Bad Adaptations - And why they are bad

[Pokemon Conquistador]

A Wrinkle in Time goes here. The fact that it exists is a slap in the face to the original book and the author herself.

There was a 2003 TV adaptation that was not horrible. It blackified one of the witches but it didn't seem like they were doing it to piss anybody off. It stayed close to the source material, but I did get the sense that it was trying to cram a lot of story into a movie too small for it. A miniseries would probably be a better format for this story, which takes its time going places.

The 2002 adaptation of the Time Machine felt weak. The 1960s adaptation had its flaws, but the Time Traveler's first attempts to move forward in time and the special effects that were used to portray it were absolute magic. The titular Time Machine also looked very iconic. Steampunkish, but not goofy.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

There was a 2003 TV adaptation that was not horrible. It blackified one of the witches but it didn't seem like they were doing it to piss anybody off. It stayed close to the source material, but I did get the sense that it was trying to cram a lot of story into a movie too small for it. A miniseries would probably be a better format for this story, which takes its time going places.

The 2002 adaptation of the Time Machine felt weak. The 1960s adaptation had its flaws, but the Time Traveler's first attempts to move forward in time and the special effects that were used to portray it were absolute magic. The titular Time Machine also looked very iconic. Steampunkish, but not goofy.

I meant the 2018 adaptation. Kind of hard to call it A Wrinkle in Time when you remove the religious aspect of it.

 

[Kulee Baba]

Bashing the Walking Dead TV show as being vastly inferior to the comic feels trite it was one of the most popular things to shit on a decade ago. So I’ll just rip on the telephone scene which was so much better in the comic. For those who don’t remember [Spoilers for an old ass comic and show] Rick’s wife Lori dies and in the comic Rick finds himself talking to his deceased wife on the phone. Rick realizes this phone call is just an insane delusion from him being clearly sleep deprived and emotionally destroyed. Lori’s last words to Rick “Don’t be silly, of course it isn’t.” is poignant and heart breaking.


In the tv show on the other hand they make it more “realistic” I guess by making Lori’s voice be whispery and then her voice just falls off in distortion. It sucks it’s nowhere near the quality of the comic which they were fully free to adapt wholesale.

 

[Doctor of Autism]

Bashing the Walking Dead TV show as being vastly inferior to the comic feels trite it was one of the most popular things to shit on a decade ago. So I’ll just rip on the telephone scene which was so much better in the comic. For those who don’t remember [Spoilers for an old ass comic and show] Rick’s wife Lori dies and in the comic Rick finds himself talking to his deceased wife on the phone. Rick realizes this phone call is just an insane delusion from him being clearly sleep deprived and emotionally destroyed. Lori’s last words to Rick “Don’t be silly, of course it isn’t.” is poignant and heart breaking.

That show was such a garbage adaptation, like they removed so many of the characters and spent the entire second season on the farm just to fuck over the showrunner of Season 1. Also killing off so many prominent characters that were in the comics.

Kirkman honestly was smart to make his next adapted show into an animated series.

 

[Dysnomia]

Needful Things. The movie has to be the worst Stephen King adaption ever. Why did they even bother? The Rick & Morty episode that spoofed it was way better. And that was just a half hour gag.

 

[Town Drunk]

Dune 2.

Spoiler: Spoilers for a 40 year old book

Channi getting all pissy about Paul marrying the Princess to secure his power. I know they couldn't help put a girlboss in because modern year. Novel Channi knew she was the one he actually loved, and they totally fucked over having a third movie because it focuses on Paul's children with Channi, and His actual wife and Channi fueding. If she left over not understanding politics I have no idea how they re going to retcon this shit. Especially when his son is probably the most important charecter to ever exist in the Dune universe.

 

[Valstrax]

The Electric State film is absolute hogwash and dumbs down the somber atmosphere the source material had into a quippy, Marvel-esque action film.

