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  • What would an Honor Harrington movie look like?

  • Discuss various aspects of the Honorverse universe here. Please be mindful of what you post, as not everybody has read the same amount of books. DO NOT post Honorverse fan fiction here under ANY circumstances!
Discuss various aspects of the Honorverse universe here. Please be mindful of what you post, as not everybody has read the same amount of books. DO NOT post Honorverse fan fiction here under ANY circumstances!
 #11713  by Brad Lee
 Sun Nov 05, 2017 4:22 am
For those that missed it (I just discovered this now myself), here is a video interview between David Weber and his nephew Alex discussing what an Honor Harrington movie might look like, courtesy of The Weberverse youtube channel:

 #11765  by John Fairbairn, KDE, GACM
 Mon Nov 06, 2017 5:32 am
Thanks for posting this. What Mr. Weber had to say is both cogent and well-reasoned. He has given this considerable thought, and does recognise a lot of issues with turning buck stories into live-action renditions. I'm quite happy to see that he has such a reasonable attitude about what eventually must happen.

Regards -
 #11775  by Laura Lochen, 1SL
 Mon Nov 06, 2017 2:35 pm
Great video and I agree, I think his ideas are very solid in approach.


Laura Lochen, KCR, MC, DSO, ME, QBM
Rear Admiral of the Green, RMN
6th Space Lord
Countess, Boundary Waters
 #11780  by Zachary White
 Mon Nov 06, 2017 3:07 pm
I remember him talking about this a few years ago - I think before Evergreen went belly-up. Saying that a Game of Thrones type approach would probably work the best.

George R.R. Martin and David Weber have similar styles when it comes to multitude of characters and the propensity to kill them. If the style could work for GoT - it can def work for the Honorverse - hopefully some day!
 #13237  by Eric Sanders
 Tue Dec 05, 2017 11:53 pm
Wow, would love to see him get his way with this, while a TV show process would be great his idea for opening the movie with the climax of On Basilisk Station then talking to Nimitz and going to the party would work perfectly, and would be a good way to avoid the difficulty of creating the native species revolt that would be difficult and very expensive to create (in the vein of Avatar).
 #14477  by John Fairbairn, KDE, GACM
 Mon Jan 08, 2018 8:40 am
I've had some thoughts about this topic. It continues to niggle in my mind. I'm addressing my general thoughts to the membership, but if anyone can/wants to forward them to Mr. Weber for his consideration, feel free as far as I am concerned.

A) There seems to be some feeling that there is an issue with just doing the HH series in order. Not sure why, but I'll allow that Media reps might know more about this side of things than I do. I will say that I just re-red On Basilisk Station, and I find it to be an engaging and very intriguing story as is. As an author myself, being an active participant and contributor to production regional theater in my area, and having some experience with trying to excerpt parts of prior work to stand alone, I think I have a valid feel for the issues and situations which must be resolved to convert such work into either a stand-alone publication or a script.

B) Like it or not, the heart of the audience in Science Fiction is not adult geeks. It's kids. They are the ones whose minds become inflamed with concepts that are away and beyond the familiar world around them. They are the ones who, when the adults in their lives say "That's just not possible!" will fire back "Why not? I'll make it so!" And then they do. For examples from today's world, just take a look around you. Almost everything you see and use daily, including the food you eat and the clothes you wear, has been touched by the magic wand of SciFi. Television, holograms, atomic power, microwave ovens, laser devices of all kinds, solid state memory, computers, cell phones, anything at all being put in space, trips to another world - all of this was a pipe dream in some SciFi writer's head when I was borne. Sure kids like adventure and action, and the more the merrier. But they can sit still for the introspective parts too. It does not all have to be continual rah-rah and blitzkrieg-fast action.

C) On a purely monetary basis, everyone likes to make a profit. Of course. No one is going to produce a movie that will not make some return. But let me say something and then ask a question. In 2016, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them grossed $814 million worldwide, making it the eighth highest-grossing film of 2016. Mostly, the audience was children and the parents who accompanied them. Hmm. Seems like the groundwork has been laid for something.

