Boycott The Seeker?

Livejournal’s Cleolinda Jones encourages The Dark is Rising fans to boycott the film adaption because of the myriad changes the movie has made to the book’s plotline. I usually think people get far too worked up about this sort of thing (OMG Arwen has linez, oh noes!) and I haven’t read the books, but the changes made in The Seeker do seem pretty drastic.

Plus, Cleolinda brings up a very good point:

What if The Dark Is Rising adaptation (“adaptation”) is a hit?

Oh, the studios will say, you can still make a ton of money, but you can do whatever you want? You can change the story and put in pointless but trendy family conflicts, love interests, younger characters? You can squeeze action into bizarre places and completely miss the point of the story? You can whittle it down until it hardly resembles the original at all? Wow, this is really convenient! All this time, we were busting our collective ass for nothing! Why bother actually trying to do the work of translating a beloved property to a different medium? We can just use a known title to sell people a completely different story, and it doesn’t even have to be any good!

So fans… What say you?

6 Replies to “Boycott The Seeker?

  1. All I’m wondering is why you would replace a unique, intriguing title like “The Dark is Rising” with something lame like “The Seeker?” Are they hoping HP fen will get confused and think it’s a spinoff?

    I mean, isn’t the point of trying to cash in on a book to… cash in on the book?

  2. I quote Cleolinda’s own HP3 parody back at her:

    HERMIONE: If you want to kill Harry, you

  3. I’ve already been telling everyone I know not to see the movie.

    Although there’s a perverse part of me that thinks it would be funny to see how they try to do the sequels since they’re eliminating the Arthurian legend references from the first one.

    I do think it’s fairly telling that the movie started out as “The Dark is Rising” then got changed to “The Seeker: The Dark is Rising” and now is simply “The Seeker” — they don’t mention the name of the books in the commercials at all anymore, just hinting vaguely that the movie was based off a “Newbury Award winning series.”

  4. Alas, all this might accomplish is publicize a movie which, otherwise, the public probably wouldn’t even notice.

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