<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Welcome to the End of Ideas. We&amp;#039;ve seen it advancing upon the shores of Los Angeles this entire decade, in which only one Best Picture winner (Crash) did not rip its guts from a pre-existing part of our culture. And as if this summer&amp;#039;s blockbuster twofer of Transformers and G.I. Joe wasn&amp;#039;t enough to prove that Hollywood will make a (successful) movie out of anything, don&amp;#039;t expect a breakout of originality: The major studios will release at least one film based on a book, musical, famous person, or other film every weekend this fall. Except for October 2, when Disney regurgitates Toy Story in 3-D a stunt we should get used to now that Mickey Mouse has put on the Wolverine claws. The adaptation machine, it seems, is pile-driving cinema into a further state of degradation: toys, board games, video games, blogs, dance fads... even Facebook is getting the big-screen treatment. And you know what? I&amp;#039;m fine with that. There&amp;#039;s no reason to split the expanded Oscar field like the screenplay category, nor to split hairs about desecrated childhoods and vanquished imagination. Because even as the industry&amp;#039;s Darwinian machine went into overdrive this summer, I found that kind of angst more and more misplaced when it came to dealing with risk-averse studio suits. And who knows? Maybe the Facebook movie will win Best Picture for a reason.  First of all, it&amp;#039;s not worth being upset literally all the time; there are enough soul-thrashing reboots, remakes, and sequels (White Chicks 2, anyone?) to hold against the heads of production without railing against, say, Universal for developing a movie version of Battleship. (Yes, that Battleship. What, is it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Memorable Quotes&amp;quot; page on IMDB supposed to consist entirely of zingers like &amp;quot;B5,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;F7,&amp;quot; and the like?) And anyway, these guys are just doing their jobs not necessarily to entertain America, but to find a third party like Hasbro to underwrite production on summer box-office winners that the studios can turn around and market for a fraction of the price. Second of all, how can anyone who spends more than a couple minutes thinking about something like a View-Master movie which DreamWorks is currently plotting with Mattel really be that down on it? Because it&amp;#039;s a feature-length toy commercial? Please. Any project that has merchandise attached to it involves selling more than just a movie, whether it&amp;#039;s Star Wars, Avatar (whose accompanying figurines are almost destabilizingly ugly, by the way) or myriad other geek-pop monoliths. Because it&amp;#039;s dumbing viewers down? It hasn&amp;#039;t even been written yet! (The assigned screenwriter actually name-checked Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes among the &amp;quot;old &amp;#039;80s Amblin movies&amp;quot; influencing his script.) Because it&amp;#039;s a lazy substitute for original ideas? I don&amp;#039;t know about that; compared to Rob Zombie following his sequel to a remake with yet another remake entirely, View-Master sounds like friggin&amp;#039; Memento.  Getting away from kids&amp;#039; fare, there&amp;#039;s the slightly thornier The Social Network, aka Aaron Sorkin&amp;#039;s Facebook movie. This isn&amp;#039;t an adaptation per se (there will be no poking or teeth-whitening ads on the side of the screen, as far as anyone knows) so much as a chronicle of Facebook&amp;#039;s back-story and rise to power. Nevertheless, it&amp;#039;s brand-name cinema at its finest and it could be a meta-migraine in the making, with Sorkin having notoriously solicited counsel with his own Facebook-page confession: &amp;quot;My grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she&amp;#039;s been dead for 33 years.&amp;quot;  Of course, if Nora Ephron could make a hit this summer out of Julie Powell blogging, then Lord knows Sorkin (and maybe rumored director David Fincher, or even rumored co-star Justin Timberlake) can fashion a success out of Facebook the ascendancy and the application. Moreover, like Julie and Julia before it, The Social Network evinces the aspirations of some filmmakers and thus studios and, hopefully, audiences to explore our relationships with brands. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a story about greed, about obsession, about our belief that all the money in the world can make us happy,&amp;quot; one script reviewer wrote of Sorkin&amp;#039;s adaptation. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s also unpredictable, funny, touching, and sad.&amp;quot; In other words, it lends human context to an otherwise unknowable behemoth. What&amp;#039;s the problem?  And if The Social Network works? Sure, expect idea-starved Hollywood to recycle the strategy for everything from MySpace to Firefox. If it fails? Back to the toy box, which wouldn&amp;#039;t be the worst thing: Lego in particular seems to have an aggressive, ambitious perspective on its own relationship to the movies. Beyond launching a successful video game and reportedly enjoying a 32 percent rise in sales in the year since it introduced sets based on the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, the Danish manufacturer is currently developing a feature-length, live-action/animation hybrid with Warner Brothers. Some industry observers are apprehensive (&amp;quot;When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they&amp;#039;re playing out Hollywood&amp;#039;s imagination, not their own,&amp;quot; one recently told the New York Times), but not me. In the best-case scenario, Lego: The Movie could actually stoke children&amp;#039;s creativity in ways that megahack director Stephen Sommers didn&amp;#039;t quite exemplify with G.I. Joe. Worst-case, it&amp;#039;ll break new ground in perma-grinning yellow-headed characters, then live on as a &amp;#039;shroom-ready cult masterpiece. Either way, you can bet brand-sensitive Lego will at least try to make it good, which is all any of us can really ask for as moviegoers. Obviously not all adaptations are created equal, but when they&amp;#039;re coming at you as this rate, we&amp;#039;re better off hoping for the best whether we like it or not. At least until Michael Bay signs on. Then we&amp;#039;re really in trouble. S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded. RELATED LINKS:  HUMOR: First Look at the Thundercats Movie!  FIRST REVIEW: Does The Road Hold Up on the Silver Screen?   THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: S.T. VanAirsdale&amp;#039;s Column Every Wednesday   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a6345/movie-adaptations-090909/>