Earlier today I read an article from SYFY that Apple TV+ will be launching a TV series based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. If you’ve read some of my other posts, you know that I consider Foundation to be one of the greatest Space Operas of all time, so the announcement that a company like Apple would be financing an adaptation of it was super exciting to me.

Then I remembered a little film called Ender’s Game. Released in 2013 and directed by one of the biggest hacks in Hollywood, Gavin Hood, the film was a complete and utter mess. Instead of looking at the themes of childhood innocence and, as my father eloquently put it, “the ugliness of adult minds”, it was clear that the studio was just trying to create a new Young Adult film series in the vein of The Hunger Games or Divergent or any of the other identical movies that came out during those years. This was clearly not the novel that I held dear to my heart; the novel that helped me get through some of those difficult early teenage years. This was something of an abomination of Orson Scott Card’s classic novel. Ender’s Game is still to this day the only movie that I have had to walk out of the theater because of how offensively bad it was and the utter disregard it paid to the source material.

Hollywood’s track record for adapting science fiction has been hit or miss over the years. Occasionally we get the greats, like Blade Runner and Jurassic Park. Sometimes we get the misses, like David Lynch’s version of Dune (For the record, I love that movie but it completely missed the point of the novel.) or Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. Then there are ones like Starship Troopers, where it was clear that Verhoeven read the book then tossed it out and decided to do his own thing to great effect. Seriously, if by some chance you haven’t seen Starship Troopers, it’s on Netflix right now and it is a brilliant commentary on fascism disguised as a popcorn blockbuster. It’s one of my favorite movies of all times, but it is nothing like its source material at all.

Later this year we have Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune coming out, which has me equal parts excited and nervous. Dune is one of those stories that is so good that it needs to be told on every medium that it can. SYFY nailed it with the miniseries back in the early 2000’s, despite having a budget of roughly ten dollars. On the other hand, David Lynch refused to put his name on his version of the film in the 80’s because of how poorly it was received. There’s a documentary called Jodorowsky’s Dune which recalls legendary french filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed attempt to translate the book to film. This is the fourth adaptation of Dune to be released, and with a 33% success rate on previous adaptations, it’s only natural to be a little apprehensive.

Luckily, from the stills we’ve seen so far, the amazing casti, and the interviews with Villeneuve, it looks like the latest Dune has all the makings to be a success. Recent years have seen studios be more careful with science fiction source materials as well, as seen with The Expanse and the 2015 SYFY miniseries Childhood’s End. With Apple putting some serious money behind Foundation, I am also cautiously optimistic about it as well. The best part is that if these films and series are successful, we will continue to see more and more classics adapted to film and television.

Number one on my list of Science Fiction books to be adapted is Frederick Pohl’s Gateway. What is a science fiction novel you would like to see come to the big or small screen? Let me know in the comments!