It's fucking horrible, the original artwork carried with them a thick atmosphere that made the world its own character with our protagonists being less overt protagonists and more like just wanderers in a technified landscape.

The movie throws all of that out and sucks off Mr. Peanut.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

Fight Club is a pretty spot on adaptation

paperback novels usually work pretty well as adaptions for that exact reason, 200-300 pages works out to 2hrs of content.

A Wrinkle in Time goes here. The fact that it exists is a slap in the face to the original book and the author herself.

i assume something was lost in translation, it mainly exists because it got an amazing tax credit and was supposed to be a cheap little scifi film like Bridge to tarabithia, but then someone at disney decided to turn it into a blockbuster and have a black woman direct it and they quadrupled the budget and rewrote the script and demanded an a-list cast out of a crappy childrens book about math

Kirkman honestly was smart to make his next adapted show into an animated series.

to be fair, people's tolerance for animation has come a long way from 2011, and zombie stuff thrived in the late 2000s because of how hilariously cheap it was to make

The movie throws all of that out and sucks off Mr. Peanut.

they'd have been better off making a movie about him.

 

[Mmemes]

OP's smoothbrain is an example of a bad adaption.

Naw I remember in college at a film screenwriter seminar a Hollywood pro said the two most influential people on modern movies of all time were Freud and Marx. This is irrefutable that anyone writing scripts for television and film want to explore themes of psychology and class/culture dynamics. Just look at any of the Oscar nominations and winners this year. It's no secret in university and college and in the big leagues of media you better get acquainted with socialism and society's ills.

I have never in all my years heard anyone argue the Godfather novel is better than the movie. Mario Puzo's The Godfather is a trashy albeit entertaining little novel, very much consumed with writing about sex in particular Sonny's big cock. Coppola improved upon the source material in every way possible.

Coppola was embarrassed that the source material was more interested in shit like getting surgery on a woman's vir jay jay so she could enjoy sex again than anymore nuances to the Cosa Nostra. In interviews and on the DVD set commentary you get the feeling that Coppola thought perhaps retroactively that Mario Puzo was an untalented hack that just lucked out by making paperback trash about a topic that Americans and the world found super interesting in organized crime. Apparently as the film was in development Coppola would invite Puzo over for ironically pasta dinners and would quiz Mario on Mafia shit and the guy would barely give Coppola anything of substance back. So nah regardless of how later Coppola was in his career there's no denying he built The Godfather bottom up from the shitty novel it was "adapted" from. A straight up adaptation of Godfather would be just weird porno anecdotes that sometimes included made men, maybe?

It's pretty obvious why they are usually bad. Cinema is wildly different than books/games. You need to deal with a budget, actors and adapting a 20 hour novel/game into 2 hour fling.

And that's before the actual differences between the mediums. Books have the ability to deliver exposition and complexity way better than cinema. Especially as the reader can backtrack to previous scenes, or take a break to think things other.

Games are more about player feeling than story. They have a gameplay loop that won't translate to films but very satisfying in person.

The good adaptions are ones where the director is talented enough to use the advantages of movies to bridge the gap from the source material. The Harry Potter films are a non ironic example, the soundtrack and casting makes the films great to rewatch despite cutting a ton of stuff.

I get your point with film but why do television adaptations fail hard too? You have more time with series yet I've seen every time a TV series adapts a novel, a historical event, a comic graphic novel or a game they barely use the material.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

Death Note (2017) - An americanized movie that tries to turn evil megalomaniac Light Yagami into bullied school shooter kid Light Turner who lets the goth girl he simps for be more evil than him while making the neutral spectator demon into an evil villain who uses psychic powers and the super smart shut-in detective with autism into a dumb autistic retard who shows his face to the public and survives by plot armor. Not to mention, ignoring the themes of justice and the cat and mouse game that was prevalent in the source material.

