The Myst feature film and TV rights have been circulating for some time now, with Warner Bros, Legendary, and Village Roadshow all attached at various points and hoping to use Myst's rich and artful settings as the basis for a cinematic and/or television adaptation. Hulu and Netflix have both been identified as potential release platforms, but this project's been bouncing from studio to studio for a few years now and it's unclear when it'll actually move forward. The success of Game of Thrones certainly helped launch a fantasy-genre gold rush recently, and many fantasy works are being snapped up for development. The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime is the best indicator of the situation; Amazon has (perhaps very recklessly) gambled a billion dollars on it - $250 million for the rights, plus $150 million for each of five seasons paid for up front, or a total of $750 million actually making the series) - an exorbitant move that shows exactly how badly every network wants to have recognizable fantasy content right now. But with viewership on RoP now clearly tanking, it's also clear that throwing a ridiculous mountain of money at a project isn't enough, you need passionate, smart people at the helm who actually know what they're doing with the project they are given.
The Myst feature film and TV rights have been circulating for some time now, with Warner Bros, Legendary, and Village Roadshow all attached at various points and hoping to use Myst's rich and artful settings as the basis for a cinematic and/or television adaptation. Hulu and Netflix have both been identified as potential release platforms, but this project's been bouncing from studio to studio for a few years now and it's unclear when it'll actually move forward. The success of Game of Thrones certainly helped launch a fantasy-genre gold rush recently, and many fantasy works are being snapped up for development. The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime is the best indicator of the situation; Amazon has (perhaps very recklessly) gambled a billion dollars on it - $250 million for the rights, plus $150 million for each of five seasons paid for up front, or a total of $750 million actually making the series) - an exorbitant move that shows exactly how badly every network wants to have recognizable fantasy content right now. But with viewership on RoP now clearly tanking, it's also clear that throwing a ridiculous mountain of money at a project isn't enough, you need passionate, smart people at the helm who actually know what they're doing with the project they are given.
Second indicator is the emerging video-game goldrush. 'The Last of Us' on HBO has succeeded wildly as a TV show because the gaming source material was actually strong in the first place from a storyline POV, and thus suitable to adapt from game to TV, and because the TV showrunners actually understood and respected the game material, the gameworld and story they were trying to adapt into a new format. Even games with far thinner stories have succeeded in other forms, the Sonic and Mario movies built fairly successfully on the interesting and beloved characters of their respective classic platformer game series and now have made a ton of money doing so.
So we're facing a confluence of a stupidly enthusiastic fantasy-TV boom post Game of Thrones that has just gone a bit too far and is now seeing its first massive misfire, and a collapse of the idea that 'games can't become good TV or movies' leading to the start of a movie/TV boom in game adaptation. A while back Gore Verbinski was attached to an adaptation of Bioshock, to the tune of roughly $150 million, but the studio wanted it made cheaper, while Verbinski wanted it made even bigger, leading to an impasse. Meanwhile, adaptations of Valve IPs "Half-Life" and "Portal" are actually moving forward for Netflix, and there's also a Fallout TV series in development.
Warner Bros has tried to make a Myst movie work with an 'Oscar winning screenwriter' and a budget in the $100-150 million range. They then got cold feet, handed it off to a string of subsidiaries each in turn unsure what to do with the IP they were handed, passing it off to somebody else.
To the studios involved, this is NOT complicated. Speaking from someone who knows this series - find a core of people who tick these boxes:
-known for good video production work - including creative art direction - executed on reasonably limited budgets.
-somebody who actually likes and respects and UNDERSTANDS the Myst games.
-a writer who knows how to write a really good story.
-a musician who gets how to score gorgeous, richly textured ambient music that is effective in supporting scenes subtly in the background.
I'm clearly not going to fully tick all these boxes, at best the second one is the only one I can fully tick. But you can probably find some group of 2 or 3 people that cover these bases effectively. Make those the core creative team, give them a budget in the $5-10 million range. Assign them to make a movie or a short miniseries and don't interfere too much unless there is some obvious waste going on from them or somebody they hired. That's it. Seriously, that's good enough. I know you think the budget must be 10-20x that. NO. Forget trying to appeal way beyond the existing audience. Just grab all the diehards plus those on the fence - those who recognize the brand, who remember the first game or two but never finished them, or finished Myst but not the entire series. Get a good chunk of that group to show up with the diehards and you have won. Think about it. 7 million people played Myst. 'The Last of Us' series is considered a profit-making SUCCESS with 11 million viewers and a $150 million budget. By that logic: a 3-4 episode miniseries 1/3 that length, with 1/3 the audience, and therefore 1/9 the revenue, but done at 1/15 the cost is also a hit - and indeed actually significantly more profitable in percentage terms.
