Disney news seems to be split between the Acolyte folks continuing to complain publicly, and Mark Hamil inadvertently aiding Gina Carano’s lawsuit by making flagrantly political statements—all pretty boring. Let’s skip that.
In Disney adjacent industry news, Amazon is again being lambasted for their season two of Rings of Power. Those critics who are starting off the season recapping last season have been so brutal it’s hard to see how this got a second season. One supposes they had the viewers to justify the madness, but the complaints sound pretty much as they did for Shannara, except there’s no complaint about poor production values. Shannara suffered poor funding while RoP is anything but.
I would point out having read all these books long ago, that it’s actually hard to turn them into such disaster. In particular, Shannara had awesome characters we get a nice close view of. Menion Leah, Panamon Creel, Keltset, Allenon, all the Ohmsfords. . .every character rocked.
I’ll forever remember Flick Ohmsford taunting Menion, that if they had a master archer, he could tie a rope to an arrow, shoot it into the fallen bridge before them and pull it up before they’re overrun by evil baddies right behind. No one takes time to write dialog that good anymore. So what did they do? They mashed all the books together, created all new stories and characters, fumbled through some of the worst dialog ever written (unless you like tweenie romance) and burnt out in 20 episodes. How stupid. The source material was so good that they could have made a decade long run, like GoT, if they had just respected the source material. They chose Shannara for the screen because of its huge following, and then didn’t give the followers anything resembling the books. Instead they focused on teen romance and girlpower. Shannara is a great study in what not to do in adaptations.
I’ll be surprised if RoP makes 20 episodes. It’s making all the same mistakes.