HBO’s Most Promising Sci-Fi Series Is Getting the Movie Treatment

Westworld is getting a brand-new movie adaptation over at Warner Bros. Their choice to write the new feature is going to excite you if you’re a sci-fi fan!

Deadline reports that David Koepp is the man with the pen for Warner Bros. He was the writer that adapted Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for the big screen. So, it’s a reunion of sorts for writer and subject!

If you’re unfamiliar with Westworld, it’s basically a 1973 film where rich people cosplay as cowboys and get into gunfights with androids. It’s all fun and self-playing pianos until one robot malfunctions and starts popping guests with live ammunition.

So yes, a perfect fit for our current age of technology, paranoia, and obsession with dudes on horses! To be serious for a second though, Westworld already proved to be a competent property for the reimagining process on HBO. So, this should be super interesting to see what an accomplished writer can do with the concept.

The most interesting part of Deadlines reporting is that a major filmmaker is circling the project at the time of writing. People are daring to dream that Spielberg could reunite with Koepp for a barn-burner of a good time at the movies. Could you imagine how easy it would be to sell this movie to the general public?

We’re doing Westworld again!

Any discussion above this news has to include the tidbit that we’ve done a version of this story on HBO before. In fact, a lot of people have gotten to see Westworld on Tubi and other free ad-supported TV channels in the intervening years.

Deadline had to catch-up with that show’s co-creator Lisa Joy a couple of years back. In her opinion, the rise of AI and other tech necessitated the show morphing into something else entirely. In of itself, that’s not a bad thing!

“These topics will continue to be explored if not in Westworld then in other series, taking [the topic] to new levels,” she said, in conversation with Deadline. “I think it’s an area rife with possibility.” 

In a funny way, the story has become more of the moment than a lot of properties plucked for modern adaptations. Joy joked that the series “went from sci-fi to documentary film” in the same conversation.

Whatever shape the new version of Westworld takes, you can bet there will be a thorough inspection of the limits and dangers of technology’s continuing entrenchment with humanity. Also, there will be killer robots, because who doesn’t love that?

A reminder of the media environment we live in

Now, the question within a lot of TV viewer communities was, how did Westworld get canceled in the first place? Well, to have HBO tell it, the viewership just wasn’t there. Also, a show of this size and scale cost a lot of money to bring to the small screen. During the period of corporate cost cutting in the mid twenty twenties, it was easy to target Westworld as a show on the bubble at the best of times.

 TV fans have seen so many smart shows go to the wayside because of this edict of cutting costs. It doesn’t matter if the show was well made or not. Simply put, if the viewership isn’t there, it gets the ax. It doesn’t matter if critical acclaim is on the table, or there’s a devoted fan base of people that might not be the size of something like Stranger Things. Everything meets an untimely end when we’re talking about budgets that can balloon in the hundreds of millions.

 Now, we’ll have to see how the new version of this story fares on the big screen. Chances are if it’s as thoughtful as what came before, things will go just fine.

(Photo Credit: HBO)

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