Davis Now at Helm of Martian Chronicles

Paramount has optioned Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

The Hollywood Reporter story says John Davis will produce. His company, David Entertainment, has Gulliver’s Travels, Marmaduke and Predator on its resume.

Martian Chronicles was an NBC miniseries in 1980, written by Richard Matheson and featuring Rock Hudson. Since then Steven Spielberg and several others have had turns trying to get it filmed.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

7 thoughts on “Davis Now at Helm of Martian Chronicles

  1. I would hesitate to use Gulliver’s Travels & Marmaduke as a sign of quality.

    Gulliver’s Travels:
    “A star-studded re-imagining of a classic piece of literature that shoots for the moon, aims for laughs and misses both targets by a country mile.”
    http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gullivers-travels-2010/

    Marmaduke:
    “Fans of the single-panel cartoon that has run in newspapers since the 1950s will find plenty to disappoint them in this live-action adaptation.”

  2. The only worse person this project could have been assigned to is Michael Bay. Sorry it slipped through Frank Darabont’s fingers.

  3. Attempts to pull a single storyline out of a collection of separate stories usually fare badly. But… I didn’t think “I, Robot” was too bad, so you never know.

  4. To quote the press release, “In three structures, the stories dealt with . . . ” Yeah, right. He couldn’t even cope with a simple compare and contrast, the big/small, sections of Gulliver’s Travels.

    Okay, Gulliver’s Travels is often thought of as a childrens book because of the Lilliput section, which is still published (with the urinating and such taken out) as a separate book. You could make a good movie with that. If you want to go up a rating or two you could make a good movie including the vulgar parts. But Davis seems to have used only the vulgar parts, added more, and created an amazingly stupid framing when, again, the one in the book could have been adapted extremely well.

    “Seems” because until now I’ve done my best to ignore the movie entirely. Thanks loads, Michael, for causing me to read the Wikipedia entry. I still could have coped with it but that framing part . . . !

  5. Sorry, everything after the first paragraph was supposed to be identified as pontificating.

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