his promises really mean nothing to me. so far he's batting a thousand with his record of really bad movies, filled with plot holes and stupid twists and turns that make no sense. his CG Porn is nice to look at, but other than that his films are a mess. Caesar says, "Thumbs down. Why is this guy still making movies?"

Somethings are better left alone.
I myself am a huge Asimov fan, and while I, Robot is a decent movie on its own terms, it's not a good adaptation of the source material. I don't think Emmerich, or anyone for that matter, can produce a Foundation film without changing major elements in the story so it can fit into the film medium.

Cyrus the simple answer is that his movies make money, and without making money there would be no movies or books , etc unless you want to go back to a barter system.

Ughh! The only adaptation I want to see is Ridley Scott's Forever War. Roland, please stay away from Foundation.

And maybe someone can go back and make a decent robot movie: Caves of Steel, perhaps?

Thumbs down means live...

I actually think this will be fun, It"s just a bunch of short stories anyway so they have to change things

There's a good reason why the most prolific writer in history has had so few films made from his works, he dealt with ideas, not actions, and ideas are hard to make into on-screen explosions. As much as I'd love to see Asimov's stories somehow adapted for the screen, I know realistically it probably can't be done very well no matter who writes, directs, acts or operates the boom mike. Especially the big stuff like the Foundation Trilogy.

If someone really wants to try to get a movie from Asimov's work, go for the short stories. The right person could make Nightfall work (though it hasn't happened yet.) I've always thought The Martian Way would make a great movie as well.

I enjoyed I, Robot.

While it was not the stories that were included in the collection by the same name, It took on the topic with, if anything, a more serious flavor.

I just finished rereading I, Robot last week - the first time I read it since seeing the movie - and was intrigued by how the stories all point in the same direction. They all point to the unintended consequences of the three Laws.

Certainly it was a fresh story 'based on' Asimov's work, but I certainly enjoyed it.

I think Foundation is probably not the best choice for a movie --- The Gods Themselves or The End Of Eternity would be better choices.

All my humble opinions, of course.

Dean

I had a bad feeling as soon as I read the phrase "living under the rule of the Galactic Empire." The whole point of the books is they are set AFTER the empire falls! So WTF, either Emmerich hasn't read the books yet or SFW hires writers who can't be bothered.

My favorite trilogy of science fiction books i have owned since the 1960's.i would love to see someone do a real adaptation of this series but i wonder if hollywood can pull it off.one good point is making a trilogy of films so each of the first 3 books get a movie.
rather than think of what characters last thru the story just do the books like asimov wrote them.
the science fiction community would love and respect anyone who took the time to do a true adaptationof his works.

Why does he have to consolidate the characters?

It is quite possible to make each of the short stories into a separate section within the movie. That way you stay as close to the books as possible.

Yes, there will not be a single major character (except maybe Hari Seldon himself) but so what.

They did it with Twilight Zone, which was quite succcesful, so why not with this.
You just need to find the right actors, willing to fuel this movie, instead of their egos.

Twilight Zone: The Movie made less than 30 million dollars. I'd suspect a Foundation movie would have to make a little more than that.

You can safely blame SyFyWire for that blunder, BillSays.

I wonder if the Foundation books would work better on television. If you look at the mini-series of Roots, that is an epic story that does not have one single character going all the way through it either. And it worked beautifully.

CAVES OF STEEL !! That is just perfect for a series of movies.Sci fi, buddy cop movie !

Iso: Not sure why you think SFW is at fault since you provide nothing to back the assertion (and of course, anonymity adds no credibility ;).

I do agree with you about the miniseries adaptation though, I've long thought if a producer could put the right package together, financing, budget, international broadcaster commitment and the like, then say 20+ hours would be vastly more satisfying than two-three times three. Even the 11-ish hours of the LotR extended editions wasn't really enough.

At say $3 million per hour that's in the neighborhood of $75 million done right. Using quality but low salary lead actors, film in Vancouver or Central/Eastern Europe and take advantage of current much lower cost SFX...

Would be awesome.

Uh-oh. Give it up, Emmerich. Even if you adapt the Foundation Trilogy very well and have the best actors performing the characters very, very well, YOU WILL BORE THE AUDIENCE TO SUICIDE. No, this is NOT to say that the books are boring, just the amount of dialogue that Asimov uses to tell his story is too great to keep a movie audience interested. And you, Mr. Emmerich could probably NEVER keep such a lofty promise anyway. GIVE IT UP!

The Bicentennial Man was pretty well done. I too, am a huge fan of Asimov. I own a couple dozen of his books in hardback. I also have had my share of disappointment with movies or TV shows made from books. Seeker, anyone? Ack!! I would love to see an adaptation of Foundation. Give the guy a chance! And, by the by, Independence Day was a great sci-fi action flick.

@Flex:
I was more thinking of the original series by Rod Serling.

