If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the first episode of EnderCast – LAUNCH, you can now listen to it and subscribe to EnderCast on iTunes. If you like what you hear please give us a rating!
Blog
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Introducing a New Ender’s Game Podcast – EnderCast
I’m very happy to announce that I’ve teamed up EnderWiggin.net with fellow fansite owner Kelly of EnderNews.com for a joint podcast all about Ender’s Game called EnderCast. We recorded our first episode on 12/12/12, a lucky day, and the episode “Launch” is now available on the EnderCast website.
It started last week when Kelly and I were talking about holiday giveaways. I can’t remember who said it, but one of us said, “We should do something together. Like a podcast maybe.” It ate away and both our brains for days and so Monday night we threw up a site and EnderCast was born.
Episode 1 covers discussion on various parts of the still, Ender’s age and height, Graff’s lack of belly, and the potential Ender’s Game has as a big franchise. Feedback is welcome, so fire away, though hopefully it’s not stuff like, “I can’t stand the sound of your voice.” because that’s not exactly something we can change. Got a future idea or question to ask us? We’re open to those too!
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Happy Birthday Hailee Steinfeld (Petra)
EnderWiggin.net wishes a very happy birthday to actress Hailee Steinfeld, who turns sixteen today! Steinfeld will play Petra Arkanian in Ender’s Game.
Ender fans just made aware of the movie’s production may be wondering why she looks so familiar. In 2011, Steinfeld was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category for her performance as young Mattie Ross in True Grit.
Steinfeld has had a packed 2012, filming not only Ender’s Game, but three other films including a new adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. All four films are due out in 2013.
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Give the Gift of Ender for Christmas
With the movie now 326 days away, it’s time for all you current Ender fans to start spreading word of the book’s existence. What better way to do it than to force feed someone a copy of Ender’s Game?
I’m kidding, of course. But there is a very nice hardcover “Gift Edition” of Ender’s Game available for sale. I bought two of these back when I headed up to New Orleans to visit the set but forgot them in my suitcase and so couldn’t get them signed. Still, maybe you’ll see one up for grabs for my holiday giveaways soon!
The gift edition sells for just under $14 on Amazon.
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‘Ender’s Game’ in Dec 14 Print Edition of Entertainment Weekly
While we’ve all seen the first official still from Ender’s Game online, the still is also present on a full-page First Look in the December 14, 2012 print issue of Entertainment Weekly. So if you’re looking to get a copy of the image in your hands, run out and grab the issue before next Thursday!
Look for the one with a variety of collector’s covers of The Hobbit.
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Summit Launches Official ‘Ender’s Game’ Facebook Page
Update: Summit recently changed their Facebook username to EndersGame. Link has been updated.
On Wednesday, when Entertainment Weekly posted the first official still and interview with director Gavin Hood, they also mentioned the official Ender’s Game Movie page on Facebook.
At the time I clicked the link, there were only 22 other fans, so I admit being a bit skeptical about it being official. I did, however, confirm with Summit that this will be their official page and as you can see, as of today they’re over 4,200 fans strong and I simply got to the page when it was just a lil’ baby. In the coming weeks, we’ll probably also get to see an official website and Twitter account.
I find Facebook movie pages to be a fascinating topic, since Facebook is undeniably an incredibly powerful marketing tool for movie studios these days, so it’ll be interesting to watch the growth rate of the page as the weeks go by and we edge closer and closer to more stills, trailers, and undoubtedly a strong presence at Comic Con.
So what can we expect to learn by watching the number of fans on the official page? For one thing, we’d get a feel of the amount of Ender’s Game fans that use Facebook. I do think that the chances are good that the page will see massive success, simply because Young Adult novel adaptations tend to have very strong Facebook numbers and Ender’s Game does fall into the YA category (despite what NPR thinks). Some balloon exponentially without explanation and others struggle to crack the 1M barrier.
There are a wealth of YA movies coming to the big screen in 2013 and so Ender’s Game is heading into a rather packed year for young adult book adaptations.
