Which other WC story could have been a movie?

C

CT25

Captain
Which other Wing Commander story could have been made into a WC movie if you were to pick one?

Personally, I would have liked to see "End Run" as a movie; though "Action Stations" or "Fleet Action" or WC3 could have been put to a big screen I think.

NOTE: I am not intending to pick on the WC movie here; that is not my intention. I'm not asking in this thread if another story should have been made the WC movie instead of the one that was made.

I'm just looking for opinions on whether other WC stories could have been made into a 2-3 hour movie hypothetically? Or for instance would "Fleet Action" have been too big to been made into one movie?
 
I think some of the game stories could be expanded into a TV show fairly easily since it's divided into missions already anyway...
 
I think WCIV possibly has the strongest story, even if it would need to be tweaked in order to stand alone. Corruption of power, conspiracies and warmongering are still contemporary themes these days, so it wouldn't seem particularly dated.
 
Secret Missions 1 might be aesy to fit as typical movie plot, though it hasn't much character development besides Maniac going crazy.

That wouldn't make a great movie, but would have a fine chance of making a good movie.
 
I think some of the game stories could be expanded into a TV show fairly easily since it's divided into missions already anyway...
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I'm not really sure--as exciting as an individual battle is and as fascinating as the setting is, the actual story quickly becames very dull when kept 'realistic'. It's the same reason we don't have World War II (or modern) pilot shows... the characters would need to fly the same mission over and over and over and don't do much else.

Look at the kludges Space Above and Beyond and Wing Commander Academy used to try and solve this problem--the former had the marines also being ground troops which made everyone angry and the latter had script after script that came up with reasons for Blair to eject or to land on a planet.

I do think *Privateer* could have been a television show. You've probably read Origin's Privateer pitch from back in the day and I think that that could really have worked well. The character freedom it gives you lets you have your Privateer be involved in big space battles on occasion but also lets him have any other kind of story without warping the concept overly much.
 
SmartAlec said:
I think WCIV possibly has the strongest story, even if it would need to be tweaked in order to stand alone. Corruption of power, conspiracies and warmongering are still contemporary themes these days, so it wouldn't seem particularly dated.
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Have to agree with that. It probably wouldn't be the best introduction to the WC-universe, but the story is the best of all published material.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I do think *Privateer* could have been a television show. You've probably read Origin's Privateer pitch from back in the day and I think that that could really have worked well. The character freedom it gives you lets you have your Privateer be involved in big space battles on occasion but also lets him have any other kind of story without warping the concept overly much.
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Like Firefly?


I would like to see End Run like a Tv mini-series ala Hallmark or some other private network.
 
People only think Firefly has the most annoying hardcore fans in the world because they never made that Privateer show. :)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I'm not really sure--as exciting as an individual battle is and as fascinating as the setting is, the actual story quickly becames very dull when kept 'realistic'. It's the same reason we don't have World War II (or modern) pilot shows... the characters would need to fly the same mission over and over and over and don't do much else.

Look at the kludges Space Above and Beyond and Wing Commander Academy used to try and solve this problem--the former had the marines also being ground troops which made everyone angry and the latter had script after script that came up with reasons for Blair to eject or to land on a planet.
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Good point, but it has been done on occasion. Battlestar Galactica comes to mind, although I'm not sure how much it counts, given that it focused on more than just pilots, and also only ran for one season (I'm talking about the original...I've never watched the remake due to being too turned off by the silliness of the pilot).

There also were some pretty good WWII pilot shows that have run...Baa Baa Black Sheep comes to mind (I've only seen part of it, but it ran for quite a while, so they must have been able to make it work somehow).

Although I agree that it's hard. You have to focus more on the characters between missions and not the missions themselves to have any chance.

Bandit LOAF said:
I do think *Privateer* could have been a television show. You've probably read Origin's Privateer pitch from back in the day and I think that that could really have worked well. The character freedom it gives you lets you have your Privateer be involved in big space battles on occasion but also lets him have any other kind of story without warping the concept overly much.
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True. The "freelancer" (lower-case) motif has been done a lot with good success, like in Airwolf, or the already mentioned Firefly. I would have liked to see a Privateer TV series.

Back on the subject of movies, I always thought the natural choice would have been WC2. It already was written as an "interactive movie" and had many of the elements that could make a movie successful. Assuming you cast someone really good as Blair, the whole angsty "everyone hates me fore something I didn't even do" motif has a lot of potential. You have romance, friendship lost, neat intereactions with Jazz and Stingray, and a dramatic showdown at the end.
 
WC1 would do also, because there are a lot of elements and gaps and backgrounds to fill in to create a story around. You never see the bridge of the claw, or what goes on in the bar, and you can expand the events of the cinematics to make them a complete story, and also expand the cast to include marines, mechanics, bridge staff and "steal" some characters from the other Media such as WCA, the movie, and characters from the later games who "served on the claw".

But better a movie then a series, because all the Sci-Fi series from lately(V 2009, BSG Remake, Stargate universe), focus way, way too much on character development that makes it more like a soapopera then a sci-fi show, if you see spaceships outside the introduction, then you had a "lucky view". Star Trek series generally did a good job, as did the original BSG, or Buck Rogers.
 
That works. I think that's kind of what the WC movie tries to do anyway, though it picks and chooses bits of WC1, 2 and 3 and tries to blend them into one story. The fresh new pilots and the Tiger's Claw from WC1, Paladin the freighter captain/secret agent and human traitors from WC2 (Pilgrims, not Mandarins, but still) and the whole war going badly/Earth under threat thing and Admiral Tolwyn as the distant mastermind from WC3. Seems churlish to say 'do that, but make it better', but I suppose I'm saying it anyway.
 
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