Genre Rouelette - Why It's Hard to Make An Artemis Fowl Film

The 2021 film was so bad by even conventional metrics that it's not really worth mentioning, except for an example of how trying to put the series in a conventional category is a toughie. 

The problem with an Artemis Fowl adaptation is that it’s a VERY precise mix of genres, and that mix even changes from book to book, and it is a mix that it is VERY difficult to fit into the typical marketed-to-kids, fantasy CGI genre. 

In fact, the truth about the series is that it weirdly kind of created its audience, because it needed an audience willing to go along with sci-fi AND fantasy conventions to start, then cop conventions, then James Bond conventions. But it managed to do so because it had an excellent sense of humor and convention, and it used effective emotional hooks. But that's an order of magnitude harder to pull off on a screen format. 

The first book is best described as a James Bond film where the villain is one of the protagonists, but who ultimately comes across as a good guy by the end, mixed with a bit of Die Hard. 

The second book is like a Bond film if the villain and Bond had to team up, mixed with a bit of Lethal Weapon. 

The third book is like a Bond film mixed with a heist film, but with some very strong emotional beats. 

The fourth book is like Lethal Weapon mixed with a bit of Star Trek 

The fifth book is a Bond film mixed with a heist film mixed with an epic fantasy film

The sixth book is a time travel film mixed with a heist film mixed with a bit of Bond globetrotting. 

The seventh book is a Bond film mixed with a survival film mixed with a heist film 

The eighth film, hearkening back to the first, is a home invasion film mixed with a sci-fi/fantasy epic

You can see the complexity here. Retaining an audience as the series bounces around in execution is a toughie. Finding a creative team that’ll bounce with all these creative twists is a toughie. And finding an audience that won’t be frustrated with some of the series’ starts and stops is also tough. And that's not even getting into how it would have to market itself to adolescents and pre-adolescents, and might be too expensive to justify production. Or that it would by necessity require a very hard-to-find young lead capable of convincingly executing all these different genres. 

That said, I’d still like to see a successful version. It’s just hard to pull off. Thoughts?