Nonprofit, evangelical, nondenominational. Fun for the whole family with games, activities, stories, answers to children’s questions, color pages, and more! One of the Web’s first and most popular Christian Web sites for children. It creates a sense of momentum that it can escalate week-after-week, with plenty of talking points from each installment, while allowing the central mysteries to unfold more organically and give the audience time to actually piece things together.Adventures in the rainforest! Learn about the Creator of the universe by exploring His marvelous creation. You can end on cliffhangers around Roger's disappearance, the truth about Lyra, and the children's escape from Bolvangar. The fight between Iorek and Iofur can become a jaw-dropping action set-piece like something out of Game Of Thrones. A whole hour can be devoted to building the world and Lyra as a character. Coulter (Ruth Wilson), and more about the mysterious Dust, before heading off on a more global adventure - the pieces are very episodic. As Lyra makes her way through the world - beginning in Oxford, with the young girl ( now played by Dafne Keen) running wild around Jordan College, and then slowly learning the truth about Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) and Mrs. It's not just a matter of minutes, because you could just make a longer movie, but His Dark Materials feels better suited to the sort of long-form storytelling allowed by television. With quadruple the runtime of The Golden Compass, the first season of His Dark Materials can cover every page of Northern Lights and then some. It should have plenty of that at HBO, with the first season set to be made up of eight episodes, each roughly around one hour in length.
Martin's A Game Of Thrones, but it still needs more time and care than a 113-minute movie can offer in order to do it justice. HBO, and the BBC alongside it, can embrace these with all the freedom necessary, giving them a much stronger platform to build His Dark Materials upon.Ĭoming in at just a shade under 400 pages, Pullman's Northern Lights isn't a sprawling epic in the fashion of, say, George R.R. It does still need to be family-friendly, because the show will be aiming to appeal to audiences of all ages, but the books themselves prove that doesn't mean cutting the religious aspects. It's known for pushing the boundaries of television and breaking taboos, in which case attacking the Catholic Church isn't going to seem like such a big deal. If anything, controversy is welcomed by HBO. Related: Euphoria: The 10 Most Controversial Things About HBO's New Show What matters to HBO is having subscribers, and if anyone is subscribed to the network - which has built its reputation on sex and violence-filled prestige dramas - they're not likely to be outraged by a critique of religion. Yes, they do need people to tune in to see their product, but as a premium cable channel it's far less exposed to being damaged by outside groups. Not only does the failure of The Golden Compass prove that what really matters is getting the adaptation right, but HBO doesn't have the same pressures facing them as a movie studio.
if it had such overt religious messages, but that's something HBO doesn't have to worry about with His Dark Materials. It was done because of fears it would make the film financially unviable in the U.S. Unsurprisingly, a sequel never materialized.īy stripping away its criticisms of religion, The Golden Compass lost much of the bite that makes Pullman's novels so fascinating.
The intrigue became exposition the clever allegory and slow-build were simplified and rushed through. There were directorial changes - Weitz was replaced by Anand Tucker, and then later returned - and plenty of studio interference, all of which resulted in a film that had roughly the same story as the books, but none of the magic. On top of that, some of the violence - such as the fight between the bears - was toned down, the mystery was spelled out, and the ending was lopped-off, to be saved for the sequel and to give to a happier finale. New Line Cinema, despite producing Lord of the Rings, demanded the film be cut from its likely three-hour runtime (based upon Chris Weitz's initial script), somehow getting it under two hours. Sure, it maybe affected its gross more, but its quality was more greatly impacted by attempting to make this as family-friendly as possible. It's the religion that gets the most attention, but it wasn’t even The Golden Compass' biggest problem.