A few years ago, my boss instructed me to write a two-page film treatment of one of our novels, All You Need Is Kill, to help our LA office VIZ Productions maybe sell it to the movies. Well, a few million bucks and five screenwriters (including a $3m payday for Dante Harper for the initial spec script, which was actually fairly close to the book) and innumerable drafts and then Tom Cruise's input and some reshoots and the introduction of new characters and a name change, we have this:
It's not terrible. Pretty neat, actually. Less boom-boom than I was worried about. I joked on the dayjob blog that rather than "based on All You Need Is Kill", we might say that the film is "thematically adjacent to All You Need Is Kill." Yes, it's whitewashed, but given the sales of the books and the orders coming in for the mass-market tie-in edition, the film remains a great commercial for the novel!
In other news, I have a new essay up on BullSpec, about my new novel Love Is the Law (which is under eight bucks, and fits in Christmas stockings, btw), in which I explain why it's actually like The Alchemist.
It's not terrible. Pretty neat, actually. Less boom-boom than I was worried about. I joked on the dayjob blog that rather than "based on All You Need Is Kill", we might say that the film is "thematically adjacent to All You Need Is Kill." Yes, it's whitewashed, but given the sales of the books and the orders coming in for the mass-market tie-in edition, the film remains a great commercial for the novel!
In other news, I have a new essay up on BullSpec, about my new novel Love Is the Law (which is under eight bucks, and fits in Christmas stockings, btw), in which I explain why it's actually like The Alchemist.
