Sorry to both jump on my soap box or throw a little conspiracy theory in here, there is no proof of this idea nor do I particularly want to jab at WB if they are really just putting EQ on the back burner and will pick it up later.
It seems really convinient timing. I heard rumor of a live action Hobbit as soon or just before the third LotR came out. Its been rolling around for long time. Why they waited so long on it is a puzzle to me, unless they were trying to maximize returns on the LotR movies, initial DVD releases, initial Blue Ray releases, Special Edition releases in bith formats, Extended editions of both formats, Special Extended versions in both formats, and twelve hour special extended directors cut of all three movies in both formats (i habe a fo-worker that helped this along, buying each version in each format...). But whatever the reason, they knew about it for a long, long time. The Hobbit is schedualed to come out THIS year, and I had seen a teaser out days before the EQ NO announcment. Even though EQ was penciled in for next year, I dont k.ow how it would have been able to come out even close to the second movie, seeings as they already have enough done on Hobbit to know that its going to take two movies to run, specific dates set for their release, and teasers/trailers already in circulation, while EQ hadnt even had the format nailed down.
It seems to me more likely that they *might* have been just holding onto the movie rights so that no one else could beat them to the punch, and reduce Hobbit's performance to second fiddle. Hobbit is a garanteed cash cow, even if it sucks, but would stand to lose more if people felt like it was thrown out to ride the wake of another fanasy series.
Well, like I said, crazy consiracy theory, but its been eating at me.
The reason I'm not quite sold on this as a theory is...
First: LOTR was originally New Line Cinema, not Warner Brothers. At the time LOTR came out, WB didn't own the rights to The Hobbit.
Second: IIRC, it's not that there were rumors of a live-action Hobbit soon after LOTR came out; but rather, there was a lot of vocalized wishful-thinking in that regard. Although TH is a prequel, in the aftermath of LOTR and its massive success, it made sense for people to think, "can there ever be a sequel?" And the answer is, "No, but there's an obvious prequel waiting" (and nobody of course meant the Silmarillion; to which film rights don't exist anyway, and the Tolkien estate appears to be disinclined to sell those, as it wasn't completely enamored with the LOTR film treatment).
However, just about all the talk about a possible Hobbit at the time assumed that it wasn't worth doing if Peter Jackson didn't do it. And it seemed fairly understandable that he and his team were utterly exhausted after ROTK came out. Even if the LOTR experiment made it clear that it was both possible and profitable to front the money for such a giant production... you have to have a production team willing to do it, and whom you are willing to trust to do it. PJ and team had just proved they could... but for a long while, they weren't willing.
Third: I just can't see any way their calculations would have thought that an EQ movie coming out would have endangered The Hobbit. I think it's the other way around: WB thought The Hobbit would make people even less interested in EQ. The Hobbit itself, as a book, is far more famous than ElfQuest; and then there's the entire publicity surrounding LOTR and its success. The Hobbit is seen as a sort of sequel to one of the most successful movie franchises of all time. IMO there is just no way it loses any audience to even a very popularly-received ElfQuest movie coming out 6 months ahead of it.
I also have a somewhat hard time believing that studios think that way. It usually seems that they think the opposite. Look at both last summer and this coming summer: Marvel Studios puts out TWO superhero films in 2011, banking on the idea that one will whet people's appetites for the other, not that one will cause people to skip the other. And their gamble pays off, even though 2011's summer also had other comics-derived films competing with Marvel's two, in addition to several other gigantic franchise films. No, Marvel's Thor and Captain America didn't do business in the realms of POTC4 or Transformers 3. But the two films did well, even in a summer that everybody agreed was over-saturated with films of that type.
One thing to take away from that is that Marvel played the synergy game well. WB seems to have played it poorly, given how poorly-received Green Lantern was. But GL's poor reception had more to do with abysmal critical reception and word-of-mouth and a muddled advertising campaign, not with audience saturation with superheroes (if the latter was true, then Captain America should have also tanked, and it didn't).
So I guess, in the end, I'm still saying that it seems foolish for WB to regard ElfQuest as a competitor with The Hobbit (they aren't apples to apples), instead of seeing it as an opportunity to keep audiences interested in the fantasy genre, with franchise films released in both summer and at Christmas.
And as you point out: EQ was so early in its production process that they had an option to simply take their time with getting it into production (rather than rushing it, which I think we can all agree would be undesirable anyway), and having an EQ movie aimed to come out in 2014, after the second Hobbit film is done. It's certainly not too early for a studio to be planning for the 2014 season; Marvel Studios already is.
See Jeedai's post above, though -- WB makes some decisions that, to me, look really weird, anyway. So this decision also just looks really weird; but it's of a piece with other weird-looking decisions they've made about their properties.
In the end, though, I dont think anyone is going to touch it with a ten foot pole until Hobbit winds down in a few years, unless they figure out a style that tears 'Hollywood' a new... Er, way of looking at things.
What Hollywood overall seems to have proven time and again is that it WANTS to imitate success... not avoid what seems to be successful due to over-saturation of the market.
The Hobbit coming out did not stop two other studios from bringing out *competing* Snow White movies in 2012 -- even though they are much more obviously in thematic competition with The Hobbit concept than ElfQuest is ("a large cast of dwarves" + "high fantasy genre"). It will be interesting to see which SW movie is left standing... but at least they were "smart" enough to bring them out in the spring, far away from TH's release.
All that said... I still don't want to see an EQ feature film as much as I want to see it given a high-quality animated series treatment. Where it would not be in competition with any fantasy-movie franchises; nor, giving the timing, would it be in competition with the new "Avatar: The Legend of Korra" series. Rather, I see that as potentially setting up audience appetites for a property like ElfQuest in long-format.
I would love nothing more than to hear that that direction was at least being explored.
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Topic: Warner: No ElfQuest movie. (Read 13896 times)