away, but it happens…
Phil Noto: I think I cornered the market in ‘turnaround’. Everything from Beautiful Killer, Ninja Girl, Infinite Horizon… people have been attached and we got option money and then…. ‘Well, this other movie came out and it wasn’t so good…’ so they don’t want to make yours. The one movie that DID make it all the way that I had anything to do with was Jonah Hex… look at how that turned out. I still haven’t watched more than twenty minutes of that. Too depressing… Jimmy (Palmiotti) and I knew from the get-go… we got a copy of the script and we were going ‘Undead zombie people? All you have to do is make Unforgiven with Jonah Hex!’ But no. Zombies. Wild, Wild West type stuff…
Charlie Adlard: The Walking Dead just keeps going, that’s the amazing thing. Season Three is even bigger than Season Two which was bigger than Season One. What CAN you say? Every month just seems to surprise me in terms of the comic and the tv show. Everything connected with it. It seems to be this unstoppable beast. Obviously, realistically, at SOME point, it will stop, but I’m enjoying the ride.
JM: Does that actually lead to more pressure on you – that kind of scrutiny on everything you’re doing?
CA: I think the pressure is more on Robert (Kirkman, the writer) to be honest. It’d be easy to be the creator and shy away from everything else and say ‘I just do the comic-book…’ and take the Alan Moore route that everything that comes in its wake is irrelevant. But Robert’s set himself up like Mike Mignola did (with Hellboy), putting himself forward and so he’s somewhat up on a pedestal, intrinsically involved. If it HAD been crap, people would have pointed at Robert as well, so it was a brave thing to do in a lot of ways.
JM: There’s talk of titles and projects being ‘optioned’, but not everyone will understand that process.
PN: It’s basically having the rights to make it for a specific period of time. Only they can make a tv series or movie out if that. But after six months or a year or whatever… if they don’t so anything, you get the rights back. These days, it’s all ‘free’ options.
CA: If you ever go to San Diego, I think all you have to do is sit there with a property and people seem to turn up at your table. Generally, they seem to be twenty years younger than I am… I think ‘Shouldn’t you be at school and you’re calling yourself a ‘producer’? Hmmm. Before The Walking Dead I had two or three other creations, all of which have been ‘optioned’. The first time it happens, it’s exciting… the second, third, fourth time… it often leads to nothing…
RF: People option a LOT of things, hoping that ONE of them will get made. I remember talking to people when I was out in LA for a while and people were saying ‘Oh, I have this, this and this optioned…but they won’t make everything…
CA: It can take on many forms. You can just give it to them. David Hine was telling me this morning that a production company came to his table at a previous event and basically sat down and said ‘What have you got?’ They wanted him to list the properties that weren’t optioned. I don’t know how many they bought or took themselves. These guys go away with lists and lists… by that very nature, it actually gives you less chance of YOUR option getting beyond that point. There are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds optioned every year…
JM: Author Michael Connelly recently got back the rights to his character Harry Bosch, but he’s spoken to the fact that it can get very complicated when characters migrate between novels etc. It’s the same ‘problem’ that Marvel has, in that some characters fit into the worlds of both The X-Men and The Avengers and yet two different companies have the rights…
RF: I actually had to face just that with The Dark Tower. Stephen King is incredibly prolific in his worlds, weaving one into another. One of my jobs was to basically show people who they could and could not have in a film or whose name had to be changed. It was incredibly painful and detailed thing. Walter Padick is also Randall Flagg, but you can’t mention Randall Flag (who also appears in The Stand and The Eyes of the Dragon). Once again, it’s a shock when you have to unweave it all…
CA: And yeah, Fox, for instance, won’t want to sell the characters they have the rights to, back to Marvel. So the chances of Spider-man turning up with the Avengers is remote.
Jock: I’ve heard that the Avengers was just SUCH a valuable property, that deals might be done with a shake of hands for cameos as it’s good for everyone… I do remember when you first see The Joker in the Batman film. He’s stood there with his mask as the camera moves behind him and you can see a Spider-man movie poster on the wall… Did you see that Joe Carnahan sizzle-reel/trailer for his proposed Daredevil with a 70s’ New York/Times Square feel? That was amazing…
JM: Hollywood certainly isn’t over its love-affair with comics. IS it a fad, a trend… or is it just a natural extension of the fact that the film industry looks to other, proven, products on which to launch its own?
PN: Comics are like the new trend, but other than various original screenplays…you have to remember that before the 60s, in the 30s and 40s through to the 60s, Hollywood would option novels. There’s not just one office somewhere where they put all the writers in and say ‘Come up with ideas for us…’ They are always pulling from outside sources. Every once in a while there are a couple of guys that will come up with original ideas, but most of the time they are pulling ideas from everywhere else…
Jock: Comics ARE a visual medium. It would be wrong to say it sweepingly, but I’ve found that (executives) will often need an image to help them understand what a film is about. If I tried to explain the Hulk to you, that’s one thing… but if you have forty years of history with visuals, it’s already set-up. You can see what it is. I think that’s why comics are so picked-from… you can see it’s all there. Fifty years of storyboards…
JM: Of course, just because a comic has been successful, it doesn’t mean that it’ll work as a film. Is there a risk for the original creative people as much as the studio that makes their own version?
PN: Well, Jonah Hex was disappointing, but I had just worked on the comics just before then. Nobody came to me and said ‘Oh, YOUR movie bombed!’ or anything. I wasn’t attached so personally.
CA: Quite a few years back, they got to the pilot stage of another creator-owned property I had called Nobody. They actually made a pilot and, again, it was so bad that it never went to series. I do remember thinking, pragmatically, that it didn’t really affect me. They sent me the pilot and the DVD had something wrong with the encoding and I only got about three-quarters of the way in before it self-destructed (laughs). In a way I was quite relieved!“They put a lot of stuff in front of test audiences and they do all the questionnaires and have a strange little system. It used to be that a pilot would go out regardless and if they got the viewing figures it would go to series. Now, it’s the test-audience and Hollywood gets cold-feet if it’s not about 75% positive… Nowadays they make tons of pilots that you never see. How many billions get spent?
PN: Pilot-wise, I watched the Last Resort pilot and thought it was amazing, but I was thinking to myself, ‘This is going to be cancelled’ because it was great for a two-hour movie, but for a series you have to have momentum going and carry it through a season. By the second episode, they didn’t know where to go. It was a premise not a series.
RF: A young guy I met who works for a studio was talking about this kind of thing and he was explaining the reasoning behind getting a Friday the 13th Part 25… it has a guaranteed audience and some guaranteed sales. It’s not about taking those kinds of risks. What is safe to do… in the eyes of the people watching the bottom-line? It’s all financial…
IN PART TWO, we'll talk about finding the best medium, the rise of the internet and what Disney buying Star Wars means for the future... CLICK HERE...