Cyan knows this. It's their strategy lately - Obduction, and Firmament were crowdfunded and the crowdfunding campaigns raised over $1.3 million each. Cyan, as a game studio, now clearly realizes they have a niche fandom with a limited size, and that to make money the per-project production scope and budget must stay limited to be consistently profitable. They overshot the size of their fanbase and it almost killed them - spent $20 million on their MMO (Uru) and it lost money, but if they spend significantly less than that on a game production, and amortize much of the cost and risk by crowdfunding a large chunk of the project from the get-go they know that means nearly-guaranteed profit. This strategy has worked extremely well for them and it has led to their studio steadily rebounding after nearly going under twice in the mid to late 2000s.
I love the wisdom that's handed to indies, and I agree with it. "Start with something that is small, smart, lean. Then build from there."
Small. I'd rather see a studio start Myst's foray into TV with a modestly budgeted project that minimizes the risk of loss, and succeeds almost inevitably in scraping out a profit and justifies further Myst productions afterwards with gradually increasing resources dedicated to them... than a lavish one off effort that tanks horribly out of the gate, killing all future potential for a later Myst movie/TV franchise.
Smart. As in efficient and clever, and focused on telling a story well above most everything else. That is, find and cast overlooked talent, not A-list names. I.e. find a once well liked / recognizable veteran name actor, coming off a misfire. A character actor - but one still known as a TV star, not a movie star. Throw in a roster of talented people who give great auditions but that nobody has ever heard of. Maybe a one-off name star who's a little bit expensive but has a small part, just a few important scenes.
Think about the big blockbuster hits over the years.
Did anyone really know who Mark Hamill or Carrie Fisher were before 'Star Wars'? Maybe one in ten knew who Harrison Ford was, as he had very limited casting activity prior to 1977. I mean, his most recognizable role before Star Wars may have been a brief scene in American Graffiti that was little more than a cameo.
The most identifiable cast member at that time was Alec Guiness, from assorted movies like 'Bridge on the River Kwai'. Star Wars cost $13 million, made $400+ million in theaters.
1984, The Terminator, the only person anyone really knew about in the cast was Schwarzenegger, and then only from one movie (Conan the Barbarian) and his career as bodybuilder. The film was made on a budget of around $8-9 million.
1993, Jurassic Park, a pile of struggling B listers and unknowns from wall to wall. Audiences didn't care because the movie looked and sounded amazing, and had technical novelty and a good premise. Spielberg had said the dinosaurs were the draw, that the dinosaurs were the stars, not the humans, so his aim was to find people throughout the cast who can act really well, and fit the parts effectively, but who aren't that expensive to cast.
Or the cast of 'Pulp Fiction'. Tarantino made that movie for $7 million. With a fast-rising star still not yet that famous [Samuel L. Jackson, whose most visible part was his little bit part in Jurassic Park] a has-been with huge Die Hard name recognition but who at that moment was coming right off a flop [Bruce Willis] and Uma Thurman, who was, aside from an appearance in the moderately-obscure 'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' still nearly a total unknown at that point.
1997. Titanic. Lots of good parts and recognizable actors, but the core of the story was always centered on two rising stars who weren't quite household names yet. Many people prior to the film's release didn't know who Kate Winslet or Leo Dicaprio were.
Think 'The Matrix'. Keanu Reeves was a recognizable name, a B-list star who was becoming sort of a joke.
The rest of the cast were people almost nobody even recognized prior to the film's release. Super expensive-looking movie but not at the high end of '90s blockbuster cost and got approved by the studio partly because of the cheaper casting. $65 million film, $450+ million box office.
And then the behemoth of 'Lord of the Rings' which made pretty much everyone involved super famous but before that trilogy came out, mostly they weren't known well. You saw a lot of random people who recognized Ian McKellen from 'X-men' or Liv Tyler from 'Armageddon' or other similar random casting bits, but aside from film nerds, the general moviegoer likely could only recognize or identify a maximum of one, two, maybe three of the cast members before the trilogy's first film launched.
Every release had a hook though. And usually it was the subject of the film - a central, intriguing story idea. Promos for The Matrix didn't even say what that was exactly, which actually made that ad campaign way more effective. Lots of crazy and creative visuals with no context and the quote voiced by Fishburne - 'No one can be told what the Matrix is. You need to see it for yourself." And audiences did. Myst - for its part - began its story with players dumped onto the dock on Myst Island and had them piece together what was going on. We should note here that a LOT of players did not get much past that, and triggering the 'what was that actually about (because I never had a clue what was going on, I just remember that it looked neat). Leaning into that on some promos might be smart, especially if your adaptation is a riff on the Book of Atrus. I say riff because, it'd be nice to adapt that while also, threading into some scenes of the descent with Gehn, hints and flashbacks relating to the city thriving, then falling, in Book of T'iana, which is pretty relevant to Gehn's past and his attitudes regardless. We should understand why he is so enamored with the D'ni civilization, and ruins and remnants communicate some of that grandeur but it helps us if the story grants glimpses of the city in its prime, lit up and bustling, and shows us also a little of the chaos of how the city fell and what that means to Gehn, how it leads him to his obsession with this place and his sense of bitterness. It's clear Gehn's a deeply damaged person, and I am pretty sure he blamed T'iana for inadvertently leading to the series of events destroying the society he otherwise might have grown up in, I suspect he wished it had lived and that his father had also lived to see him grow up there. That's an early part of the character's formative psychological damage, a nostalgia not for 'what was then' but for what 'could have been', and giving the audience a view of what he lost there via fragments of BoT - even setting aside the fact that he has his own subsequent issues with Atrus as well after that - yes, it can work dramatically. Bonus: brief scenes in the city pulled from BoT would be a great opportunity for visual fantasy-city eye candy and a bit of mayhem [explosions, ominous clouds consuming the city] which can be used in some promotional capacity.
