Yeah, that would be a great one, if they could stick to what made the stories great. The “known space” universe of Niven has always been a favorite.
I’ve seen traces of the idea of a huge ring structure in space with people living on it, popping up from time to time, such as the Halo video game series and the movie Elysium. But these little rings are tiny in comparison to the one in Niven’s books. This ring is utterly huge, being about 500 MILLION km in length (along the inner surface of the ring) and 1.5 MILLION km wide, with 1000 km high walls at the edges to keep the atmosphere in. The ring is spinning like a bicycle wheel, see, so centrifugal force is providing “gravity” and holding the atmosphere down. The size of the Ringworld is the orbital path the Earth takes around the sun. Has anything this vast appeared in a movie? In a realistic, meaningful way?
I mean, a model of the Earth is present for some reason on this ring. It appears in flattened, map-projection form someplace along the surface of the ring. In the small section of the ring map where it appears, it looks as small as a fly squashed on a wall. (Insert flat-Earth jokes here)
Could a TV series do the story justice? Sure, lots of colorful alien characters (Puppeteers, Kzinti), weird planets colonized by humans, an ongoing series of wars between Humans and Kzinti, “safe” interstellar travel, thanks to indestructible spacecraft built by the Puppeteers. I suppose the ring itself could be done using CGI. They’d have to have it appearing in the sky, as described in the books, as an “arch.” Maybe they could do it well, if sufficiently motivated…
^ This. I’m not a huge fan of the prequels, but I’ll take ANY of them over TLJ (and rottentomatoes audience scores line up with this sentiment). God I hate TLJ with a passion.
Another one was a Alien sequel by Neill Blomkamp. He was gonna bring back Ripley, Newt, Hicks and apparently pretend Alien 3 and 4 never happened (and I wish they never happened as well).
There aren’t enough Larry Niven fans out there to make this commercially viable. If Morgan Freeman can’t get Rendezvous with Rama off the ground, even with Arthur C. Clarke’s name behind it,* I don’t think the less-recognized Niven** will carry the weight. You’re more likely to se a movie based on Halo first.
On the other hand, they’ve announced a Ringworld TV movie over two years ago. we’ll se if it happens.
(not just 2001, but [2010 and Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World and lots of other things known to the General Public)
**Niven had an episode of the new Outer Limits – “Inconstant Moon” – and an episode of the Animated Star Trek – “The Slaver Weapon” and three episodes of Land of the Lost
You have to look at from the perspective of the early 70s. At that time, few mainstream movies had tackled the subject of the Holocaust head-on. 1965’s The Pawnbroker was a notable exception but most films like **Judgment at Nuremberg **and Diary of Anne Frank either dealt with the aftermath or what happened immediately before (e.g., Anne Frank ended just as the characters were caught and being sent to the camps). A lot of that had to do with sensitivity of the subject matter. The Holocaust was so horrific that the consensus was it was likely beyond dramatizing effectively and any attempt to turn the subject into some Oscar-bait melodrama would end up being a grave insult to both the survivors and those that died. The fact that the one person who was bucking conventional wisdom by doing a Holocaust movie was a loud overbearing comic on the downhill side of his career who was unfamiliar with the words “taste” and “subtlety” only added to the view that the project would be a disaster beyond comprehension.