I could forgive it being shit because it was basically a stitched together abomination from several scripts by 6 people, but it's director is a retard who didn't even watch the anime and even outside of that... What is the genre of this movie? Is it a detective? Ok, why there is a focus on teenage romance then? Is it a thriller? Then why its deaths are gory in a goofy way ala grindhouse movies? Is it dark and serious? Why the fuck then it ends with a blooper reel?
Also, the thing with Ryuk. What the hell does he want? Firstly he says he wants to get rid of bad people, then says "there is only a game", then wants to kill Light when the Note is at risk of being found by cops, even though here he just threw it into Light, then helps him to kill his girlfriend, even though he liked her more than a keeper... What the fuck does he want?

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Most video games are fairly simple plots or rather pretty straightforward. Dead Space, Halo, most fighting games centered around a tournament, Resident Evil, and a lot of others can be easily adapted in under two hours.

Halo has a terrible adaption when in reality all you’d really need to do is Keyes giving exposition, crashing on the ring and recovering some marines before rescuing Keyes, control room, 343 Guilty spark, and then blowing up the Autumn. Chief is a silent protagonist to an extent, but you could focus on a random marine or even Keyes if you wanted to adapt it.

You have outs to Chief teleporting because in the game it handwaves Cortana teleporting you.

Any fighting game adaption is dependent on eye candy and not being retarded.

The problem is that it still boils down to "and then X kills/beats a group of enemies and a plot beat happens". It will get repetitive unless the creators make it vary enough.

I get your point with film but why do television adaptations fail hard too? You have more time with series yet I've seen every time a TV series adapts a novel, a historical event, a comic graphic novel or a game they barely use the material.

Television has more time to adapt scenes but has bigger issues in regards to budget and format. In case of the latter, not all books are easy to split into 0.75/1 hour mark with mostly self contained events that affect the greater plot.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

Adaptations being shit is a numbers game certainty. This whole thing can be shown mathematically. How many books are actually good? 5%? 1%?

How many movies are actually good? Probably between 1-5%

It kinda depends on how exposed you are to the full breadth of what is produced. You're likely to have a bias to only seeing the better works, because they are more valuable to put marketing in, people will talk about them more, they are in theaters longers and so on.

That percentage is still true for sequels, adaptations, prequels and so on. But these are made only for those that are aleeady succesful. So you're comparing the 95-99% shit rate of produced result to 100% good rate (those works where people want a sequel/adaptation).

It's a numbers game that most sequels and adaptations will be shit.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

It's pretty obvious why they are usually bad. Cinema is wildly different than books/games. You need to deal with a budget, actors and adapting a 20 hour novel/game into 2 hour fling.

The last airbender adapted a series made for tv into a series made for tv with MORE runtime than the original had and a bigger budget and somehow still fucked it up.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

Spoiler

Channi getting all pissy about Paul marrying the Princess to secure his power. I know they couldn't help put a girlboss in because modern year. Novel Channi knew she was the one he actually loved, and they totally fucked over having a third movie because it focuses on Paul's children with Channi, and His actual wife and Channi fueding. If she left over not understanding politics I have no idea how they re going to retcon this shit. Especially when his son is probably the most important charecter to ever exist in the Dune universe.

There are other reasons why the chani change works though. The ending of the first dune book sounds like a wrapped up ending. But you have another movie to sell, because villeneuve wants to tell the Paul Atreides story, which has to include Dune messiah.
Frank Herbert didn't know the book needed a follow up, but like Verhoeven with starship troopers, Herbert was dissappointed with most of the audience falling for the main character propaganda and seeing them as heroes. He wrote Messiah to remind people that Paul is kind of like Hitler, even making a direct comparison in the book.

By seeding in the fremen skepticist faction and Chani as part of it, it helps end Dune 2 on more of a cliffhanger and setting up the third movie.

Majority of people (niggercattle) do instinctively take the girl's view as the morally right one and as such people are better primed to see how Atreides are just another oppressive empire.