A well-planned adaptation of BoA with glimpses of BoT makes so much sense. BoA is a novel set in the Myst metaverse, and connects directly into Myst and Riven, which is to say, it's a perfect entry point to the series of games that follows. It features a lot of the icons of the first two games and numerous related characters and locations - (Myst Island is present, as is the age of Riven) - so it has that recognizable element, of 'clearly this is a Myst thing even aside from a 'Myst' title.' and filling in how you wound up on Myst Island, what led into that, makes so much more sense than... just following the story of 'Myst' which is a stupid-obvious and also just stupid idea. Myst has a story, sure, but the narrative events that actually happen in the game are rather minimal. Myst - the first game - in the end boils down to a lot of exploration and puzzle solving followed by one real, substantive endgame decision. That decision is informed heavily by what you've seen up to that point, that is to say aftermath of a lot of things that took place before you even got there. The whole game is really about piecing together backstory and teasing out the mystery of 'what happened here' and then making an endgame choice about who to trust based on everything you unlocked up to that point. In terms of "Myst" story, most of that story is backstory, told often through the details of the gameworlds themselves. So if you're determined on dramatizing the first game for some reason, just because it's the most-identifiable piece of the Myst canon, why wouldn't you just tell THAT [what led to the start of Myst the game] as it has more to it than any story content occurring during the game itself.
Also: consider a secondary category of additions - consider the [option] of filling in some pieces of Sirrus and Achenar growing up semi-neglected by a busy and oft-distracted Atrus, and the early hints of their corruption, their embrace of Gehn's ideas that age writers don't write links to worlds already existing in a universe somewhere, they 'create' the worlds directly by writing them, and thus those worlds are 'property' and their inhabitants and natural resources are likewise property, to be used/abused however their self-proclaimed 'God' Gehn wishes. Sirrus and Achenar ascribe to a very similar view - they too drift towards abuse and exploitation of the creatures and 'treasures' of the worlds they gain access to, regardless of Atrus's attempts to teach them otherwise.
This makes sense to depict a bit as one of the BoA's largest failings is the rushed later parts of the book - BoA is primarily focused on Atrus/Catherine/Gehn - Gehn bringing Atrus to D'ni, after being absent for years, Gehn teaching Atrus to write ages, Atrus realizing the deep foundational evil in Gehn's view of the ages he's written, and starting to realize his long-gone father is a monster, that disillusionment, Atrus running into Katran on Riven, developing feelings for her, teaching her how to write ages, their writing of Myst Island among other ages, the birth of Sirrus/Achenar, Gehn realizing Atrus has been hiding a lot from him, and has betrayed him, by falling for an outsider and perhaps far worse, giving that outsider the Art (of age writing) which is in his mind his culture's central heritage and only meant to be accessible to the D'ni. Gehn holds Catherine hostage on Riven, Atrus arrives - only to find he's hopelessly outmatched, and Atrus then links out but does so falling through a dimensional rift (The Starry Expanse) with the only linking book out of Riven at the time. That is, the Myst book at start of Myst. And here's where the BoA pretty much skips over a TON of time. The book chooses to gloss over the entire transition from Sirrus and Achenar's early childhood to the way they are when Myst starts (ie young adults) and there's something lost in doing that.
Which is why any adaptation ought to take a bit of time there to resolve that notable omission. We learn a lot of bits of what happened when Sirrus/Achenar grew up but we learn those in the games themselves, after the fact. We know Atrus was raising Sirrus and Achenar alone, as Catherine was trapped in a cell for years on Riven secretly collaborating with the Rivenese Moiety rebels where she could to undermine Gehn's abuse of power there. We know Atrus was making, and usually reversing, minscule details in the Riven link, the [speculative on Atrus's part] idea being that small enough alterations could slightly affect the underlying properties of an age itself, but that large enough changes would be 'too much' and the link would then redirect to a similar looking, but not actually the same, age because the description now was closer to matching that age than the one it initially linked to. But it wasn't just Atrus messing slightly with the link in an attempt to slow down the inevitable destruction of the age of Riven, buying more time for a move to save Catherine and the Rivenese people from Gehn. It was the fact that he was also responsible for the rest of the D'ni survivors and their children aside from Gehn. Atrus was coordinating an ongoing search of linking books in the city to people who'd surivied due to being randomly traveling offworld at the time the city was destroyed. He found a few hundred, over time, and was not merely looking for this diaspora, but writing a new home for them due to the reality that there weren't enough left to credibly ever rebuild the ruins of the city. A few hundred D'ni survivors is not enough to hope to restart what had been a city of several million. So he had been tasked with making a new home age that was uninhabited [no real complex life, no intelligent denizens who could be hurt by the settlement] but with arable soil, breathable air, and clean water, hospitable enough for growing food, and establishing a new settlement, an age named Releeshahn.
