A new Earthsea adaptation could help us forget the crappy SCIFI Channel miniseries
We might soon be in for a return trip to the archipelago of Earthsea, the setting of Ursula K. Le Guin’s famed epic fantasy series. According to Deadline, A24, the studio behind such film projects as Ex Machina, The Witch, and Midsommer, has picked up the rights for a new television adaptation of the project.
We’ve heard this story before. Way back in 2004, just as Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was exiting theaters, the SCIFI Channel (which has since dropped the article and the modifier and rebranded as Syfy) decided it was time to jump on the epic fantasy bandwagon, releasing a two-part miniseries adaptation of the first two books in Le Guin’s enduring series, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan.
It didn’t go well.
Critics noted that the series featured a cast of white actors—Le Guin had pointedly (this was the 1960s, remember) created a world that featured a host of non-white characters— while the author herself penned some harsh words for the project, saying it presented, “a far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned.”
“When I looked over the script, I realized the producers had no understanding of what the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence.”
A couple of years later, in 2006 (in Japan, anyway) another adaptation arrived, this time in the form of an animated film. It also earned mixed reviews from critics, becoming a rare misfire for Studio Ghibli, the home of My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and famed animator Hayao Miyazaki—who was too busy adapting Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle to take the reins as director, despite having pursued the rights to the franchise in earnest in the 1980s (when Le Guin, no fan of “Disney-type animation,” refused, Miyazaki moved on to creating his own stories, which was probably a net victory for his fans, if not Le Guin devotees).
Instead, Miyazaki’s son Goro—a relative newcomer to the animation industry—led the production, which everyone seems to agree wasn’t up to dad’s lofty standards. Le Guin noted that “much of [the animated film] was beautiful,” she also criticized it for departing from the books. “It does not have the delicate accuracy of Totoro or the powerful and splendid richness of detail of Spirited Away. The imagery is effective but often conventional.”
More than a decade later, the television and streaming video industries are awash in new projects, leading studios to look to bookshelves for the next potential hit franchise. With the recent end of HBO’s Game of Thrones, it seemed like only a matter of time before someone would dust off the Earthsea stories and give them another go.
That’s now happened, and A24 has on their hands a project with considerable baggage, one with as much potential to excite viewers as to turn them off before they even see the first trailer. (An early response on Twitter: “I just hope it’s not as bad as the Ghibli version.”)
I’m an eternal optimist, and despite past precedent, I’m hopeful for this particular project. For one, Le Guin sold the film option prior to her death last year, and having accepted the author’s blessing, producer Jennifer Fox is well aware of the importance of the series within the fantasy genre. “She is second only to Tolkien in influence in this genre, and before she died last year, she agreed to put her most beloved work in my hands,” Fox said. “This project is, therefore, a sacred trust and priority for me as well as an opportunity to create an iconic piece of American culture.”
What’s more, A24 has a pretty solid track record when it comes to genre films, chalking up home runs (or at least interesting doubles) with Hereditary, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, The Witch, and Ex Machina, among others.
But there’s also an increased attitude amongst studios, screenwriters, and directors that sometimes, the authors who wrote the books that they’re adapting actually knew what they were doing the first time around. Projects like Syfy’s (and now Prime’s) The Expanse, HBO’s Game of Thrones, Netflix’s Altered Carbon, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale are projects that stem far closer to their source material than many earlier book-to-film projects.
Heck, Neil Gaiman even took on writing and show-running duties for the adaptation of Good Omens, a book he co-authored with the late Terry Pratchett; by some assessments, the show matches or exceeds the book (the spot-on casting of Michael Sheen and David Tennant certainly helps matters along).
This feels, in part, to be a consequence of the success of Game of Thrones, which benefited from its showrunners’ deeper understanding of George R.R. Martin’s books (not to mention Martin’s close involvement in the early years), and also demonstrated that audiences will in fact tune in for complicated stories of politics, court intrigue, and magic. Studios are also finally paying more attention to how women and characters of color are portrayed, which bodes well for the prospects of the new Earthsea better representing the characters as they exist on the page.
Absent a script, a cast announcement, or trailers for the project, it’s impossible to say whether those confluences of factors will benefit a new adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea. But filmmakers have at least one useful bit of information to work from: when an adaptation is done thoughtlessly, and without regard for the source material, people will notice.
Hopefully, our return to the islands of Earthsea will live up to our memories of those original stories.