Yes it comes at the cost of fidelity to source material. But unlike changing the arcologist to a black woman, there are actually some good reasons for this change.

And if like the book a timeskip is made, there is no reason why they can't start together in Dune 3.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Most video games are fairly simple plots or rather pretty straightforward.

Games that actually have good stories worth adapting also tend to be completely unadaptable because the reason they have good stories in the first place is because they take advantage of the fact that they are an interactive medium.

Stuff like Pathologic, New Vegas, Disco Elysium, etc.

When games try to be movies (uncharted) they're just shitty movies because they're trying to shoehorn a non interactive medium into an interactive one, and its the inverse for when you try to adapt good games into movies, turning something interactive into something non interactive.

People will often say "So so book is unadaptable", but that's wrong, because NO book is unadaptable.

What they actually mean is "This book cannot be adapted into a 2 hour blockbuster that is marketable to the lowest common demoninator."

In theory, there is no physical barrier preventing you from making a 5 hour film where 2 of those hours are the main character monologuing in an empty room, it just would have a niche audience. (Shit its something most OG dune fans would watch). I'm not saying its viable, but it IS possible and good adaptations stem downstream of that fact.

Good games on the other hand, DO have that physical barrier. It doesn't matter how much runtime or how much creative freedom you have, the instant the game throws a fork in the road you're done being an adaptation.

Again, this doesn't apply to linear "cinematic games", but of all the games that are widely revered for their story, almost none of them actually are linear cinematic. (Again like I mentioned earlier, Pathologic, New Vegas, Disco Elysium off the top of my head).

 

[HodgePodgeRogerDodger]

Games that actually have good stories worth adapting also tend to be completely unadaptable because the reason they have good stories in the first place is because they take advantage of the fact that they are an interactive medium.

Stuff like Pathologic, New Vegas, Disco Elysium, etc.

When games try to be movies (uncharted) they're just shitty movies because they're trying to shoehorn a non interactive medium into an interactive one, and its the inverse for when you try to adapt good games into movies, turning something interactive into something non interactive.

People will often say "So so book is unadaptable", but that's wrong, because NO book is unadaptable.

What they actually mean is "This book cannot be adapted into a 2 hour blockbuster that is marketable to the lowest common demoninator."

In theory, there is no physical barrier preventing you from making a 5 hour film where 2 of those hours are the main character monologuing in an empty room, it just would have a niche audience. (Shit its something most OG dune fans would watch). I'm not saying its viable, but it IS possible and good adaptations stem downstream of that fact.

Good games on the other hand, DO have that physical barrier. It doesn't matter how much runtime or how much creative freedom you have, the instant the game throws a fork in the road you're done being an adaptation.

Again, this doesn't apply to linear "cinematic games", but of all the games that are widely revered for their story, almost none of them actually are linear cinematic. (Again like I mentioned earlier, Pathologic, New Vegas, Disco Elysium off the top of my head).

RPG’s that actually go into role playing are hard to do because any adaption is going to require either making a route canon or treating the events of the game from a third perspective. Other option is the series follows side quests with the main quest in the background.

New Vegas would not be hard to do as a series. Most RPG’s would likely be better as something like One Piece Fan Letter. The main character and party members are only seen in glimpses and are given a load of respect.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

New Vegas would not be hard to do as a series.

The new vegas plot itself is relatively straightforward. Following a single route isn't that impressive on its own and would make for a pretty drab series. Its all the forks in the road you take that make it intresting and personal.

If you held a gun to my head and told me to make a new vegas series (with the stipulation that it couldn't just be slop) I would probably focus it on Ulysses' journey.

 

[74164978231]

There are other reasons why the chani change works though. The ending of the first dune book sounds like a wrapped up ending. But you have another movie to sell, because villeneuve wants to tell the Paul Atreides story, which has to include Dune messiah.
Frank Herbert didn't know the book needed a follow up, but like Verhoeven with starship troopers, Herbert was dissappointed with most of the audience falling for the main character propaganda and seeing them as heroes. He wrote Messiah to remind people that Paul is kind of like Hitler, even making a direct comparison in the book.