All of this was going on and frequently pulled Atrus away from his sons. And those sons resented him for it, and probably began inquiring about the things he initially avoided discussing, including Atrus's own father, Gehn. That sense that Atrus was absent, secretive, etc, all could have led to a distrust of Atrus and eventually a deep curiosity about Gehn... and while Atrus once taught them lessons about the structure of ages and harmonious systems in them, even building a series of ages as a way to discuss such concepts, as seen in Myst III: Exile, from physics to ecology, to power generation, in the end they retained little of Atrus's ideas of keeping things in delicate and sustainable, respectful balance, and ended up tearing the ages to shreds and looting them, even killing the living things in them en masse, then abandoning them once the pillaging was over, pretty much the moment Atrus was gone. We see the aftermath of this sort of thing especially in the ages of Myst, and in Myst III: Exile. Set a couple scenes in such settings that show what led to this falling apart, this teenage rebellion - maybe an early incident in the treetop dwellings of Channelwood, maybe one in a floating Narayani village, and it helps fill in the gaps in BoA's pacing, gives insight into why Sirrus and Achenar ended up the way they did. Also show Atrus's POV on this along with theirs, make clear why Atrus was often absent and how that played into this. Could work really well IMO not just to fill in a rushed segment of the book's story and explore character dynamics it failed to, but also to give uviewers glimpses of more worlds - tying this story further into Myst ages beyond Myst Island, and also a bit of Exile, which is also a pretty good idea that many fans will appreciate. Exile doesn't have the recognition level of Myst or Riven but it's still well-liked by both serious fans and semi-fans of this series. Many players who had big gripes with Myst games in general still liked Exile - it's fairly accessible, relatable in story terms, the puzzles are easier than average for a Myst game, the art direction's quite pretty, the soundtrack's among the better in the series, and Brad Dourif was a good casting choice as the deranged-but-sympathetic antagonist Saavedro, giving a performance that elevated the story of the game above what it otherwise was.
So what?
I mean, it's a valid question. Everyone has ideas for how to approach an adaptation. That doesn't mean that such a vision will go anywhere.
And it's not like Cyan will allow the cost of such a vision to be crowdfunded, or will fund it themselves directly.
Nor can they cut a deal with me for the chance to let me adapt their IP as the rights were already given - first to the Mysteriacs, actual fans, and then basically ripped away from them by higher-end Hollywood people with connections in the film industry but no real understanding of anything 'Myst'.
So in summary:
I'd like to do fan art. Fan films. But a BoA adaptation deserves better resources and a more solid cast roster than anything I can scrape together, so I'm looking at a smaller start, near term, a fan film about 40-50 mins. long that uses entirely 'unknown' cast members nobody outside of my local circle of friends will know about, uses a lot of digital extensions and virtual sets [limited full scale, built for real stuff] and the occasional miniature effects element, mostly as a chunk of something to be scanned into 3d as a NeRF and then matchmoved to match the live action camera.
The proof of concept fan film material, would involve a cast of 6-7 people, a handful of limited partial sets, extended heavily with bluescreen and digital environments. The VFX count would be in the 400-450 shot range, which is to say 90% of the shots in this are VFX shots... usually background extensions. I'd do all that 3d-animated and analog miniature VFX work myself, along with the writing (script already exists in its third draft) the directing, video recording, editing, assembly of props, sets, costumes... and
Budget would include $490 in additional software, $250 in new camera gear and lighting gear, $300 in set design, props, costumes, $300 in miniature elements, And nearly a thousand $ pulling all the cast members here into a single recording effort for about a week.
I cannot guarantee any of it will go as smoothly as I'd like, [BUT] if my (unrelated to Myst) work keeps growing at current rates, this should be done by end of 2024.
It's intended mainly as a casual entry to the Mystverse, with a bit of humor and a few characters who know nothing about any of this being dumped into an adventure they never could have anticipated.
I've got to try to do this well, but even a small cut-rate $2k fanfilm is a challenge to finance without major compromises elsewhere.
If other ventures go well, it could go faster. If they all fail, well, I would not be surprised to see completion of this delayed a bit.
Doubly frustrating, of course, is I can't say what those ventures even are here. Just know that I'm trying to make this work.
Also by then, I hope to have a standalone Myst fangame completed (the new version of Sehv T'devokan, about twice as large as the original) and an "Uru expansion pack" with five new ages.
