I recently watched Ender’s Game, and I couldn’t figure out who it was aimed at. Didn’t seem like a kid’s movie, but it didn’t quite seem like it was for adults either. Who was the target audience? I have not read the book.
The target audience was anyone who liked the book. It was a bog-standard moneygrab adapation.
And for this member of the target audience, I passed on the movie. I could tell it was best avoided.
I’ve never seen the movie, but the book probably counts as “Young Adult.” I was in high school the first time that I read it around 1990.
Seemed to be the same young adult audience that The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent were targeting. Possibly a bit younger, maybe Percy Jackson like.
Also, this XKCD makes no sense to you!
Boy, does it ever not!
The weird part is that the comic (and that part of the book) came true. It’s just that it wasn’t Wordpress, but rather a microblogging service designed to make it impossible to express complex thoughts, and the things posted to said blog were the stupidest bullshit imaginable. And yet that person was voted into power largely as a result. We truly are living in a sci-fi future.
Sort of. It was a subset, of which I’m a member:
“People who liked the book so much that they’ll watch a bad movie made from it.”
Or to be charitable call it “…pay money to see a movie that, at two hours, can’t help but be a pale shadow of the original.”
This. Ender’s Game (1993) was released as part of the 2010s trend of book-based dystopian YA movies, and was presumably aimed at the same audience.
What I had intended to write was “2013”. As usual, I forgot what decade this is.
Similarly in 2014 was the big budget movie release of “The Giver”, another movie adaptation nobody asked for aimed at the dystopian YA crowd.
I’m probably the only one out there who thought the movie was better than the book. I found the book too shallow to be novel length and the twist ending to be predictable and anti-climactic.
I thought the 2-hour movie was sufficient for the story, the visuals were much better than the book explained, and the extended ending was much more interesting than the book.
It was a very popular book that people had been trying to adapt into a movie for years. It was always a challenge to do so because it’s hard to hang a big budget movie on a bunch of child actors and the effects to make the Battle Room anything like the book are non-trivial.
And then they finally did it and it was… ok, I guess. I liked the book. I saw the movie, and I don’t remember anything of it. So it at least wasn’t so bad I remember how bad it was.
I think the studios were looking for a YA novel series to turn into films, much as The Hunger Games, Divergent and Twilight had been previously.