On December 16, 2004, Ursula K. Le Guin published an article in Slate about how Hollywood butchered her work when the Sci-Fi Channel built a miniseries around A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, describing the final product as "full of scenes from the story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they make no sense."

Apparently having two of her most beloved novels transformed into "a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence" didn't put Le Guin off selling her work to Hollywood completely, because yesterday, on the fourth anniversary of that article's publication, word went out through Publishers Marketplace that she had sold the film rights to The Left Hand of Darkness (just as highly regarded as the Earthsea books, if not more so) to writer/director William Phillips, whose previous work includes the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Foolproof. (Interestingly, a previous film deal for the novel was announced in 2004, right around the time the Earthsea miniseries was airing on Sci-Fi—that deal included the videogame rights as well, but appears to have gone nowhere, as these things often do.)