Again, no guarantees those will go smoothly either - certain ages like Sevkor keep being massively, almost obsessively reworked partly in order to make them more efficient and have them look as good and detailed as possible while limiting actual texture data use to below half what it once was. My current aim there is to have all five ages combined, five *substantial* ages, entirely fit within 400mb of filesize. This seems pretty standard for Uru - the initial Uru: Ages Beyond Myst fit on a single 650MB CD. This indie fan expansion is roughly 60% as large in area. I want to do that really well too but of course no matter how hard I try to improve my workflow and optimize things better than before, still cannot guarantee approval by Cyan or the fanbase for use in MOULa.
What I can pledge is release on fan servers such as Deep Island, Gehn Shard, etc, at least, by mid-2024, and hopefully that generates enough excitement there to propel it through the testing process of Minkata shard and finally ideally MOULa.
Some time soon, as all this progresses, I'll be sharing a bunch of images and video clips of the WIP.
Second indicator is the emerging video-game goldrush. 'The Last of Us' on HBO has succeeded wildly as a TV show because the gaming source material was actually strong in the first place from a storyline POV, and thus suitable to adapt from game to TV, and because the TV showrunners actually understood and respected the game material, the gameworld and story they were trying to adapt into a new format. Even games with far thinner stories have succeeded in other forms, the Sonic and Mario movies built fairly successfully on the interesting and beloved characters of their respective classic platformer game series and now have made a ton of money doing so.
So we're facing a confluence of a stupidly enthusiastic fantasy-TV boom post Game of Thrones that has just gone a bit too far and is now seeing its first massive misfire, and a collapse of the idea that 'games can't become good TV or movies' leading to the start of a movie/TV boom in game adaptation. A while back Gore Verbinski was attached to an adaptation of Bioshock, to the tune of roughly $150 million, but the studio wanted it made cheaper, while Verbinski wanted it made even bigger, leading to an impasse. Meanwhile, adaptations of Valve IPs "Half-Life" and "Portal" are actually moving forward for Netflix, and there's also a Fallout TV series in development.
Warner Bros has tried to make a Myst movie work with an 'Oscar winning screenwriter' and a budget in the $100-150 million range. They then got cold feet, handed it off to a string of subsidiaries each in turn unsure what to do with the IP they were handed, passing it off to somebody else.
To the studios involved, this is NOT complicated. Speaking from someone who knows this series - find a core of people who tick these boxes:
-known for good video production work - including creative art direction - executed on reasonably limited budgets.
-somebody who actually likes and respects and UNDERSTANDS the Myst games.
-a writer who knows how to write a really good story.
-a musician who gets how to score gorgeous, richly textured ambient music that is effective in supporting scenes subtly in the background.
I'm clearly not going to fully tick all these boxes, at best the second one is the only one I can fully tick. But you can probably find some group of 2 or 3 people that cover these bases effectively. Make those the core creative team, give them a budget in the $5-10 million range. Assign them to make a movie or a short miniseries and don't interfere too much unless there is some obvious waste going on from them or somebody they hired. That's it. Seriously, that's good enough. I know you think the budget must be 10-20x that. NO. Forget trying to appeal way beyond the existing audience. Just grab all the diehards plus those on the fence - those who recognize the brand, who remember the first game or two but never finished them, or finished Myst but not the entire series. Get a good chunk of that group to show up with the diehards and you have won. Think about it. 7 million people played Myst. 'The Last of Us' series is considered a profit-making SUCCESS with 11 million viewers and a $150 million budget. By that logic: a 3-4 episode miniseries 1/3 that length, with 1/3 the audience, and therefore 1/9 the revenue, but done at 1/15 the cost is also a hit - and indeed actually significantly more profitable in percentage terms.
Cyan knows this. It's their strategy lately - Obduction, and Firmament were crowdfunded and the crowdfunding campaigns raised over $1.3 million each. Cyan, as a game studio, now clearly realizes they have a niche fandom with a limited size, and that to make money the per-project production scope and budget must stay limited to be consistently profitable. They overshot the size of their fanbase and it almost killed them - spent $20 million on their MMO (Uru) and it lost money, but if they spend significantly less than that on a game production, and amortize much of the cost and risk by crowdfunding a large chunk of the project from the get-go they know that means nearly-guaranteed profit. This strategy has worked extremely well for them and it has led to their studio steadily rebounding after nearly going under twice in the mid to late 2000s.
I love the wisdom that's handed to indies, and I agree with it. "Start with something that is small, smart, lean. Then build from there."
Small. I'd rather see a studio start Myst's foray into TV with a modestly budgeted project that minimizes the risk of loss, and succeeds almost inevitably in scraping out a profit and justifies further Myst productions afterwards with gradually increasing resources dedicated to them... than a lavish one off effort that tanks horribly out of the gate, killing all future potential for a later Myst movie/TV franchise.