- Beautiful Creatures (which stars Viola Davis too!) February 2013 (51,000 fans)
- Warm Bodies February 2013 (148,000 fans)
- Stephenie Meyer’s The Host March 2013 (37,000 fans)
- Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters March 2013
- The Mortal Instruments: The City of Bones August 2013 (210,000 fans)
- The Hunger Games: Catching Fire November 2013 (8.4 million fans)
Note the major difference between all the titles on the list and The Hunger Games. It sounds almost impossible to achieve, but I’ve seen it for myself with The Hunger Games. Back in around May 2011, The Hunger Games movie page was somewhere around 70,000 to 80,000 Facebook fans. On July 4, 2011 they hit 100,000. On August 25, they hit 150,000. On September 13, they hit 200,000.
Keep in mind this was only six months before the movie premiered. When March rolled around, the Facebook page had ballooned exponentially to 3.5 million. And even with the 8.4 million it has today, it’s still nowhere close to Harry Potter (53 million) or The Twilight Saga (36 million).
Before we get all excited though, it should be noted that Ender’s Game probably has a much smaller readership. The Hunger Games trilogy has 50 million copies in print and Harry Potter something ridiculous like 450 million copies, while the most current number I can find for Ender’s Game is 2 million in 2009. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong.
Still, the book page for Ender’s Game has a very healthy 430,000 fans and paperback copies of the book were handed out to fans camping out at the Breaking Dawn Part 2 premiere, indicating that Summit is fully aware of the need for cross-promotion. The success of their Facebook page will likely depend on whether they can bring in new fans and readers, since people who enjoy young adult literature are always looking for the next awesome series to read.
With the same studio behind Twilight and The Hunger Games marketing Ender’s Game, I definitely think it can crack the 1M barrier by drawing in a lot of new readers and movie fans. Who knows where it can go from there, but I’m hopeful about its chances.
Help them grow by liking the official movie page today. (and while you’re at it, EnderWiggin.net too!)
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“Is that Han Solo?!”
Yesterday while reading all the reactions across the net, most people seemed to have one of two reactions:
Ender’s too old…
and
IS THAT HAN SOLO?!
We can’t have people reacting like that and not crack some jokes, can we?
And one more…
And yes, I know Ender says that to Anderson, but it worked here. 😉 If you want to create your own, here’s a blank for you! If you make one, send it in to valentine@enderwiggin.net or post them on the EnderWiggin.net Facebook wall.
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Ender’s Potential as a Major Hollywood Franchise
In an interview published online yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Summit worldwide marketing president Nancy Kirkpatrick on her success in turning The Twilight Saga into a multi-billion dollar franchise across the globe. When talk turned to her next project, Ender’s Game, the words “franchise hopeful” were used.
Post-Twilight, Kirkpatrick is turning her attention to franchise hopeful Ender’s Game, also based on a young-adult novel. The first movie opens in theaters Nov. 1, 2013.
For anyone who might be worried about a woman who helped build the Twilight marketing success touching Ender’s Game, I’m sure she knows what she’s doing and therefore I’m not concerned. I don’t think we’ll be seeing Ender Wiggin pillow cases or Petra Arkanian Barbies.
As book fans know, there’s no shortage of existing books in the Enderverse for them to make into movies, but with no news about whether young actors Asa Butterfield, Abigail Breslin, and Jimmy Jax Pinchak (the three Wiggins) or any of the actors playing Ender’s jeesh are signed on for more than one film, it seems safe to assume that they’re either waiting to see how well Ender’s Game performs come next November or keeping a very tight lid on a multiple film deal.
As funny as it sounds since it’s taken nearly three decades to be adapted, of the original Ender Quartet, Ender’s Game strikes me as the most easily adaptable. Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind are all much more involved and complicated than Ender’s Game and therefore don’t seem to have as much blockbuster potential. They are better books than they ever could be movies.
So where could a sequel take us? Allow me, for a moment, to take us into unthinkable land.
