In 1994, True Lies was a huge hit at the box office, making close to $400 million. That makes sense, since it was made by James Cameron, who had just finished making Terminator 2, and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of Hollywood’s most bankable actors.
But how many people saw La Totale, the French movie on which it was based?
The person who made John Wick is thinking about that question. Kolstad is now writing the scripts for the next Splinter Cell series for Netflix and an anime series with eight episodes based on Forgotten Runes: Wizard’s Cult.
If you don’t spend your evenings shopping at the NFT market OpenSea, you probably haven’t heard of Forgotten Runes. It is a collection of NFT characters from the fantasy world that came out in July of last year. I have a simple question: Could a presentation about NFTs be interesting to people who may not even know what those three letters stand for?
Kolstad said “There’s real life and there’s what Web3 is doing, and there’s a divide between the two,” “To close the gap, all you have to do is make something beautiful that makes people ask, “What is this?” Where does it come from? “Which one is it?”
Characters in NFT collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which usually have hundreds of different characters, are linked by a vague story. But NFTs divide people. Many people don’t like them, but others have embraced them with all their heart. People who work in the industry know that crypto credentials alone aren’t enough to get people excited about NFT adaptations, like a TV show.
But that doesn’t mean that NFT brands, stories, and characters can’t be used as the basis for a successful mainstream adaptation. Several NFT businesses, like Forgotten Runes, want to move from the blockchain to the big screen.
Bryce Anderson, a production executive at Clubhouse Pictures, which helped make I, Tonya and Birds of Prey, said, “There are usually around 5,000 NFT owners in a collection.” “If that’s the market you want to reach, building a worldwide brand won’t be enough. We talk about our favorite TV shows, and to stay on the air, you need 500,000 viewers a week. You must have that.”
It’s going to be hard. The speculation bubble that took over the crypto market in 2021 was a big reason why people were so happy about NFTs. The recent drop in the price of cryptocurrencies has slowed down this speculative craze and made people less interested in NFTs. Many designers are working to show that NFTs will stay around even though “crypto winter” is making the air cold.
Credible artists are looking into NFTs, just as some engineers and developers left Silicon Valley titans to work in the cryptocurrency sector. The well-known stand out the most. Seth Green is making a show, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT will be in it. Reese Witherspoon’s production company is making a movie and TV world for the World of Women NFT collection. Both the writers and artists who came from Pixar and Marvel are important.
Bearsnake, who was one of the people who started the band Forgotten Runes, once said, “You never know what something will become.” Bearsnake wouldn’t tell CNET his real name, but he did confirm that he was in charge of creative for an entertainment company that Disney bought. “Hello Kitty started out as a vinyl coin purse. Did they know it would grow to be… one of the biggest media franchises in the world? No, but it got to where it is now on its own.”
Buy a character and help a show out
Some people want a universe based on NFT collections to go beyond the cryptographic ceiling and become widely used. Others think that NFTs are a better way to help keep manufacturing costs down.
During a June speech at the NFT.NYC conference, Spike Lee said, “Money has been the biggest problem for every first-time filmmaker.” How are you going to pay for it?
Lee says that the ability for non-professionals to record and edit video on their phones and computers has helped spread out the filmmaking process. Young artists still have trouble getting money, though. Lee wants to change this with NFTs. He is trying out a plan that will let his filmmaking students at New York University use NFTs to fund their projects. Lee said that movie studios would keep making movies, while NFTs would work in the independent film industry.
The main idea behind the theory is the idea of intellectual property. Fans can invest in the characters that new filmmakers make in the same way that investors can invest in new businesses. In theory, the rewards will go up as these characters become more popular.
The second benefit of making things with the blockchain is how IP works. When you buy an NFT, you often have to buy both the character’s intellectual property (IP) and the right to build a story around that IP. Many people think that this will change the way movies and TV shows are written and made.
Consider Forgotten Runes. Wizard’s Cult is a collection of 9,995 illustrations that show wizards, warriors, alchemists, clairvoyants, and other magical people. People who own NFTs can add a character’s formal history to the Book of Lore, which they can access. Even if the NFT is sold to someone else, it can’t be changed once it’s been written.
Even though that might seem like a recipe for trouble, given how easy it is for harmful content to flood sites that aren’t paying attention, the idea is that self-interest will win out. Forgotten Runes is going to be made into an anime, and well-known characters may be chosen to be in it. If it gets popular, the characters and NFT that are connected to it will be worth more.
Bearsnake says that writing fan fiction is technically against the law because it breaks rules about copyright. Many NFT collections make the case that franchises would grow faster if they did more to encourage fan enthusiasm instead of just putting up with it.
Anderson of Clubhouse Picture says that some of his best literary works from the last ten years were things that people made online and gave away for free. That was how they wanted to be creative, and I think NFTs helped them find a way to make it more public.
Anderson helped make Runner, an NFT compilation that will be released soon. The story of Runner takes place on the planet Omega, and it’s about a race called The Omega Race. The winner of this race gets to rule the whole world. Blaise Hemingway is writing it. He wrote the music for Frozen and Big Hero 6 as part of the Disney Animation Story Trust.
Hemingway said that the idea of NFT owners being able to make official backstories for their characters was like how he made stories for his Star Wars figures when he was a kid.
He asked, “How is it that a character can only be seen for two seconds in a cantina scene?” What is that person’s history? We’re following the stories of about 12 main characters, but there are many other stories going on at the same time that touch on this.
Hemingway and Anderson have ideas for making Runner work in different ways, but nothing is set in stone yet. Given the qualifications of the team, it seems like a movie or TV phrase is inevitable: Bran Unkeless, who made The Hunger Games, and Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, who made Snow White and the Huntsman, work with Hemingway and Anderson.
NFTs are blowing up
Economic models for NFT collections, if they even have any, often depend on how well they can get into popular culture. But making great things takes a lot of time and work, so breaking out calls for quality things.
Forgotten Runes is one of the NFT teams with the most goals. In addition to the anime series, there is also a comic book series (the first issue came out in June), a planned tabletop game, and, strangely enough, a cookbook. A massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Forgotten Runes will come out at the start of the next year.
Bearsnake says that the idea of starting a brand and spreading it to other media is as old as Disney. Fans can now take a more active role in this process thanks to a set of new tools that come with NFTs. But these technologies cause both problems and ways to solve them. Creators must make items that appeal to the general public while also pleasing NFT investors, who are mostly speculators who care more about short-term buzz than long-term goals.
Bearsnake thinks it’s fine that most people in the field are mostly interested in making money. “Because not everyone knows how hard it is to make a comic book, I think many people in the community have unreasonable expectations of the founders. That was hard, you know?”
At the moment, it’s hard to grow. The last few months have been hard for everything to do with cryptocurrencies. Since the start of the year, the price of ether, which is used by most NFTs, has dropped by almost 50%. Because of this, not only have NFT prices dropped—Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs now trade for about a third of their all-time high—but so has public interest in the mysterious technology.
A blockchain hit isn’t likely, but the people behind NFT don’t have to make the next True Lies. All you have to do is make the following La Totale.
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