Yes a mini-series or a 1 season series, without a single main character would work just as well.
Probably better, since you can insert cliff-hangers ;->

I honestly can't believe that someone is actually going to try and adapt what in my opinion, is one of the greatest sets of short stories ever written in the SciFi (NOT SYFY) genre. It's just not possible to do it right. Not unless you did one movie expanding on EACH of the shorts. The problem is that Hollywood doesn't really care what kind of schlock they put out now as long as it makes money. There is no art left in it. First Starship Troopers, then I Robot. These are just too examples. And when will Hollywood realize it sucks and stop using so much cruddy CGI. It's just not believable when you mix it with live action. It just makes the movie look cheesier than an old Toho flick. The only movies that even came close to pulling it off with CGI were the Star Wars films. I am afraid to see what they would do with something like Lensman, or Ringworld, or even Rama.

I've got faith in Roland. After all.... he DID create "Stargate"!! Give a guy some credit. Even the best filmmakers have made weak movies. Although I didn't like Godzilla or Independence Day I did enjoy The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC, and 2012 looks like it will compare as one of the better disaster epics made (considering most are pretty bad anyway). A bit of advice: don't read the book until AFTER you see the movie..... because worthy adaptations are EXTREMELY rare (maybe LotR is the only excellent adaptation, EVER?)

LotR is probably the example to draw from, esp. given that it was not that faithful to the source material, Jackson was willing to cut or change where it helped the tempo or made the plot more interesting for a typical movie audience (Aragorn was far more conflicted in the movies than he ever was in the books).

However, I doubt seriously that a Foundation movie would be very good, particularly with Emmerich as a director. Stargate is as close as he's gotten to serious science fiction (and it was very, very good), but most of his recent stuff has been very, very poorly done.

Best choices for Asimov books converted to movies are the Robot books (particularly those with Elijah Bailey). The Mule *might* make a good movie but there would be too much backstory for it to work.

If this was a regular series (not just mini) project by Moore and Eick, that would be great!

As for a continuous character, didn't they read the later novels? Daneel Olivaw!

It has been a while since I read the Trilogy, but I do remember that it was a faster read than most, and I am of a mind that this story could be easily compressed into 1 longer or 2 shorter films (TV Miniseries would be best, like the Earthsea trilogy did).
Otherwise one gets too dragged out with the 3 books into 3 films (LOTR had much more substance to work with) or too compressed that it is hard to follow.
Time will tell how they treat it, though.-kh

The question that's been ignore so far is will he attempt to integrate both Asimov's own 4 sequels to the original trilogy as well as well as the official ones written after his death by Brin/Benford/Bear? If he's planning a trilogy and already conflating characters, he'd have to do something with those other 2 movies.

What about the two twists revealed in Foundation's Edge and Foundation & Earth? Will the discovery at the end of Foundation & Earth be foreshadowed in his movies?

Emmerich has entered into the legendary
realm. This will be very difficult to do. It
will be funny though if they get it to screen
and people will see how much Asimov
shaped things:)

@BillSaysThis: I think he put the blame on SFW because, well, it wasn't a quote from Roland Emmerich. It was a wire writer adding some context to the story and misrepresented the period.

According to Asimov, Foundation was set against a backdrop of the "decline and fall of the Galactic Empire".

The Foundation Trilogy has been a misnomer for years, describing the first consolidation of the original stories. Since then we have prequels, sequels and inserted chapters by Asimov and other approved authors and the blending with the Robot stories ... how do you do justice by going back to the original stories and apparently ignoring the later revelations?

Look on the bright side... at least it isn't Uwe Boll...

It's kind of hard to believe that this will really only be the second big budget, big screen adaptation of any of Asimov's works. Bicentennial Man (which was okay in spite of Robin Williams) is the only other.

The thing you need to remember about I, Robot is that the movie wasn't even based on Asimov's work. It was an original screenplay that the studio got their hands on and since they had the rights to I, Robot, they threw in the three laws, named a character Susan Calvin and slapped Asimov's name on it. I thought the movie was okay, but I don't consider it an Asimov movie.

I've always thought the Foundation story would make a great mini-series. If Sci-Fi can devote the resources to the 20-hour epic Taken (which I never made it through) I wish they would undertake something like this rather than hand it over to someone like Emerich.

I admit, I love Stargate, and I even like Independence Day. I consider it a guilty pleasure. But stuff like 10,000 B.C. was so bad I laughed all the way through it (as did most of the rest of the audience). And don't even get me started about The Day After Tomorrow. I mean, come on, people being chase by COLD AIR!

I'll just keep my fingers crossed when it comes to Foundation.

An assurance from a person trying to convince us to see his work isn't much of an assurance.

So, so many people have said they won't screw up something, or try to instil confidence by arguing that they 'get' the material, then they ruin it anyway.

Just look at Silent Hill. Avery and Gans kept saying that they understood the material, and that they loved it. Then they took enemies from the second game and put them in a film where their symbollism made absolutely no sense whatsoever. And they screwed with the story.

I see absolutely no reason to put stock in the promises of people who want us to view their material. If they were worthy of the claim, they wouldn't need to make it in the first place.

