Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series on Apple TV+

[Astronuc]

Previously, there was a possibility that HBO would make a series,
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/hbo-will-make-asimovs-foundation.781302/

but, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article...the-unfilmable-sci-fi-epic-now-on-our-screens

Filmmaker David S Goyer was working alongside James Cameron as a scriptwriter on Terminator: Dark Fate, when he received the news that the rights to the science-fiction classic Foundation by visionary author Isaac Asimov had become available. Was he interested?

Goyer was introduced to Foundation on his 13th birthday when given a copy of the original trilogy by his father, with whom he had a troubled relationship. Many years later, his terminally ill father asked Goyer – by then the screenwriter of the Blade trilogy and collaborator with Christopher Nolan on the Dark Knight trilogy – if he'd done anything right as a parent. "You instilled in me a love for science fiction and fantasy, and I've gone on to build a career around that," Goyer told him. One of the last things they ever discussed was whether Goyer would get the opportunity to film Foundation, which his father regarded as the greatest work of science fiction.

So, when Goyer was told four years ago that the rights were once again in play, he took the night to think about it but his answer was never really in doubt. He pitched it to Apple TV+ as "a 1,000-year chess game between Hari Seldon and the Empire… All of the other characters are being utilised as pawns by one side or the other. But in chess, if a pawn makes it to the opposing side, it becomes a queen, and those shifting power dynamics can happen in our story." And part of the solution to the problems presented by the complexity and scale of the work is to tell the story via long-form television – the first season has 10 episodes – rather than to try to compress it into a movie or even a trilogy of movies, as previous attempts have done.

Will he pull it off?

 

[Dr Wu]

Yikes, I'm shuddering already. It would be wrong to prejudge the film in this way, but I'm minded of the illustrated Folio edition of Foundation & Empire, in which the Mule is depicted pretty much as a regular bloke (p.230), which only goes to show that the illustrator responsible for this travesty never bothered to read the book. I wonder if the film's special effects will include palls of cigar smoke.

 

[snorkack]

Yikes, I'm shuddering already. It would be wrong to prejudge the film in this way, but I'm minded of the illustrated Folio edition of Foundation & Empire, in which the Mule is depicted pretty much as a regular bloke (p.230), which only goes to show that the illustrator responsible for this travesty never bothered to read the book. I wonder if the film's special effects will include palls of cigar smoke.

There ARE original illustrations of Mule available. The ones from Astounding, 1945.

 

[GTOM]

I have a guess that it will be like Expanse, nice scenes and acting, otherwise a total lame space pulp, barely similar to what Asimov imagined. But maybe i ll be wrong.