Look behind the scenes and you’ll find Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the men who have successfully taken pre-existing characters and taken them where no man has go– sorry, Star Trek teaser sickness took over for a second, but it’ll become relevant in a bit.Orci and Kurtzman have written and produced mega franchises such as Transformers, which took a line of beloved characters and put them in an entirely new storyline. The franchise to date has grossed billions of dollars.
They wrote and produced the rebooted Star Trek, which many Trekkies know took our beloved characters and turned their world upside down. What emerged was a completely fresh slate for a wealth of pre-existing characters, modernized for today’s pop culture and successful to the tune of $385 million dollars. As most of you probably know by now, the first teaser for Star Trek Into Darkness is filling up Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines across the globe. It’s primed to be another smashing success in their new Star Trek universe.
What I’m trying to say is, what if they took the characters they adapted into the Ender’s Game movie and simply took off into the sunset, leaving behind what is arguably a series too dull to be successful movies and another series (the Bean Quartet) that is completely separated from Ender. It may seem horrifying to die hard book fans, but for those fans who still pack theater seats eager to be entertained, the idea can be simply thrilling.
Imagine a completely new set of movies based on the adventures of Ender, Valentine, Bean, Petra, Dink, Alai, and more. Would this excite you as much as it excites me?
With a fresh cast and a fanbase that’s been building for 30 years, this could be the next franchise conquest for Kurtzman and Orci in their ever-growing line of science fiction blockbusters.
I’m sure Nancy Kirkpatrick would be right on board with that.
Source: Full article at THR.com
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Ender’s Game: A Separation of Author and Movie
So now that Entertainment Weekly has pushed out the exclusive first look at Ender’s Game, much of the world that wasn’t aware that this movie is in the can and ready to come out in about 11 months is now aware and with that has come what I think some of my fellow fansite admins have been dreading along with me: people immediately declaring against the film because of author Orson Scott Card.
When I first read Ender’s Game, I was probably 11 or 12 years old. I was in the sixth grade. It was around 1991 and my parents eagerly shoved it into my hands, wanting me to read their favorite book and come back to them and talk about this fascinating little boy Ender.
I couldn’t help it, I was hooked. I loved Ender. He was a savior, a soldier, and unbeatable yet kind, vulnerable, and ever so small. Reading the book again earlier this year I couldn’t help but look over at my six year old son and imagine what it must have been like for Mrs. Wiggin, to live in a world where your third child is “requisitioned” and can be taken away at a moment’s notice with hardly any time to prepare.
My household didn’t get internet until 1996, so the idea of the nets that Valentine and Peter built their reputations on seemed very high tech science fiction to my little tween brain. It also meant that I had no idea who Orson Scott Card was other than an intimidating name on a book cover I’d come to love so much.
Now that I’m firmly plugged into the internet, it’s been a little rough to find out more about the real man behind the Battle School because my own beliefs really don’t line up with his. Back when I started this site last year, when I first heard about Alex Kurtzmann and Bob Orci taking it on, I had to pause a minute. Did I want to do this? Did I want to create a site dedicated to a movie based on a book written by a man very vocal in the media about his anti-gay and political sentiments? In the end, it came back to Ender Wiggin.
I couldn’t deny how much I loved this character Card had created. I couldn’t shake off the excitement I felt 20 years ago reading about kids my age responsible for the fate of the Earth, written so well that they felt real. It’s rare nowadays for me to latch on to characters in a similar way; a sure sign of a great character writer.
And so today, over a year after I started this site and over six months after I visited the set in New Orleans, I felt saddened by the comments that began popping up on EW.
I hope it tanks. OSC is an asshat.
Scott Card is a serious homophobe. Pass.
That bigot won’t be getting any of my money.
Saddened because after spending a whole day with the people behind the movie, without Orson Scott Card in sight, I found them all to be really, truly nice people just as passionate about the book as the people they’d invited onto their set. We met members of the cast and even parents of the cast. I don’t know what their personal beliefs are, but they’re entitled to them, just as I’m entitled to mine and Card is entitled to his. I certainly don’t think any of these kids deserves to be treated as though they’re Orson Scott Card himself.
