by Michael
May 25th 2012 — About 3 years ago I built a webpage that asked if there would be a warrior cats movie. At the time it seemed like a movie might be made even though there was no clear news about it. It was all speculation and hope. But all of us thought that a warrior cats movie was a good idea. In fact on PoC (this site) there must be about 1,500 comments on the WC movie page and the other comments page and on the petition page I am told that there are about 7,500 entries! The large number of comments is amazing because for a while I stopped comments. Yeh!!!! people want a movie based on the warrior cats series. So why isn’t it being made? Or maybe it is but we have heard no news about it.
One of the biggest film producers in the business is Harvey Weinstock. He owns and runs The Weinstock Company with his brother David. They are making three animated films due for release in 2013, one of which is about a vegetarian lion, called Leo The Lion. Obviously cats and animated films are profitable.
I am assuming at the moment that if anyone made a WC movie it would be an animated movie – sophisticated cartoon style. Or a combination of real and animation using CGI (computer generated graphics).
The biggest producer of animated films and the most sophisticated is Pixar. They are able to create a new generation of animated films in terms of reality and storyline. The business invests heavily in new technology. I believe they use their own version of RenderMan to produce photographic quality images. The well known Toy Story is one of theirs. My research tells me that a WC movie is not on the cards at Pixar.
The News and Announcements page of the official Warrior Cats Forum has no announcement for a movie. I guess you knew that.
Where does that leave us? No news of even the possibility of a movie? It might be important to remember that this would be a good book to film adaptation. Perhaps Erin Hunter do not want a movie. Has anyone thought of that possibility? Books allow the imagination to fly. Each reader of a book creates their own Warrior Cats world and creates their own little movie in their mind through their imagination. Perhaps Erin Hunter do not want to spoil that because they might think that a film could never improve on a person’s imagination.
There is difficulty in adapting a book to a film and in this case it is a series of books to a single film. Perhaps discussions have taken place between Erin Hunter and film producers but they could not agree on a way to make the film. It would mean writing a screenplay. Who would write that? It is not the same as writing a novel. Some people say that all film adaptations of books are failures. In this case an obstacle might be the fact that there are four writers with different opinions and they can’t make up their minds.
If you follow the book closely there is almost no need to make the film and if you make something different you are unfaithful to the book and might disappoint WC fans. It is quite complicated.
A particular difficulty with Warrior Cats is the fact that the people most likely to see the film are WC fans. Are there enough fans and followers to make the film profitable? How well known outside of the WC fan base is Warrior Cats? It is a little bit specialist and perhaps the producers think that the potential audience is not large enough.
There has to be a large audience because high quality animated movies from Pixar are expensive. Maybe CGI is expensive because it is labor intensive (lots of man hours are required to make these films). The budget for Toy Story 3 is apparently $200 million. That is a big number.
My thoughts right now are that a Warrior Cats movie will not be made. It has been discussed for three years and there has been a lot of chances to make it and there have been a lot of animated or CGI type films over that three year period. So why not a Warrior Cats movie?
The bottom line in movie making is always money, of course. Could a WC movie make money? The answer seems to be NO.
