Science Fiction Forum

Man, there are times I totally don't get how the entertainment industry works. Take book-to-film adaptations. Usually a novel only makes it to the big screen when its contents have reached a sort of critical mass in pop culture and it gets folded into the zeitgeist. Not so if your name is David Goyer or Michael Cassutt. According to Deadline, this pair inked a seven-figure deal Friday with Warner Bros. to write a sci-fi novel trilogy before turning around and adapting them for the screen. Why not just skip the cumbersome publishing process and only write screenplays? When one of you wrote the screenplays for Dark City, Blade and Death Warrant (a tour de force!) the normal rules simply do not apply. 
 
Goyer and Cassutt's novels already have names--Heaven's Shadow, Heaven's War and Heaven's Fall--and will add to the ever-higher pile of "man meets alien, alien meets man, alien clobbers man" invasion plots floating around Hollywood at the moment. The plot of the first book sounds like a cross between Independence Day and Arthur C. Clarke's classic Rendezvous with Rama in that a massive unknown object is detected inside the solar system and a crew of astronauts is dispatched to intercept, only to find the inhabitants hostile. (In Clarke's novel, though, the inhabitants were ambivalent.) Honestly, as a prolific reader of sci-fi, that all sounds dull as dishwater. Gentlemen, add some tie-in to the architects of Stonehenge, flesh eating "grey goo" and our only hope for survival being a cadre of bikini car wash workers and I'm sold.

Man, what.
 
Why not just write screenplays? What are they doing? What is this?

This could be cool.  They know it's gonna be made into a film so they have to write it to be adaptable.  I never heard of anyone writing a book with the idea of it being a film so this is different.  It being a trilogy force them to have to come up with something pretty GRAND so who knows.  If it works, we will definitely see a new way something works.  I won't knock it till I see how well it works.

My best guess is that the books will generate some buzz prior to the film going into production. That will only happen, though, if the books are any good.

I like the idea of finding ominous floating objects in space but I'd always hope there's something more going on that just "IT'S FILLED WITH ALIENS! SHOOT 'EM!".