Smart. As in efficient and clever, and focused on telling a story well above most everything else. That is, find and cast overlooked talent, not A-list names. I.e. find a once well liked / recognizable veteran name actor, coming off a misfire. A character actor - but one still known as a TV star, not a movie star. Throw in a roster of talented people who give great auditions but that nobody has ever heard of. Maybe a one-off name star who's a little bit expensive but has a small part, just a few important scenes.
Think about the big blockbuster hits over the years.
Did anyone really know who Mark Hamill or Carrie Fisher were before 'Star Wars'? Maybe one in ten knew who Harrison Ford was, as he had very limited casting activity prior to 1977. I mean, his most recognizable role before Star Wars may have been a brief scene in American Graffiti that was little more than a cameo.
The most identifiable cast member at that time was Alec Guiness, from assorted movies like 'Bridge on the River Kwai'. Star Wars cost $13 million, made $400+ million in theaters.
1984, The Terminator, the only person anyone really knew about in the cast was Schwarzenegger, and then only from one movie (Conan the Barbarian) and his career as bodybuilder. The film was made on a budget of around $8-9 million.
1993, Jurassic Park, a pile of struggling B listers and unknowns from wall to wall. Audiences didn't care because the movie looked and sounded amazing, and had technical novelty and a good premise. Spielberg had said the dinosaurs were the draw, that the dinosaurs were the stars, not the humans, so his aim was to find people throughout the cast who can act really well, and fit the parts effectively, but who aren't that expensive to cast.
Or the cast of 'Pulp Fiction'. Tarantino made that movie for $7 million. With a fast-rising star still not yet that famous [Samuel L. Jackson, whose most visible part was his little bit part in Jurassic Park] a has-been with huge Die Hard name recognition but who at that moment was coming right off a flop [Bruce Willis] and Uma Thurman, who was, aside from an appearance in the moderately-obscure 'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' still nearly a total unknown at that point.
1997. Titanic. Lots of good parts and recognizable actors, but the core of the story was always centered on two rising stars who weren't quite household names yet. Many people prior to the film's release didn't know who Kate Winslet or Leo Dicaprio were.
Think 'The Matrix'. Keanu Reeves was a recognizable name, a B-list star who was becoming sort of a joke.
The rest of the cast were people almost nobody even recognized prior to the film's release. Super expensive-looking movie but not at the high end of '90s blockbuster cost and got approved by the studio partly because of the cheaper casting. $65 million film, $450+ million box office.
And then the behemoth of 'Lord of the Rings' which made pretty much everyone involved super famous but before that trilogy came out, mostly they weren't known well. You saw a lot of random people who recognized Ian McKellen from 'X-men' or Liv Tyler from 'Armageddon' or other similar random casting bits, but aside from film nerds, the general moviegoer likely could only recognize or identify a maximum of one, two, maybe three of the cast members before the trilogy's first film launched.
Every release had a hook though. And usually it was the subject of the film - a central, intriguing story idea. Promos for The Matrix didn't even say what that was exactly, which actually made that ad campaign way more effective. Lots of crazy and creative visuals with no context and the quote voiced by Fishburne - 'No one can be told what the Matrix is. You need to see it for yourself." And audiences did. Myst - for its part - began its story with players dumped onto the dock on Myst Island and had them piece together what was going on. We should note here that a LOT of players did not get much past that, and triggering the 'what was that actually about (because I never had a clue what was going on, I just remember that it looked neat). Leaning into that on some promos might be smart, especially if your adaptation is a riff on the Book of Atrus. I say riff because, it'd be nice to adapt that while also, threading into some scenes of the descent with Gehn, hints and flashbacks relating to the city thriving, then falling, in Book of T'iana, which is pretty relevant to Gehn's past and his attitudes regardless. We should understand why he is so enamored with the D'ni civilization, and ruins and remnants communicate some of that grandeur but it helps us if the story grants glimpses of the city in its prime, lit up and bustling, and shows us also a little of the chaos of how the city fell and what that means to Gehn, how it leads him to his obsession with this place and his sense of bitterness. It's clear Gehn's a deeply damaged person, and I am pretty sure he blamed T'iana for inadvertently leading to the series of events destroying the society he otherwise might have grown up in, I suspect he wished it had lived and that his father had also lived to see him grow up there. That's an early part of the character's formative psychological damage, a nostalgia not for 'what was then' but for what 'could have been', and giving the audience a view of what he lost there via fragments of BoT - even setting aside the fact that he has his own subsequent issues with Atrus as well after that - yes, it can work dramatically. Bonus: brief scenes in the city pulled from BoT would be a great opportunity for visual fantasy-city eye candy and a bit of mayhem [explosions, ominous clouds consuming the city] which can be used in some promotional capacity.
