Fanboys and girls everywhere perked up their ears when talk of a live action adaptation of the hit anime series Cowboy Bebop began brewing in the nerd community at large. Oh the joy. Oh the horror. This will be awesome until it becomes terrible.

We fans are fickle, irrational creatures when it comes to the furthering of our favorite franchises. For the cult surrounding some particular novel or comic or video game, there are few diversions as engrossing as speculating about how the masterpiece could be adapted to film — fantasizing about dream casts, bickering about worthy directors, and bitching about the inevitable ways that the precious material would be most unavoidably and completely f*cked up.

But by the time an actual movie is released, the fun is over. The finished product might be a categoric success, but chances are far greater of it sucking hard. For every success (Iron Man, Lord of the Rings) there are a thousand failures (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Doom, Wing Commander, Dungeons and Dragons), and while some of these films end up being terrible in a way that makes them awesome (Starship Troopers, Super Mario Bros.), we don’t really feel any less slighted.

This record certainly doesn’t keep the copyright holders from continuing to option their works, but I can’t fault them for cashing the check that probably better enables them to continue being productive than the royalties from their unbastardized original material ever did. And during those brief months between the rights being sold and the movie coming out, there is all that tongue-wagging fun to be had. If only the ultimate cinematic experience of such an adaptation could somehow remain in the speculative phase forever.

Well, it’s beginning to look like maybe it’s possible. Some of the titles with the most rabidly obsessed fan bases have been sitting, optioned, in the pre-production phase for ages. Things looked pretty good for that Halo adaptation for a while, when there were names like Alex Garland, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Torro attached (and who can forget how Microsoft sent guys costumed in UNSC space armor to hand deliver copies of the script to the studios), but not long after rumors began linking some guy nobody’s heard of to the director credit, the project went dead and it’s stayed that way for a couple years now. I figure it’s just as well though. Last I heard, filmmakers were hung up on constructing a story around someone other than Master Chief as the main character, since the SPARTAN-II supersoldier’s face is totally hidden by that sexy helmet.

This would seem to illustrate the classic blunder that befalls the makers of most shitty adaptations. Even gamers who don’t like or care about Halo know that in the event of an adaptation that skirts Master Chief to the edges of the story, fans of the franchise will have nothing but scorn for the poor doomed loser cast in the central role of Some Asshole who’s definitively less badass than the faceless cybornetic hero. Fans want to see how their beloved characters and settings could be brought to life; delivering on that curiosity first, and on narrative and cinematic conventions second, seems like it could only help — since cinematically speaking, most of these movies end up sucking anyway.

With the Halo movie indefinitely tabled, we’re free to dream-cast which actor could deliver on the Master Chief gravitas with pure voice, presence, or possible bio-tech enhancement. Similarly, obsessed otakus worshiping at the altar of the critically acclaimed anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion have had over five years to speculate. Since production of a live action Eva movie was announced in 2003, there’s been a single development, when a smattering of concept art from Weta Workshop was released in 2004. Since then it’s been silence, with nary a name attached to the project aside from Matt Greenfield, co-founder of ADV films.

But again, I can’t really complain that it’s apparently been shelved. As exciting as it would be to sit in a dark theater before some movie I probably don’t even want to see just to get a two-minute glimpse of what would probably be a totally kick-ass live action Eva trailer (where the Biblically epic use of O Fortuna would actually fit the subject matter!) I’d still want to go home that night and jabber euphorically about how I “can’t wait for the movie!” in an impossible time loop, where the full-length film never actually appears. After all, even that concept art got fans in an uproarious tiff because it appeared to change some of the characters’ names. I’d hate to see the nature-scene-T-shirt filled riot that would ensue when these kids saw all the changes that would surely be found in the movie itself.

The only adaptation I can imagine causing more elated speculation followed by furious, possessive disappointment is Ender’s Game, another all-but-defunct project that remains safe in our imaginations and out of the hands of men. Arguably one of the best and certainly one of the most loved sci-fi novels ever written, Orson Scott Card’s book has been in movie talks for at least six years, though I recall hearsay dating back far longer. Card himself penned a screenplay, though David Benioff and Dan Weissand were later announced as writers, and Wolfgang Petersen was attached to direct, but nothing came of any of it and eventually, all names were dropped from the project.

The grand expectations that would (probably fairly) arise in bringing an already great story to the screen is one problem, but with Ender’s Game there’s the added difficulty in casting the iconic protagonist with a child actor. Ender is, after all, a child genius with not just preternatural intellect but an exceptionally developed capacity for emotional intelligence. At the same time, he’s a small boy who still has a distinctly child-specific — if totally unique — perspective. Obviously the biggest fear this illicits is the possibility of a Jake Lloyd incident, but even when an all-around well respected child actor shows up on the scene, you can’t really put him through the grueling litany of ongoing tests that a newcomer would normally need to secure the lead in a big budget movie like this. The longer you wait, the less your promising little thesp fits the age range.

As you can probably imagine, Haley Joel Osment was the most popular Ender contender for a while, and I’m sure Freddie Highmore dominates the “who shud play Ender?!?!?!” thread of the IMDB forms presently, but even he will be hitting the fug of puberty soon enough. In the meantime, he’ll be honored with a place in yet another grand process of delightful speculation, which, God willing, will continue long after he’s Culkined out.