Every eighteen months or so a new production company issues a press release saying they are adapting Foundation to TV or film, and each time that is all we hear about it until the next time. Lord Of The Rings was the seminal work of fantasy and received an excellent and lucrative film. Executives looking for the same thing for science fiction would find Foundation. which even once beat LOTR to the title of best all-time series. Like LOTR it was published as a book in the early fifties, written throughout the forties and published in three volumes divided arbitrarily on pagecount.

But LOTR though epic in nature is set over just a few months, with a set of characters who continue through and, crucially, rustic hobbits who live simply and can serve as the eyes and ears of the audience while all the epic battles take place.

Although Foundation does have the occasional innocent who can serve this purpose, Gaal Dornick and Arcadia Darell being examples, not all stories contain such. The fact that the cast changes in most stories doesn't help either.

Roland Emmerich tried to consolidate the characters so that the same cast could continue through, but needless to say that didn't work.

If on TV, a solution might be to treat it similar to an anthology show, given the characters change between most stories.

The possibility exists to do the Back to the Future/Cloud Atlas trick of having the same actors portray different characters based on theme. Yohan Lee - Limmar Ponyets - Hober Mallow - Lathan Devers - Han Pritcher; . Lewis Pirenne - Jorane Sutt - Indbur III; .

Alternatively as a film series, ignore the division of books and make four movies, one about Salvor Hardin with Dornick in flashback, one about the Traders vs the Empire, one about the rise and fall of the Mule and one about Arcadia.