A well-planned adaptation of BoA with glimpses of BoT makes so much sense. BoA is a novel set in the Myst metaverse, and connects directly into Myst and Riven, which is to say, it's a perfect entry point to the series of games that follows. It features a lot of the icons of the first two games and numerous related characters and locations - (Myst Island is present, as is the age of Riven) - so it has that recognizable element, of 'clearly this is a Myst thing even aside from a 'Myst' title.' and filling in how you wound up on Myst Island, what led into that, makes so much more sense than... just following the story of 'Myst' which is a stupid-obvious and also just stupid idea. Myst has a story, sure, but the narrative events that actually happen in the game are rather minimal. Myst - the first game - in the end boils down to a lot of exploration and puzzle solving followed by one real, substantive endgame decision. That decision is informed heavily by what you've seen up to that point, that is to say aftermath of a lot of things that took place before you even got there. The whole game is really about piecing together backstory and teasing out the mystery of 'what happened here' and then making an endgame choice about who to trust based on everything you unlocked up to that point. In terms of "Myst" story, most of that story is backstory, told often through the details of the gameworlds themselves. So if you're determined on dramatizing the first game for some reason, just because it's the most-identifiable piece of the Myst canon, why wouldn't you just tell THAT [what led to the start of Myst the game] as it has more to it than any story content occurring during the game itself.
Also: consider a secondary category of additions - consider the [option] of filling in some pieces of Sirrus and Achenar growing up semi-neglected by a busy and oft-distracted Atrus, and the early hints of their corruption, their embrace of Gehn's ideas that age writers don't write links to worlds already existing in a universe somewhere, they 'create' the worlds directly by writing them, and thus those worlds are 'property' and their inhabitants and natural resources are likewise property, to be used/abused however their self-proclaimed 'God' Gehn wishes. Sirrus and Achenar ascribe to a very similar view - they too drift towards abuse and exploitation of the creatures and 'treasures' of the worlds they gain access to, regardless of Atrus's attempts to teach them otherwise.
This makes sense to depict a bit as one of the BoA's largest failings is the rushed later parts of the book - BoA is primarily focused on Atrus/Catherine/Gehn - Gehn bringing Atrus to D'ni, after being absent for years, Gehn teaching Atrus to write ages, Atrus realizing the deep foundational evil in Gehn's view of the ages he's written, and starting to realize his long-gone father is a monster, that disillusionment, Atrus running into Katran on Riven, developing feelings for her, teaching her how to write ages, their writing of Myst Island among other ages, the birth of Sirrus/Achenar, Gehn realizing Atrus has been hiding a lot from him, and has betrayed him, by falling for an outsider and perhaps far worse, giving that outsider the Art (of age writing) which is in his mind his culture's central heritage and only meant to be accessible to the D'ni. Gehn holds Catherine hostage on Riven, Atrus arrives - only to find he's hopelessly outmatched, and Atrus then links out but does so falling through a dimensional rift (The Starry Expanse) with the only linking book out of Riven at the time. That is, the Myst book at start of Myst. And here's where the BoA pretty much skips over a TON of time. The book chooses to gloss over the entire transition from Sirrus and Achenar's early childhood to the way they are when Myst starts (ie young adults) and there's something lost in doing that.
Which is why any adaptation ought to take a bit of time there to resolve that notable omission. We learn a lot of bits of what happened when Sirrus/Achenar grew up but we learn those in the games themselves, after the fact. We know Atrus was raising Sirrus and Achenar alone, as Catherine was trapped in a cell for years on Riven secretly collaborating with the Rivenese Moiety rebels where she could to undermine Gehn's abuse of power there. We know Atrus was making, and usually reversing, minscule details in the Riven link, the [speculative on Atrus's part] idea being that small enough alterations could slightly affect the underlying properties of an age itself, but that large enough changes would be 'too much' and the link would then redirect to a similar looking, but not actually the same, age because the description now was closer to matching that age than the one it initially linked to. But it wasn't just Atrus messing slightly with the link in an attempt to slow down the inevitable destruction of the age of Riven, buying more time for a move to save Catherine and the Rivenese people from Gehn. It was the fact that he was also responsible for the rest of the D'ni survivors and their children aside from Gehn. Atrus was coordinating an ongoing search of linking books in the city to people who'd surivied due to being randomly traveling offworld at the time the city was destroyed. He found a few hundred, over time, and was not merely looking for this diaspora, but writing a new home for them due to the reality that there weren't enough left to credibly ever rebuild the ruins of the city. A few hundred D'ni survivors is not enough to hope to restart what had been a city of several million. So he had been tasked with making a new home age that was uninhabited [no real complex life, no intelligent denizens who could be hurt by the settlement] but with arable soil, breathable air, and clean water, hospitable enough for growing food, and establishing a new settlement, an age named Releeshahn.
