The Movie of the Book

With the recent announcement that the cinematic dream team of Peter Jackson, George Lucas, and Stephen Spielberg are teaming up to make a Tintin movie. I've been thinking a lot about movies based on books and comic books.

Most of them are terrible while the ones that are good often seem to be a studio's Oscar attempt. The initial buzz though, that's always good. When you hear that a book or comic that you really like is being made into a movie, you may worry about them messing it up, but you're also excited about the possibility that they won't. At least, that's how I feel, and I'm going to project this as a universal, because of the truthiness of the idea.

The converse is not the case, I don't know anyone who gets excited about the book of a movie they like. Photo books, or books with the script, maybe, but novelizations? No. Even the word novelization has a negative sound to me.

Movies of comics seem to be particularly bad and unlikely to stay true to the original story. Perhaps because the comic books are already such perfect storyboards, the movie makers feel a need to show that they're doing it themselves, and to resist the directorial force of the original book. At the same time, comic book movies are supposed to be summer blockbusters, and if there was ever a movie type that was driven by committee, it's these. Executives start with the property, and then they package everything good out of it.

But Tintin, well, it's hard to picture it as a summer blockbuster, and the people who are working on it have been pretty good in the past, so I have hopes. I'm fighting them though, because that disappointment when they make a terrible movie out of something you love can be painful.