‘Star Wars’ Setback: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Duo David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Exit Trilogy

in Movies
‘Star Wars’ Setback: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Duo David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Exit Trilogy
https://deadline.com/2019/10/star-wars-setback-game-of-thrones-duo-david-benioff-d-b-weiss-exit-trilogy-1202771184/
Comments
Nice try.
They just better make sure that whatever they make next is great.
To anyone who thinks Star Wars has a toxic fan base, you realize we fans are also fans of other franchises which you would not characterize as toxic, right? How would you explain that?
At least they brought in Feige, who would not have tossed out the entire EU and killed Luke Skywalker, destroying all hope we'd get anything close to the EU. Feige rewards fandom. I'm hopeful.
Some examples:
"Dammit. She's in love with him,"
Jon and Sansa look at each other. They both failed geography.”
“That’s weird. But so is the new king.”
“Hard to argue with omniscience,”
Every writer is different BUT as someone who has both written fanfic and original stuff, they have demonstrated to me they don't have much writing ability on their own. They're not terrible but they're middling. I'm not excited for anything original they want to write. They're network television good.
Edit: Oh, I kind of jumped one thought ahead of you there in responding to what I think the comeback is, which is that they will theoretically do better with their own original characters and plot. That's not how it works, in my own admittedly limited experience. Not to mention they had 4-5 seasons consulting with George to get to know those characters.
@RyanReeseman
They made a bunch of changes, small and large, that definitely improved the show. I put most of the blame on how things turned out on GRRM. After the third book, he hit the brakes hard and slowed things down to a snail's pace. One example is he wrote 364 chapters (364 might be a slightly inflated number) of Brienne and Pod just walking and maybe two of them were decent. Anything after book three was unfilmable as a tv series, especially what the massive audience had come to expect from the show. GRRM himself said that it would have taken multiple more seasons of the TV show to translate what he was writing to the screen. I don't think anyone involved in the show was all that interested in doing ten seasons of meandering plots.
A lot of the best episodes of the show were also not based on book material. Hardholme was only referenced in the books, The Door isn't going to be the same, The Spoils of War was the Ds, The Winds of Winter was the Ds, and most people's favourite episode, The Battle of the Bastards, was the Ds.
Yeah, they fucked up the final two seasons, but they were also responsible for some of the best TV ever made and don't deserve the massive amounts of hate they're getting. But hey, what's the Internet there for if not to hate things?
That being said, it was definitely the right decision. It was an unwinnable situation. It's like how Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Ron Howard were all smart enough to say, "Thanks, but no thanks," when Lucas tried to get them to direct the prequels.
- "Benioff and Weiss emerged from their public hibernation to attend a panel at the Austin Film Festival, and finally answer some questions from fans. The two were brutally honest, essentially admitting that they were never fully qualified for the job from the beginning."
- "Benioff and Weiss still aren’t sure why George R.R. Martin entrusted them with his magnum opus, as the two didn’t have any comparable experience, or even an appreciation of the book’s themes. (...) In fact, Benioff once said: “Themes are for eighth-grade book reports,” which tells you all you need to know about his dedication to the art of storytelling."
- "The two went on to admit that they had absolutely no idea how to work with costume designers (kind of important for a fantasy series), and described their experience making Thrones as “an expensive film school.”"
- "The two never went online to read criticisms of the show from fans, who clearly understood the books better than they did. Well, Benioff searched online, once, but the results “upset him,” so he never did it again."
Well, this answers a few questions!