All of this was going on and frequently pulled Atrus away from his sons. And those sons resented him for it, and probably began inquiring about the things he initially avoided discussing, including Atrus's own father, Gehn. That sense that Atrus was absent, secretive, etc, all could have led to a distrust of Atrus and eventually a deep curiosity about Gehn... and while Atrus once taught them lessons about the structure of ages and harmonious systems in them, even building a series of ages as a way to discuss such concepts, as seen in Myst III: Exile, from physics to ecology, to power generation, in the end they retained little of Atrus's ideas of keeping things in delicate and sustainable, respectful balance, and ended up tearing the ages to shreds and looting them, even killing the living things in them en masse, then abandoning them once the pillaging was over, pretty much the moment Atrus was gone. We see the aftermath of this sort of thing especially in the ages of Myst, and in Myst III: Exile. Set a couple scenes in such settings that show what led to this falling apart, this teenage rebellion - maybe an early incident in the treetop dwellings of Channelwood, maybe one in a floating Narayani village, and it helps fill in the gaps in BoA's pacing, gives insight into why Sirrus and Achenar ended up the way they did. Also show Atrus's POV on this along with theirs, make clear why Atrus was often absent and how that played into this. Could work really well IMO not just to fill in a rushed segment of the book's story and explore character dynamics it failed to, but also to give uviewers glimpses of more worlds - tying this story further into Myst ages beyond Myst Island, and also a bit of Exile, which is also a pretty good idea that many fans will appreciate. Exile doesn't have the recognition level of Myst or Riven but it's still well-liked by both serious fans and semi-fans of this series. Many players who had big gripes with Myst games in general still liked Exile - it's fairly accessible, relatable in story terms, the puzzles are easier than average for a Myst game, the art direction's quite pretty, the soundtrack's among the better in the series, and Brad Dourif was a good casting choice as the deranged-but-sympathetic antagonist Saavedro, giving a performance that elevated the story of the game above what it otherwise was.
So what?
I mean, it's a valid question. Everyone has ideas for how to approach an adaptation. That doesn't mean that such a vision will go anywhere.
And it's not like Cyan will allow the cost of such a vision to be crowdfunded, or will fund it themselves directly.
Nor can they cut a deal with me for the chance to let me adapt their IP as the rights were already given - first to the Mysteriacs, actual fans, and then basically ripped away from them by higher-end Hollywood people with connections in the film industry but no real understanding of anything 'Myst'.
So in summary:
I'd like to do fan art. Fan films. But a BoA adaptation deserves better resources and a more solid cast roster than anything I can scrape together, so I'm looking at a smaller start, near term, a fan film about 40-50 mins. long that uses entirely 'unknown' cast members nobody outside of my local circle of friends will know about, uses a lot of digital extensions and virtual sets [limited full scale, built for real stuff] and the occasional miniature effects element, mostly as a chunk of something to be scanned into 3d as a NeRF and then matchmoved to match the live action camera.
The proof of concept fan film material, would involve a cast of 6-7 people, a handful of limited partial sets, extended heavily with bluescreen and digital environments. The VFX count would be in the 400-450 shot range, which is to say 90% of the shots in this are VFX shots... usually background extensions. I'd do all that 3d-animated and analog miniature VFX work myself, along with the writing (script already exists in its third draft) the directing, video recording, editing, assembly of props, sets, costumes... and
Budget would include $490 in additional software, $250 in new camera gear and lighting gear, $300 in set design, props, costumes, $300 in miniature elements, And nearly a thousand $ pulling all the cast members here into a single recording effort for about a week.
I cannot guarantee any of it will go as smoothly as I'd like, [BUT] if my (unrelated to Myst) work keeps growing at current rates, this should be done by end of 2024.
It's intended mainly as a casual entry to the Mystverse, with a bit of humor and a few characters who know nothing about any of this being dumped into an adventure they never could have anticipated.
I've got to try to do this well, but even a small cut-rate $2k fanfilm is a challenge to finance without major compromises elsewhere.
If other ventures go well, it could go faster. If they all fail, well, I would not be surprised to see completion of this delayed a bit.
Doubly frustrating, of course, is I can't say what those ventures even are here. Just know that I'm trying to make this work.
Also by then, I hope to have a standalone Myst fangame completed (the new version of Sehv T'devokan, about twice as large as the original) and an "Uru expansion pack" with five new ages.
Again, no guarantees those will go smoothly either - certain ages like Sevkor keep being massively, almost obsessively reworked partly in order to make them more efficient and have them look as good and detailed as possible while limiting actual texture data use to below half what it once was. My current aim there is to have all five ages combined, five *substantial* ages, entirely fit within 400mb of filesize. This seems pretty standard for Uru - the initial Uru: Ages Beyond Myst fit on a single 650MB CD. This indie fan expansion is roughly 60% as large in area. I want to do that really well too but of course no matter how hard I try to improve my workflow and optimize things better than before, still cannot guarantee approval by Cyan or the fanbase for use in MOULa.
What I can pledge is release on fan servers such as Deep Island, Gehn Shard, etc, at least, by mid-2024, and hopefully that generates enough excitement there to propel it through the testing process of Minkata shard and finally ideally MOULa.
Some time soon, as all this progresses, I'll be sharing a bunch of images and video clips of the WIP.