‘They will destroy everything’: Cinephiles unite to diss Roland Emmerich ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ TV adaptation

Considered a landmark film in Hollywood history, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia has stood the test of time owing to ahead-of-its-time camerawork, story, direction, and performances.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, German director Roland Emmerich is looking for buyers for his project, which is slated to be a three-season TV series based on the 1962 adventure drama. Emmerich is developing the project with Bohemian Rhapsody’s Anthony McCarten, who is attached as the writer. McCarten reportedly plans to write the complete first season by himself.

Once the news of the Lawrence of Arabia reached X (formerly Twitter), the reactions from fans were far from positive, who highlighted both Emmerich and McCarten to be poor fits. Amid a slew of criticism, there was no sympathy for either the writer or director, as X users implored them to not go ahead with the show in the comment sections of the posts where the aforementioned news was shared:

It’s rare to see fans of pop culture unanimously writing off an ambitious project before it has even been released, but the news of Emmerich and McCarten’s collaboration has brought everyone together. The fans’ low confidence in the series being worth their time and doing justice to the original stems from the critical failure of Emmerich’s past projects and the rinse-and-repeat nature of them.

Called the “master of disaster,” almost all of Emmerich’s catalog revolves around science fiction and the “world coming to an end” trope. After seeing success with films like Independence Day and 2012, Emmerich’s most recent works, Independence Day: Resurgence, Midway, and Moonfall all failed to impress either audiences or critics. More recently, his inability to succeed despite working with big-budget studios is often highlighted in the cinephile community, with weak screenwriting often cited as a common factor.

McCarten, meanwhile, has a much better reputation owing to his four Academy Award nominations, which includes his work on films like The Theory of Everything and The Two Popes. However, at the same time, Bohemian Rhapsody remains one of the most mocked films online in recent history despite its multiple Oscar nominations, with its screenwriting not inspiring much confidence. From the fans’ perspective, McCarten and Emmerich working together is not likely to result in a satisfactory show, hence the barrage of hate.

Titled Lawrence in Arabia, Emmerich has promised the show “has a little bit more characters,” prompting him to replace the “of” with “in.” The German director also plans to work on the second season of the gladiator drama Those About To Die, which premiered in July 2024.

While other details about the upcoming series have been kept under wraps, it will be intriguing to see how Emmerich and McCarten bring David Lean’s world to television. The cast of the show remains another talking point, and the list of actors that get finalized will have a herculean task on their hands, as they will be compared to all-timers like Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, and Omar Sharif.