So that’s been a fear in the back of my mind for a while. Is this movie going to crash and burn because of its author? Will people protest the premiere? I don’t really know. I certainly hope not.
To wish for this movie’s failure is to wish a failure upon not just Card, but on a huge cast of young actors and a crew of hundreds. Sure, it’s Card’s story, but in my humble opinion, the movie “belongs” to those who made it. Their performances will make or break this movie and that’s what we should be examining come next November.
So while the opinions of Orson Scott Card may not match my own, I’ll continue to support this film, its cast, and its crew.
I support Ender Wiggin.
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PHOTO: First Official Still from ‘Ender’s Game’ with Ender and Graff
This morning brings to us the first official still from next year’s film adaptation Ender’s Game, brought to us exclusively by Entertainment Weekly.
The still, which shows child military genius Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) with Colonel Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford), is from the barracks at Battle School in space, where Ender is in training with the International Fleet among the world’s brightest young soldiers.
In the background, you can see the insignia for the International Fleet as well as their beds, no doubt a cold contrast to what they’ve just left at home. Alai (Suraj Partha) stands next to Ender. Behind Graff there’s a female cadet and several unidentified cast members (most likely background).
In the photo above, we get a first glimpse of Hugo’s Asa Butterfield (right) as Ender, standing in line with other new recruits (a.k.a. “Launchies”) early on at his time in the Battle School. He’s facing off with the imposing Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford, center) over whether his emails to home are being blocked. It’s telling that the two characters are clashing over communication, since they’ve got major communication issues with each other. In the novel, Ender could never be sure whether Graff was manipulating him, or whether he simply saw great potential in him and wanted to foster it.
The actors tried to mirror their characters’ emotions. “The relationship between [Harrison] and Asa was very close,” explains Hood, “but he didn’t overly befriend him off the set. He helped Asa by allowing that slight sense of intimidation to be there.” Getting intimidated by Indiana Jones himself? Sounds like a cinch! What was harder for the cast of children was filming the movie while going to school. “The kids have to attend school for at least three hours of class every day, plus do homework, so you can only shoot with someone like Asa for five hours of your day,” says Hood. “There was no time for fooling about or not knowing your lines or being unprepared.” To everyone’s delight, Butterfield (along with every child actor) proved himself a true professional. “Asa being prepared meant that we could focus on the scenes, and these are complicated scenes for a young actor,” says Hood.
Source: Full article at EW.com
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New EnderWiggin.net Image Gallery
I’m happy to announce that I’ve opened up a new gallery for EnderWiggin.net, one that’s much easier to navigate than the previous gallery. I hope to have a lot more to add to the movie section over the coming year as we get closer to the movie’s premiere.
To those wondering, none of the images used in the banner are official stills from the movie. They’re photos from events and the set. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it re-designed with official cast imagery soon, but until then I hope you like the design.
All images are tagged with the actors’ names and when movie stills begin to come out, those will be tagged with the character name as well, enabling you to search for specific people and pull up all uploaded photos of that person.
If you have photos you’d like to contribute or would like to submit a correction, you can email them to valentine@enderwiggin.net.
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Orson Scott Card Reveals Details of ‘Ender’s Game’ Movie
Thanks to an EnderWiggin.net reader, we got a tip that there are a series of videos from a book signing that Orson Scott Card did earlier this month for his book ‘Ruins‘ which was released on October 30. The signing was held at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Orem, Utah.
In this first video, Card jokes about how he was offered a part that involved cool uniforms, but insisted that he’s improving the look of the movie by only appearing by voice as a pilot on a shuttle as Ender and Graff.
He goes on to reiterate what he said in a previous interview about how few scenes are in the movie from the book but this time says there are NO scenes from the book in the movie.
There are no scenes from the book in the movie, and there are no scenes in the movie from the book, but that’s actually not a surprise. That’s pretty much the way my scripts were too because Ender’s Game is an unfilmable book. That’s something we learned 20 years ago.
