Media rights gone wild
What should be the publishing endgame?
You’ll be happy to know that last week’s headline - I quit writing to become a turkey chef - was not true. Shocking, I know. In retrospect, I should have known that a career based on cooking whole turkeys outside of November was never going to work out. When was the last time you were even served turkey in a restaurant that was not part of a sandwich? Never, that’s when.
Anyway, read more about my latest cooking adventures below. But first, it’s Three Things Friday!
We’ll really make real money with the adaptation rights!
The past 18 years have seen comic books entering the mainstream becoming a cultural touchstone, culminating in Avengers: Endgame briefly holding the title of highest grossing movie of all-time, DC’s Arrowverse recently finishing an impressive decade-long run on TV with six series and multiple crossovers, and of course The Walking Dead, among others.
So you could forgive comic book publishers for trying to adapt every single IP in their stable to TV shows and movies, because it’s worked really well in the past. And you could forgive enterprising individual for starting comic publishers from whole cloth specifically to create new IPs to mine for media rights.
The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald does a deep dive into what she calls The Big Lie: that creating comics to turn into other media is the ticket to big money.
For another example, we turn to another industry that has constantly been chasing Hollywood dreams: video games.
Riot Games’ League of Legends, which was originally inspired by the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, is one of the most successful video game properties of the past decade, bringing in $3 billion a year mostly from the sale of in-game virtual merchandise like skins. But why stop at being a video game juggernaut when you can adapt your IP into a full-fledged cinematic universe, starting with the critically-acclaimed Arcane?
And who cares if you spent $250 million on 18 episodes of an animated TV show (including $60 million in marketing spend) that derailed future adaptation plans? The show is a hit, right?
Well, not really.
I don’t know what lessons we can learn from this wildly expensive experiment, but my first takeaway would be you can’t make fetch happen. Here’s a deeper breakdown on what went wrong with Riot Games’ ambitious Hollywood plans.
Should Star Trek become Star Wars?
I grew up sitting in both the Star Trek and Star Wars camps. TNG was weekly appointment viewing and I spent hours re-reading The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, which summarized every single episode of the series. And if memory serves me, I think I first watched Star Wars on cable before buying the THX-remastered versions of the movies that preceded the special editions (which were my first Star Wars theater-going experience).
The main distinction I drew as a kid between the two series was that TNG was more cerebral (there was an entire episode where Picard is forced to learn a language based entirely on strange metaphors) and Star Wars was more action/fantasy oriented. Star Wars was about big space battles and Star Trek was about being attacked by a flute-containing alien probe and living a second life on another planet.
Later Trek series embraced more action-y premises and of course there was always a good heaping of time travel shenanigans.
Trek eventually entered its current cinematic era when the J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek debuted in 2009. I was very excited to see this movie, so much so that when the picture gave out within 5 minutes at the theater, I of course ran to the front of the replacement ticket line to see the movie the next day.
With lots of lens flares and more action, the Abrams-era Trek has a decidedly different feel, that has carried over to the current crops of series. Whether we should return to a TNG-type show is a question that cannot be answered in this limited space, but if that is what is next for Trek, then the producers should also reinstitute the previous practice of taking spec script submissions.
This was just a very long preamble leading up to the fact that I watched the below trailer for Star Trek: Section 31, thinking that it was a new TV series and it looked pretty entertaining, only to find out that it is in fact a new Trek movie premiering on Paramount Plus next month
But I want to hear from you! What was your favorite TNG episode?
Adventures in cooking
Last weekend I did double duty in the kitchen, making some meal prepped lunches and also cooking a vodka-free penne vodka with my daughters using a recipe we found on Instagram.
First up was chicken burrito bowls. I seasoned the boneless chicken thighs with a seasoning blend my son found on Instagram (don’t ask) and the chicken came out really tender. Then I separately cooked up peppers & onions, black beans, and a bean flour-based high protein rice that I found on Instagram (anyone seeing a pattern here?).
Below you can see all 4 constituent parts all going at once, the packed meal, and then the plated meal (which doesn’t look very pretty but it tasted very good). This was a great addition to the lunch rotation, although having to cook 3 different things in 3 different pots/pans is not ideal. Next time I will cook the peppers & onions in the oven to save a pan (and maybe also throw the beans on there).
After the burrito bowls were done, we turned to the penne vodka. We sautéed sliced cherry tomatoes, minced garlic, and then deglazed with lemon juice (instead of white wine). After that, we added heavy cream, tomato paste, and parsley, then stirred in the al dente penne. We topped with bocconcini and parmesan. It was delicious, but we definitely added too much garlic!
Tales from the Creative Mines
I am getting over a cold this week, which made putting words down on paper particularly challenging. But thankfully my creative partner-in-crime Fran Delgado is continuing to pump out pages of Blood of Atlantis #2 at a great clip.
Yesterday she sent me the fully-colored first page, which looks fantastic! I’m only going to show you the first panel, because I decided to letter this page for fun and to learn about lettering, which will be the subject of a future Amazing Journey column. But if you want a preview of what it will look like, go here.
That’s a wrap for this week’s column, and what will probably be the last edition of Three Things Friday in 2024. Next week will feature one final missive for 2024, where I’ll take a look back at the year that was.
In the meantime, if you want to help support ARC Worlds and my work, pick up a copy of my books from my online shop and Blood of Atlantis #1 and stickers at my all-new Etsy shop!
The one you mentioned with the flute.