So, Thomas Harris.

UPI crime reporter. Decided to write a novel. Great little story about Jihadis blowing up the Superbowl by strapping a giant claymore mine to the bottom of the Goodyear Blimp. Gripping read. Shocking. Read it when I was 11, maybe 12. A few years later I saw the movie they made out of it. John Frankenheimer, Bruce Dern, Robert Shaw. A forgotten piece of 70s cinema that was damn good.

Decided to write a serial killer novel. Red Dragon. Messed up guy being chased by a messed-up guy, the cop getting tips from another messed-up guy he locked up not long ago, that nearly killed him. William Petersen, Tom Noonan, Dennis Farina, Brian Cox, Joan Allen. Directed by Michael Fucking Mann.

Followed up with that - wrote another serial killer novel. All new cast, really. Kept the Dennis Farina character. Kept the Brian Cox character.

The movie traded Scott Glenn in for Dennis Farina. Okay, no big. Traded Anthony Hopkins for Brian Cox.

And that was that.

I loved Silence of the Lambs. I saw it, then read it, then read Red Dragon. Lambs is a much better movie than Manhunter but Hopkins just inhabited that role.

Clarice Starling was much more interesting in the book.

But hey - it's Jodie Foster and she won an Oscar for it. And as soon as that movie swept the Oscars anything that followed would be Hannibal II.

Now you gotta keep in mind: Thomas Harris don't write much. But what he writes becomes big expensive movies. And it took years, but eventually he wrote Hannibal. And Jodie Foster hated it. Hated it publicly. Hated it to the point where she said "Clarice Starling would never do that."

(Right, Jodie, because you wrote her, right? It's not like you were just, you know, reading the lines you were given. Or that Ted Tally's screenplay may not have captured the full depth of your character and that the novels contained characterization beyond what is possible in two hours)

So, bad news. Now the ending for the movie is going to be different than the book. The legacy of Lecter is now in the service of a committee, not an author. So we get to ditch a David Mamet(!) screenplay and go punt, in order to make Jodie Foster happy.

Jodie Foster has already left the project. "on principle." But the new ending sticks.

Lecter is now a far less interesting person. He's now spending his energies on a far less interesting adversary. But any thought of returning to the characters that got us here... plain out. Now we're writing Lecter based on what Julianne Moore wants.

And hey, let's beat a dead horse and remake Manhunter. After all, anything Michael Mann can do, Brett Ratner can do better, right?

By the time we got to Hannibal Rises, nobody even gave a shit anymore.

So here we are. What started, for most people, as a six-oscar-winning crime drama is now yet another talking serial killer. It's a CSI rip-off, which was a Law and Order rip-off, which was a Hill Street Blues rip-off, which was a Dragnet rip-off. We had a cop who did bad and a murderer who did good but now we have "based on characters created by Thomas Harris for the book Red Dragon."

Who gives a fuck?

So no. Haven't seen Hannibal. Won't see Hannibal. Stopped giving a shit right about the time I was forced to watch Julianne Moore and Ray Liotta.

No regrets.