A New Adaptation Of ‘The Dresden Files’ Could Be Coming To TV
There could be a new adaptation of Jim Butcher’s ‘The Dresden Files’ book series heading to tv, as Fox21 Television Studios options the rights to New York Times bestselling novels.
The contemporary fantasy/mystery novel series follows the adventures of private investigator and wizard Harry Dresden as he takes on cases of supernatural disturbances in modern-day Chicago. It’s set in a world where all the supernatural creatures you can think of – vampires, demons, ghosts, faeries, and werewolves – are real. Dresden acts as a “consulting wizard”, taking cases from client both human and nonhuman clients, along with helping out the Special Investigations (SI) Unit of Chicago PD.
The potential new series would come from Ileen Maisel (‘The Golden Compass’, ‘Inkheart’), alongside John Fischer and Julie Waters from Temple Hill Entertainment (‘The Twilight Saga’, ‘The Maze Runner’) who would produce the show.
Jim Butcher’s original novels were first published back in 2000, beginning with ‘Storm Front’. There are now 15 books in the series, with the latest being ‘Skin Game’ published in 2015. The books have sold millions worldwide, and have spawned roleplaying games, tabletop games and a series of graphic novels.
This isn’t the first time ‘The Dresden Files’ has been adapted for tv. The Sci-Fi Channel (before it became Syfy) adapted the books back in 2007, with ‘Arrow’ star Paul Blackthorne taking the lead role of Dresden. Sadly, it only lasted one, 12-episode, season before being cancelled.
It’s still very early days for this potential new adaptation of ‘The Dresden Files’, but we’ll let you know if and when we hear more.
2 comments
I personally quite liked the first TV adaptation. (Bob was very different than in the book series – but in an interesting way. Murphy was miscast, though.) However, the problem with this book series is that it only really gets good with the third novel or so, and that most fans are used to middle-to-late series Dresden, who is WAY more powerful than in the first few books. I only started reading the novels after watching the TV series, but apparently old fans found seeing a “depowered” Dresden without all his contacts to various supernatural groups rather weird.
Another problem is that the books normally have at least one big battle scene that would need a serious CGI budget – and that’s not even talking about scenes taking place in the fairy realm. Just turning the franchise into another low-budget police / PI procedual (like the first TV series did) seems to make sense at first glance – after all, Dresden must have many more small cases than just the big ones we read about in the books – but it wouldn’t do the tone and style of the books justice at all. Maybe if they could film it like Sanctuary did – almost entirely in greenscreen, which apparently saved them money. Or maybe CGI is cheaper now, at least as much as they’d need for the frequent fire spells.
Excellent news, I loved the first very short adaptation.
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