D) What happens if a studio produces a film (just for a working title: Treecats), that tells the story of Stephanie Harrington? Start with a bit of background - IE: the founding of Manticore and from it Sphinx. Then tell her 'first' story, about discovering treecats. Add in the tale of helping find survivors after the Copperwall avalanche. It even could throw in a segment at the end about the first Winton-treecat adoption (Queen Adrienne). Whether to include Honor's adoption at the very end is up for discussion. That would introduce the population to a much wider exposure of the Honorverse, allowing people to discover Manticore (Manticore-A III), Sphinx (Manticore-A IV), and Gryphon (Manticore-B V), their inhabitants, and to become conversant and invested with the whole concept of the stories. Call it a prequel, if you like. It seems to me that this would be a natural way to hook in kids (and of course, their parents and grandparents). From there, the first Honor Harrington story would be quite a natural progression, pretty much as written.

E) If that movie is a financial success (and if the script, casting, directing, and SFX are reasonably good I can not see any reason why it should not be) that would be real incentive to the producers to do the next one, the first about Honor herself. Will it make more than $50 M? I don't know, but I bet a studio could produce a heck of a good movie for under $50 M. It takes money to make money. Convince the studio that it is in their interest to formally reserve the profits to plow back in as funding for the next.

Personally? $20 bucks I'd go to see that movie. I want to see a 'real' moving treecat. Eating stolen celery. And a hexapuma. Yup. What do you think?

Regards -
 #14485  by Zachary White
 Mon Jan 08, 2018 12:34 pm
I think that doing a FX heavy production like anything HH would be for 50M is a pipe dream. Avatar, for example, cost almost 250M for its official budget and other estimates break 300M for actual out the door costs..........

And a movie is not right for this - worked for Lord of the Rings sure - but HH is not Lord of the Rings - it’s more akin to Game of Thrones.

The production value would be huge - the necessary FX would be huge.

Someone like Netflix or Amazon or HBO needs to be interested and pick up the rights.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 #14507  by Neil Simpson
 Mon Jan 08, 2018 7:41 pm
One possibility would be to do it as anime. The FX budget is a lot cheaper and you wouldn't have issues about finding a tall Eurasian actress to play Honor...
Fiona Clark liked this
 #14513  by Zachary White
 Mon Jan 08, 2018 9:00 pm
Neil Simpson wrote:One possibility would be to do it as anime. The FX budget is a lot cheaper and you wouldn't have issues about finding a tall Eurasian actress to play Honor...
In all honesty the actress doesn’t necessarily have to be tall - movie magic makes Tom Cruise look tall........just saying.

There are any number of actresses that could play Honor.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 #14658  by John Fairbairn, KDE, GACM
 Thu Jan 11, 2018 2:35 pm
I gave some thought to the items brought up here, before I posted as I did. I take no offense that people ask questions, but I stand by my thoughts. A movie about Stephanie Harrington and about the young Winton princess does not need the kinds of extremely costly FX that LOTR or Game of Thrones required. In fact, most of that could be done quite inexpensively. Fantastic Beasts, for example had a budget of around $180 M, but nobody knows how much of that actually was spent. Now that was a comparable type of film, but a story about the treecats should be far less expensive (not so many different creatures to design and produce, and far fewer scenes requiring lots of FX).

The costs of doing FX are dropping rapidly as newer equipment and better rendering software reduce the time and labor required to produce a scene. BTW, Fantastic Beasts has grossed more than $234M just in the US, and $814 M worldwide. Pretty good return, no?

As for who could play the parts, what tall, slender young aspiring actress (someone like Rowan Blanchard, Nikki Hahn, or Hailee Steinfeld, at age 11) would not want the part? I am sure there are plenty of English-speaking Eurasian girls out there who would jump at the chance. The same is true for girls to play Princess Adrienne. Let's see - how about Amandla Stenberg, Kaiya Perry, or Quvenzhane Wallis? Then too, there always is the possibility of finding relatively unknown-but-talented girls who could slip into those parts at a fraction of the cost of known young actresses.

In any event, I'm not the one who would be producing such a movie. I'm just trying to raise some considered thought about the possibilities. It does not seem to be necessary to jump straight into the HH line of material. It could be prequelled.

Regards -

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Welcome to The Royal Manticoran Navy: The Official Honor Harrington Fan Association's Forums. We are here to celebrate the work of David Weber and the universe he has created in his Honor Harrington books. Our hierarchy structure is set up based on what is in the books. We have gone to great lengths to make sure we are as true to the books as possible, using the books, and input from David Weber and Ad Astra as our guide. We want you to have a positive fandom experience, so please explore all our site has to offer and if you like what you see, feel free to join us. All we ask is that you remember one thing; no matter what you do, Do It With Honor!

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