The most prolific writer of science fiction is Isaac Asimov. Now, usually, when I write a sentence like that,
I'll throw in some weasel words like one of the most prolific, mostly so that parents can correct me in the comments.
But in this, I feel that it is just literally true. Wikipedia has five separate pages, just listing Asimov's bibliography.
In his own words, over a space of 40 years, I published an average of 1,000 words a day. Over the space of the second 20 years,
I published an average of 1,700 words a day.
Granted, most of his work is nonfiction, but he still wrote enough fiction that there's actually
a fair bit of scholarly disagreement over how to count it. The number I've seen for novels and short stories is around 400.
He wrote so much, he even wrote books about how he had written so much. Obviously, it's not just that he wrote a lot,
it's that he wrote some of the most foundational. You need a new foundation. Pieces of science fiction ever.
But you'd think with over 400 science fiction stories and with how popular science fiction is at the box office,
that there'd be like 100 or 50, or 25, or even 10 adaptations of Asimov's work.
But no, there are only eight. There would be nine, but Fantastic Voyage doesn't count.
It's often mistaken as an Asimov book because the novel came up for the movie. But actually, the script for the film was written first
and then they hired Asimov to write the novelization. He managed to get the book out onto the shelves six months before
the film came out because he's just that fast of a goddamn writer.
This is different, Spoon, listen, I got this fun little ass little yummy. I mean, she is complete agreeable,
I mean, ass has sprinkable, Spoon. What does that even mean? Today, I want to talk about the 2004,
Adaptation of iRobot starring Will Smith and nothing else. This video is only going to be about the 2004,
"Adaptation of iRobot" starring Will Smith. Wait, why do I keep putting the word adaptation in quote?
The reason I wanted to talk about this movie is not just to harp on a more or less forgotten Blockbuster from a bygone era because it is fun,
but because last year Apple released a big adaptation of foundation. If we lay a strong enough foundation.
Asimov's biggest series. Before talking about that, I wanted the context of some other times people have adapted his work,
which is what we're doing here. But we're only going to talk about iRobot. I wouldn't read and watch every Asimov adaptation in
existence no matter how obscure charting 60 years of failed or underfunded productions,
just as the prelude for different video, that would be insane.
There is an entire field of film criticism centered on categorizing the different kinds of adaptations, but unfortunately,
all of that scholarship is compromised because all of them would need to put the 2004 air quotes adaptation of iRobot in
its own special category because the making of this movie is real weird.
Back in the 90s, screenwriter Jeff Vintar wrote a completely unrelated screenplay called hardwired.
The movie wasn't an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery where the suspects were all robots or other artificial intelligence.
There was a robot called Sonny, a supercomputer called Vicki, and the hologram of Dr. Lanning,
the man who had been killed. It was originally written more like a stage play, taking place entirely on one floor of a building and with FBI agent,
detective Del Spooner tasked with figuring out which the robots killed Lanning and how. It's like a sci-fi Knives Out.
The script was first acquired by Disney, where it entered a period of development hell and got rewritten several times.
With one iteration taking place on a space station and the entire team of space marines taking on the role of the detective from the original script.
When that version of the movie fell through, Fox became interested in the idea and Vintar expanded the scope of the movie out from the original stage play like murder mystery to
a big-budget studio film broadening the scope of the story out to an entire metropolis and bringing back the central detective character that.
Soon after that, Fox acquired the rights to Isaac Asimov's short story collection iRobot, never saying to themselves, how do we make money off of this thing that we just got?
I know, why don't we get poor Jeff Vintar to rewrite his screenplay again so that it can pass as an Asimov adaptation?
Poor Jeff Vintar who had rewritten this thing like 11 times by now went about making some Asimov references in the new screenplay.