Revisiting the Question of a Film Version of The Honourable Schoolboy

A decade ago, shortly after Tomas Alfredson's 2011 feature film adaptation of John le Carré's classic George Smiley novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy enjoyed a measure of critical and commercial success, I wrote a blog post about the challenges facing any makers of a sequel to that movie based on the source material's sequel novel, The Honourable Schoolboy--which ended up the most-viewed thing ever on this blog, and still gets a fair bit of regular traffic all these years on.

Back then I concluded that the odds of a feature film sequel were not great--because the material, much more than any other Smiley novel, would require a fairly big budget for faithful conveyance of the story's content, a bigger one than the first film's success justified, while I suspected that given the film's content it would not play in China, a thing which back then was increasingly important in film backers' calculations. (Alfredson's Tinker notably relocated an important piece of the story's action from Hong Kong to Istanbul for this reason--but anything like that with Honourable is simply not feasible.)

Today, more than a dozen years after the film's release, one would think that anyone taking on this part of the Smiley saga would be thinking "reboot" rather than a sequel, perhaps attempting to do Tinker over again before getting on with Honourable--while as if that were not trouble enough, there is the post-pandemic reality of the film business. The big blockbusters are less sure-fire than they used to be--but at the same time the serious dramas have only gone on getting riskier. Indeed, as Bryan Wizemann said in an interview a couple of years ago, every filmmaker he knew started "trying to figure out how to break [their scripts] into 10 longer pieces because that seemed to be what was getting made" as drama largely shifted over from theatrical release to streaming--while the big studios, belatedly realizing that the profits to be made in this area were not boundless, have been cutting back sharply on for-streaming content, to the point of being ready to bury films that they already made (with Netflix just adding to the list of such canceled projects a Halle Berry science fiction movie).

The possibility that a proper Smiley vs. Karla saga will find a home on streaming in the circumstances thus looks no greater than its being realized on the big screen these days barring some extraordinary spike of interest in it that seems to me very unlikely--what we watch less and less likely to have any relation to what we read, precisely because so few do.