The Roundup with Jeff Stockton (Season 25 Round 7)

 

The novel adaptation curse is seemingly at an end now, but not before the box office took on more damage. Here's The Roundup....

3. Jacob Jones
I must commend writer Jacob Jones for taking the criticisms of Kazaria to heart and working on fixing most of that film's issues with the sequel. Obviously it all didn't pan out at the box office, but that was more of a financial issue than a storytelling issue.

2. End of the Adaptation Curse
The Novel Adaptation Curse has finally been broken thanks to Revival. We do have two more novel adaptations on the schedule for this season, Nineteen Minutes and The Watsons Go to Birmingham, so we may not be out of the woods yet. Next season should also have at least 4 or 5 novel adaptations, so hopefully the writers of those films have learned from some of the recent failures.

1. Revival
I really enjoyed Revival. It clearly wasn't an easy story to adapt, but Chad Taylor did a pretty damn good job taking a difficult novel and making it easily digestible on the big screen. Bringing Frank Darabont in to direct was also a smart move given the skill in adapting King's work, especially his less obvious horror work, in the past.

3. Kazaria: Burns of the Lavita
I thought this film was a big improvement on the first Kazaria film, but I have to question the logic in making the sequel dramatically more expensive than the first film which barely made any profit with the casting of more expensive talents like John Cena and Dwayne Johnson (who managed to bilk the studio into an extra $5 million on top of his original $20 million if the Gossip Rag is to be believed).

2. Bunny
Nothing about Bunny worked for me other than casting Kaitlyn Dever in the lead role. The plot  didn't work very well in a film format. The characters were annoying and unlikable, and it seemed like the filmmakers and the author of the novel were all more interested in being quirky than being legitimately entertaining.

1. Box Office
Obviously the box office has had a bit of a rough patch, and not just with novel adaptations. Right now this season is on pace to be one of the least profitable in LRF's long history. It will obviously be up to films like Nightwing and Carte Blanche to bridge the gaps and avoid being the all-time least profitable season (Season 14 with a profit of $897,635,701 - right now we are at just $277,880,752 after 7 rounds).