I find this particularly confusing, as if there are no scenes from the book in the movie, then what exactly is going to happen in this movie called ‘Ender’s Game‘? It certainly sounds like it follows the story. Perhaps he means that there are no lines from the book in the movie?
If you filmed every scene it would be a four and a half hour movie, and I don’t care how much you love Ender’s Game, four and a half hours is a long time to sit in a theater. We also discovered very quickly that one battle in the Battle Room is one too many. You gotta see it happening, but it’s like watching Quidditch. How exciting was that? You already know how it’s gonna come out, you just wanna see them fly around a little bit, bingo it’s over. And that’s kind of how Battle Room is. It’ll look great, but we’re not going to follow these battles closely.
Looks like I’m going to have to agree to disagree with Mr. Card on this one because I really preferred watching Quidditch over reading Quidditch! I also don’t really think that one Battle Room scene is necessarily enough to appease not just fans, but newcomers. Summit will of course want non-book fans to come to see the movie and I’m not entirely convinced that one or even no battle would make the point of Battle School clear to these viewers.
In the second part, Card talks a bit about how Harrison Ford is in person, mentioning that he’s a very shy, quiet person who goes off into a corner once the cameras are off. He goes on to talk about meeting the other kids and how they suffered doing their wire work, but ended up being in the best shape of their lives.
He touched more upon the script and how they went with Gavin’s script over his.
Here’s the thing about movie. It’s going to be different from the book. It has to be. It couldn’t be filmed the way it was, the way the book is. And so what I’m hoping is, it’s brilliant. I would love it if Gavin’s script was really good. Now I did a reading of the script that I was really proud of, but you could lose your job greenlighting a film scripted by the author. That’s just the truth. And you can’t lose your job over greenlighting a film scripted by the director. So they went with the one where nobody loses their job, whether it wins or loses.
He goes on to tell his fans to go see the movie once and if they love it, bring their friends back and if they don’t, bring their friends back to show them how awful it is. Still, he sounds confident about how things will turn out. “I am very hopeful that it’s going to be terrific.”
Later, Card takes questions from fans and the first one is actually one that I’d been dying to know as well, so it was great seeing this asked.
I read Ender’s Game back when I was 17 in the 80s. The thing that really grasped me is that in it you talk about the internet, you talk about laptops, wireless internet, chatrooms, […] and identities online. What gave you the insight?
The novel by 1985, while the internet was not open for public access yet, there were services like […] and Delphi. I had been on bulletin boards, I knew about flame wars. I mean there was all kinds of stuff like that.
Despite his answer, I still found the things he described in Ender’s Game to be very prescient in that the desks he “created” in the 80s are now the tablets of today. (not laptops imo)
There are three more videos that you can watch here: Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Source: Donovan Heap via Roko
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Summit Releases Official Synopsis for ‘Ender’s Game’
Summit Entertainment has released the official synopsis for Ender’s Game. As a fair warning to people who have not read the book, this synopsis contains book SPOILERS.
In the near future, a hostile alien race (called the Formics) have attacked Earth. If not for the legendary heroics of International Fleet Commander, Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley), all would have been lost. In preparation for the next attack, the highly esteemed Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) and the International Military are training only the best young children to find the future Mazer. Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), a shy, but strategically brilliant boy is pulled out of his school to join the elite.
Arriving at Battle School, Ender quickly and easily masters increasingly difficult war games, distinguishing himself and winning respect amongst his peers. Ender is soon ordained by Graff as the military’s next great hope, resulting in his promotion to Command School. Once there, he’s trained by Mazer Rackham, himself, to lead his fellow soldiers into an epic battle that will determine the future of Earth and save the human race.
Note that I say book spoilers. With Summit pulling Mazer Rackham’s presence as Ender’s teacher this early on, it sounds like the movie will possibly be eliminating the long timeline put forth in the books to condense the story down.
What do you all think? Will Mazer’s relativistic space travel be cut and the story’s timeline be altered for the film?
