Gene Brewer - Campaign to Reboot the K-PAX film franchise - independent vs blockbuster

K-PAX (which came out just after 9/11, starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, directed by Ian Softly) was one of ‘those films’ that captured an era. It was well cast and sympathetically low-key and everyone forgot independent author Gene Brewer wrote FOUR MORE EXCELLENT BOOKS in the series. All of which this reviewer has read, and loved…

I know, I know, after a quartet of five-star reviews I harshly reviewed Brewer’s fifth book in the K-PAX that told us about the Bullocks. I wasn’t too enamoured by his ending; that was it. The last expositional page(s). Get rid of that, leave the ending as it was, and the quintilogy is SOLID; a perfect description of Human Futility. Even go back into the book’s files and delete it altogether and re-edition. I told him, begged him. And I think I lost a friend in that author. But such a UNF or unattractive narrative fetish is ‘easily fixed in post’ as Hollywood calls it. I’m sure that, with this many years of water under the bridge, Gene Brewer would be up for a Hollywood Spring Clean of the whole K-PAX franchise – all five K-PAX books deserve a thorough cinematic revisit, and we now have the technology to do Brewer’s imagery justice, in this reviewer’s opinion.

Spacey and Bridges were great in their respective roles in K-PAX but it all needs updating, all of it. Who could pull of these roles in a five-book reboot? Well, that’s up to a casting director and the flavour of the month, one supposes. Maybe a more indi-director should have a stab at a Reboot, the production is certainly gonna need some balls when it starts to examine books three, four, five so let’s have this done by a Maverick or someone who really wants to share the Philosophy of these Astonishing works with his cinema audience. But it’s also gonna need some serious financial backing…

So the question is, “An independent film-maker on a minuscule budget, or a Planet of the Apes type event with all the sfx bells and whistles?”