The 2004 movie was an adaptation of "I, Robot" the way "Star Trek" was an adaptation of "Hamlet."

Hari Sheldon wasn't a central character?
They are going to use a composite??? How does a composite stay alive for 1,000 years/?

The Foundation Series is my favorite books and it looks like they have alreayd ruined it.

@ oneeye: you are mistaken sir. in ancient Rome the thumbs down is the sign for the gladiator to kill-as in the sword going into the body. a thumb to the side is the sign for life, while a thumb up is a sign for an indecent gesture, (i think you know which). take it from a graduate student in ancient history at Harvard-STOP GETTING YOUR HISTORY FROM THE HISTORY CHANNEL.

He's the wrong choice for this one. If any should do it , it should be someone like Alex Proyas or Ridley Scott or Maybe Peter Jackson.

Roland Emerich "promises" not to ruin Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy. Uh, huh. That ranks right up there with "the check's in the mail".

My first thoughts when I read this were NO NO NO NO.............After thinking about it awhile is still say NO NO NO NO.

I've been wanting to see an adaption of Foundation for a long time. After Peter Jackson pulled off LOTR I actually started to think that maybe someone could pull it off. But Emmerich? Only choice worse than him would be Micheal Bay. I don't see any way he could pull this off.

Oooo, yes, The End of Eternity. It would make a terific movie adaptation: it contains one hero and one love interest, and IIRC one bad guy who isn't one-dimensional. It's also full of action and ideas that are easily explained without too much exposition.

The guy who wrote and directed Primer, a very smart sleeper movie about time travel, could pull off the complexities of the Foundation stories.

I would love to see an adaption of the Foundation series although his knowledge of the series is lacking is he thinks there is no character(s) to be found throughout the series. He forgets that Lazarus Long (originally written in Methuselah's Child) as well as the robot from "I Robot" a contiguous figures (if mostly in the background) in all of the stories.
If he does not know that much of the storyline then I have low expectations for the film adaptation

kenshiro,
Lazarus Long is a Heinlein character, not Asimov. I'd love to see someone do a decent adaptation of some of RAH's material (please Cthulhu, no more horrific Starship Trooper ripoffs!!)!

whoa - consolidated characters?! Uh uh. Why. There is a throughline character to the whole series - Hari Seldon. Okay he may be dead for most of it but his recorded messages to the foundationers are what hangs it all together - his appearances confirm whether the characters of the time have got it right or whether things are spiralling out of control. I'd like to see a movie that used Hari as the continuing character without the need to blend characters and plot lines. Besides there are enough 'continuing characters' to run a kind of tag-team throughline for a series of movies Bayta and Arkady Darrel, Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow, and the Mule carries much of book three. Sheesh, it's all there for any screenwriter with the wit to do it.

Speaking of Foundation adaptations - the BBC radio 4 play is a fantastic one - eight hours and much of the dialogue is word for word from the page.

Strictly speaking, I have yet to see a movie that's a spot-on adaptation of any novel. With time constraints and in an effort to appeal to a wider audience than what would normally be attracted by the book, certain artistic license with the story has to be taken. Just so long as the overall theme is faithful to the original, people should be satisfied.

On a personal note, I think Emmerich is a good candidate to direct the trilogy. All of his movies have a 50's flavor to them (similar to the old monster movies that aired during that time) and that's the time frame that the original series of Foundation novels came out. I would say to give him half a chance. You might be surprised. I swear, society these days is so angst ridden, they're willing to find fault with ANYthing

If you don't want to ruin it, then please don't turn a bunch of separate stories into a single story only vaguely related to the original, as happened in the film adaptation of I Robot.

Emmerich...AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Hack!!. "Foundation" is way too far above his head. He will completely fumble this project. None, NONE of his films can even come close to the upper tier. "Stargate" was riddled with holes and "2012" is a "mash-up" of every disaster pic you've ever seen rolled into one horrific disaster of a film.

Let's start spreading the blame now...Sony Pictures, Roland Emmerich and whoever sold the rights to "Foundation" without more control over who was allowed to handle the material.

You need a unique approach for Asimov's works. If you've ever seen the full, and I mean full, length Director's cut of David Lynch's "Dune" where he allows us to hear the inner thoughts of the characters...that's the approach. "Foundation" is a chess game, not a video game, Roland!!! Take your time...a slow pace with peaks of action. Three films, not one. Don't compress too many characters. Keep it mostly dark. Society was at the brink of 10,000 years of medieval times. Develop Harry Seldon fully! He's the center, the father figure, the engineer and architect. We need to know him as this was his master plan...until it wasn't ;)

Stargate good? What are you people smoking? It was a mediocre hack job that promised an epic story, but ended up feeling like it was filmed in somebody's back yard. Everything else this man did was somewhere between craptacular and just plain shitty. He is the Uwe Boll with a budget, and he is unquestionably the worst choice for this project. I'm sure that Dr. Asimov is spinning in his grave as the news of Emmerich's involvement trickles out.