By seeding in the fremen skepticist faction and Chani as part of it, it helps end Dune 2 on more of a cliffhanger and setting up the third movie.

Majority of people (niggercattle) do instinctively take the girl's view as the morally right one and as such people are better primed to see how Atreides are just another oppressive empire.

Yes it comes at the cost of fidelity to source material. But unlike changing the arcologist to a black woman, there are actually some good reasons for this change.

And if like the book a timeskip is made, there is no reason why they can't start together in Dune 3.

Movie chani is beyond fucking retarded. No group of ultra zealots would ever allow anyone who mocks them or their beliefs into their social club. Then you have chani fall in love with a man who is everything she hates.

The icing on the cake was being played by dei zoomer flavor of the month actress.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Games that actually have good stories worth adapting also tend to be completely unadaptable because the reason they have good stories in the first place is because they take advantage of the fact that they are an interactive medium.

Stuff like Pathologic, New Vegas, Disco Elysium, etc.

When games try to be movies (uncharted) they're just shitty movies because they're trying to shoehorn a non interactive medium into an interactive one, and its the inverse for when you try to adapt good games into movies, turning something interactive into something non interactive.

People will often say "So so book is unadaptable", but that's wrong, because NO book is unadaptable.

What they actually mean is "This book cannot be adapted into a 2 hour blockbuster that is marketable to the lowest common demoninator."

In theory, there is no physical barrier preventing you from making a 5 hour film where 2 of those hours are the main character monologuing in an empty room, it just would have a niche audience. (Shit its something most OG dune fans would watch). I'm not saying its viable, but it IS possible and good adaptations stem downstream of that fact.

Good games on the other hand, DO have that physical barrier. It doesn't matter how much runtime or how much creative freedom you have, the instant the game throws a fork in the road you're done being an adaptation.

Again, this doesn't apply to linear "cinematic games", but of all the games that are widely revered for their story, almost none of them actually are linear cinematic. (Again like I mentioned earlier, Pathologic, New Vegas, Disco Elysium off the top of my head).

Then you have games like Xenogear (PS1). With a story deeper and more substantive than many books, let alone moves etc. A lot of games have stories that would need to be trimmed down, not bloated up. Simpler narrative games seem to get picked up out of sheer popularity (like mario etc) but even when they do adapt the right games, HW is full of big brains execs who "know better" and hacks who's egos really want to be writing/directing their own projects. That's how we get nonsense like the RE movies. (which aren't bad movies actually.. just bad RE) RE is probably the best example of the trend outcome. Mos of the time it's a total disaster in every way or misses the point so completely that it can' even be faulted as a bad adaption.

DMC netflix if it hasn't been added already.

Short version: just read this URL

https://boundingintocomics.com/tv-shows/netflixs-devil-may-cry-turns-dantes-story-into-allegory-for-war-on-terror-complete-with-american-invasion-of-hell-set-to-green-days-american-idiot/

Demons are now the good guys and innocent (illegal) immigrants/refugees as well. Since they are also humans who were stuck in "demon world" (which is now simply another dimension) in the long ago past. The PotUS/US are the bad guys, Mundus and other ranking demons are now potentially the lesser of two evils next to the US right. Lady is a foul mouthed murderous bitch in a new unsexy outfit. Dante is a jobber, needing back up, losing to people like Lady. As well as a try hard idiot. The green day song is NOT A JOKE! The entire series has been turned into a soap box of the hack behind this and progressive left in general.

Going to create a thread i think.

Sorry about the double.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I'll add Visual Novels to be very hard but not impossible to adapt. The issue is usually the scale. If you can't get at least half an hour per reading time then you are fucked. If the plot relies on some meta loop the reader doesn't realize until later you are double fucked.