How many new books are published every year as hardbacks, paperbacks and audio books? Add those you read on electronic devices and they must run into several thousand.
Pop into a book shop and (apart from the heavily promoted works of television personalities like the prolific Richard Osman*) the vast array of books on display can be daunting to many.
Less so if you’re an avid reader who knows Edna O’Brien from Maggie O’Farrell and Iain Banks from Ian Rankin.
*Everybody who’s presented a TV show in the last decade has a best-selling thriller to their name. Whether they actually wrote it, is another matter . . .
With so many books published every year, I find it weirdly frustrating that so few are adapted for the cinema. Film studios seemingly prefer to re-make/re-imagine old films.
The latest to be re-made/re-imagined is “Westworld”, the 1973 science-fiction adventure set in a luxury resort where wealthy tourists ‘visit’ past eras (like Medieval World) and interact with human-looking robots in appropriate costumes.
The main action takes place in ‘The Old West’ where tourists can challenge a taciturn, scary gunslinger to a gunfight and win every time! The gunslinging robot who eventually runs amok and shoots a customer (a possible scenario the resort’s guide book fails to mention) is played by Yul Brynner wearing an all-black outfit similar to the one he wore in “The Magnificent Seven” 13 years earlier.
I realise movie special FX have moved on since 1973, but why remake what’s already been re-made in different forms?
In the 1976 sequel, “Future World”, Yul’s gunslinger returned in a dream sequence.
1980 saw a short-lived TV series “Beyond Westworld” and in 2016 the first episode of the big budget TV series “Westworld”, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins premiered, followed by a further 35 episodes across four series.
The writer/director of the original “Westworld” was Michael Crichton who developed the ‘Things running amok in a theme park’ idea into the novel “Jurassic Park”. The 1993 film adaptation has had a number of sequels and another one is due in 2028.
Cash cows need regular milking!