The Sad, Constant Failure to Get a Bone Adaptation

If there has been any comic that caught my eye consistently throughout my life, it would have to be Bone. A hybrid of sword and sorcery fantasy with classic cartoon elements, it’s an engrossing and distinctive story that is both very humorous and simultaneously profound. Think of if the Lord of the Rings films started like childish Smurf stories and grew into an aggressive, Game of Thrones-esque one. It follows Fone Bone and his cousins, who are known as bone creatures; small, white, humanoid people that look like old 30s cartoons. They get lost from their home and meet Thorn, a princess, and a fantasy world with magic and numerous creatures and monsters. They have to contend with the threat of the rat creatures, a figure known as the Hooded One, and an entity called the Lord of the Locusts. What starts as a simple misadventure evolves into a hero’s journey that tests the characters and pushes heavy themes and imagery one wouldn’t expect going in. An adaptation for the screen is something that feels perfect for the comic since it has the scope and ambition to match one. Unfortunately, it seems like bad luck and conflicts of interest have constantly hit any attempt to get any sort of project, film or show, off the ground, much to the frustration of fans and especially comic creator Jeff Smith.

Buzz about a potential film adaptation was thrown around since the comic first started in the late 90s. Nickelodeon was the first to show serious interest. The most we know about this project is all the bad ideas that Nick threw around, such as only hiring child actors for the Bone characters and getting a modern pop soundtrack for the film. This meant unfitting NSYNC and Britney songs accompanying the story. Warner Bros would be the next and most consistent party in developing a potential project. They started work in 2008 and continually worked on it until 2016 at the latest. Plans for a computer-animated trilogy of films directed by Mark Osborne, who made Kung Fu Panda and The Little Prince, were announced and worked on for a time, but nothing came of it.

The most recent effort was in 2019 when Netflix announced they would be picking up where Warner Bros left off and were developing an animated series. This finally seemed like it would be the one to make it to the screen since Netflix had been consistently focused on developing original animation from their own studio and Bone would heavily benefit both from the large platform and having a large amount of time to tell its story with a TV series. By 2022, however, Netflix’s whole animation division was downsized, and many projects were simply thrown out due to a desire to maximize elements of the business, and animation was seen as something easy to cut out. Many projects, such as the follow-up film of Sergio Pablos, the director of the Oscar-nominated hit Klaus, and a film by Rango and Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski, were canned. Bone would be one of the highest profile projects to bite the dust in this cleanup. Smith himself commented soon after on the constant starts and stops with a comic, with the Bone characters parodying the classic Peanuts dynamic of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and pulling away the football. If that doesn’t sum up the frustrating dynamic here, I don’t know what else would.

In my eyes, Bone absolutely deserves an adaptation. My personal way to go is a series of hand-drawn animated films that fully commit to a 1:1 retelling of the story. Of course, I also don’t feel that would ever happen, both because of the instability of the current industry and an unwillingness of the major studios to embrace either hand-drawn animation or more mature stories. I don’t even think Smith is as open to an adaptation as he used to be. He has been burned one too many times by studios and their conflicts with him. Bone is such a specific vision, and it just doesn’t fit within the studio mindset of something more controlled and marketable. The Paramount and Nick conflicts show just how wide a gap there is between Smith and those holding the finances on what they think needs to be done with the material. It’s very much one of those pipe-dream projects that I hope we get to see one day, but I am very doubtful about it at this point.