Isaac Asimov's Foundation
Trilogy Heads For TV
The attempt to turn Isaac Asimov's sprawling and hugely influential Foundation sci-fi book trilogy is one that has frustrated filmmakers and studios for decades. It's been mooted as a big screen project several times, but television – particularly the prestige channels that have cropped up on cable and via the streaming services – might be its natural home. Now Skydance has David Goyer and Josh Friedman taking a fresh crack at the idea on the small screen.
Foundation is partly the story of a mathematician called Hari Seldon, who has invented a science called "psychohistory" which can predict the future for large-scale human concerns (so not whether you'll meet a mysterious stranger, but definitely whether civilisation will survive the next millennium). Sheldon sees that the Galactic Empire in which he lives is going to collapse, and that there will be a period of barbarism lasting 30,000 years, but he also predicts that, with the help of psychohistory and a planet called Foundation filled with experts in sciences and philosophy from all over the Empire, that barbaric age can be reduced to 1,000 years. The first book, Foundation, tells the story of that planet. Follow-ups reveal that another planet, Second Foundation, was set up to hold the psychohistorians themselves in isolation, while further adventures revolve around the development of the plan.
This one has bounced between creative folk and companies in its time, landing at different points with such various names as Roland Emmerich and Westworld's Jonah Nolan, who was working up a version for HBO, but switched to focus on the Crichton adaptation instead. The big problems with making Foundation work on screen are manifold, but mostly because of its huge nature (it has been compared to Game Of Thrones in terms of scale), the lack of any sort of protagonist or standard narrative structure, and the fact that so much of it has been mined by movies and TV series that came after (hello, Star Wars), so it'll be tough to avoid looking like you're ripping them off.
Still, Goyer has a lot of genre experience with the likes of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies and more, and Friedman has written and produced a variety of projects – he's part of James Cameron's Avatar sequels team and is overseeing the TV version of Snowpiercer.
But maybe we'll finally see Asimov's work taken off that "unfilmmable" shelf, and whether it can truly work on screen...
A million sci-fi geeks cross fingers
Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, the New Line founders-turned-producers, clearly need a challenge in life since the studio they built was absorbed by the Absorbaloff off Doctor Who Warners. So what better idea than to tackle Isaac Asimov's Foundation, a story that takes place over a thousand years with a constantly-changing cast of characters, and is concerned mostly with the ever-popular subjects of history and maths?
The story is about the fall of a Galactic Empire (no, not that one) and its aftermath. A mathematician called Hari Seldon has invented a science called "psychohistory" which can predict the future for large-scale human concerns (so not whether you'll meet a mysterious stranger, but definitely whether civilisation will survive the next millenium). Sheldon sees that the Empire is going to collapse, and that there will be a period of barbarism lasting 30,000 years, but he also predicts that, with the help of psychohistory and a planet called Foundation filled with experts in sciences and philosophy from all over the Empire, that barbaric age can be reduced to 1,000 years. The first book, Foundation, tells the story of that planet.
But don't worry, the film's moving forward carefully. "This is not a script you knock out in six months," says Shaye, who's looking at doing the whole Foundation trilogy if they can get the first film to work - and with a prequel and a few books beyond the official trilogy, the franchise potential is definitely there. In fact, Prelude to Foundation is probably a lot more cinematic than its more famous elder brother.
The film was originally in development at Fox, which was trying to mash all three books together in one movie, but is now with Shaye and Lynne's Unique. Let's hope it turns out better than Shaye's sci-fi directing project The Last Mimzy. Although it's already ahead on title points...
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