Why Adaptations Keep Failing

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Yeah, the book was better... but why? What's so difficult about a change in medium?

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[TheTaleFoundry]

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[Warrior-Of-Virtue]

The worst are those fools who try to adapt a series of books before said series is finished. You cut out one part of the book that seems inconsequential only to realize that it was actually setting up a major plot point in a future book.

[joliealbury]

Honestly, I think the _How to Train Your Dragon_ movie franchise is so different from the books that one could argue it's not so much an "adaptation" as it is "a completely separate story that just so happens to have the same name and ideas." Kinda like how there are two different comic strips called _Dennis the Menace_ about a troublemaking kid in a striped shirt named Dennis.

[frankmckenneth]

Anime fans dont know how good they've got it with adaptations. No other medium is as faithful.

[andistansbury]

The Percy Jackson fandom is still planning murder against Disney for their adaptation.

[VulpinePIlot]

2001: A Space Odyssey isn't an adaptation, believe it or not. Both the film and the book were produced in tandem with a lot of communication between Kubrick and Clarke.

I just felt compelled to mention this neat fact.

[OtakuUnitedStudio]

I love how many of the comments here are reacting to the title, and it's obvious they didn't watch the video.

[joshkorte]

A lot of adaptations don't seem to understand the themes, philosophy, and subtext of the source material. For as much as school tried to teach us media literacy and the sort, many modern writers are not inbuing their work with anything deeper than the cgi spectacle.

[lanlinked]

I think that another part of it is that most adaptations make the work… smaller. A book that takes you several days to read is condensed down to 90 minutes. Part of what makes the How to Train Your Dragon movie good is that it expands the original book. Those books were written so simply that it pretty much had to be expanded, and they kept the original tone, as you mentioned.

[wolfbd]

I think that the movie adaptation of Hamlet is as good as the original - those animated lions really convey the emotion (and i still tear up at the stampede scene).

[roachdoggjr]

I think our imaginations have so much to do with this phenomena. When reading a book, you can picture the characters, voices, and action at exactly the pace you prefer. Far more relative control than the movie watching experience.

[douglasphillips]

Short answer, the studio knows fans will show up to see the adaptation. So they buy the IP and put as little as posible into the product, because they already have your dollar

[emeraldqueen]

As someone who’s read the How To Train Your Dragon books and seen the movies I personally enjoyed both even though they’re different… To paraphrase a quote that Toys for Bob used they remade the PS1 Spyro trilogy into the Reignited trilogy “we’re remaking the memories you think of when you have rose tinted glasses” PS : I agree that the ANIMATED Avatar is a masterpiece

[unavezms]

I just wonder WHY they adapted The last airbender into live-action. There are so many new stories that can be told in this world and yet they decide to remake a beloved animated series that's just perfect. The setup about Avatar cycle could be used to make all kind of cool sequels...

*waits for next season of the dragon prince*

[janedoe]

I do multimedia storytelling, and keep a decent eye on how things get adapted between mediums generally. One thing I've picked up is that if you are adapting a book to a film, a video game, a comic--you need to add something through the new medium, and take advantage of the medium in a meaningful way to the content of the story.

Alan Moore focused heavily on the way comics work as a medium in Watchmen in particular. The Spider-verse movies dealt with shift in medium by bringing aspects of comic visuals into film. They play with animation, action, and transitions to evoke comic elements while being mindful of the presence of sound versus absence of caption and dialogue boxes. Hitchcock's Psycho, Rope, and The Birds play with not only presentation of shots but with how cuts and music are (and are not) used. Action can be sped up or slowed down. Immersion/emotional response can be manipulated not only through what is there but what isn't.

Watchmen has been adapted already. I would argue that it isn't possible to adapt the medium-specific delivery in perfect accuracy because it is medium-specific. However, there is room to create alternate medium-specific deliveries for film as a medium, because it has its own set of tools unique to the format.

(And as a last thing, I've seen people argue it's near impossible to adapt cosmic horror to film. From the bottom of my heart I don't think so. Literally screw with the medium itself in experimental ways to evoke physics and biology not working. Use glitches, weird camera effects, deformed/inconsistent scenery, hard lines in organic creatures, scale differences like an eye the size of a house, etc. I actually think it's made for film, but you'd need to play with how film works.)

[cyberprime]

Whenever people discuss "remakes" and "adaptations", there comes a point where you have to ask the following:

"What can we do to adapt this media to another medium?"

"What did the source material do that we can implement into this form?"

"What didn't the source material do we can add to it for this platform, if we can at all?"

"Am I doing enough to balance the source material with the tools and tricks of the media I plan to implement with it?"

"Is there an audience/demand for this remake? If so, what does the audience want or hope to slip in?"

"Can we at least not be the next M. Night Shamalan or Micheal Bay?"

[adiveler]

I would argue that Coraline is also a good example that many consider the movie to be better than the original book!

[kvar_runeback]

Guys I think there is a technical issue from 10:43 to 14:00, it should be talking about the most agregious example of movie adaptations, but there's just white noise. After all, there *is* no movie in Ba Sing Se

[Reddles]

You touched on this a little at the end, but a big problem is that people tend to adapt things that were already really good, so it's hard to live up to the original. Really they should be adapting things that had interesting ideas but flawed execution, so they can learn from the mistakes of the original and try to improve it.

I think there's also another issue with adaptations and also stuff like tie-ins or fan fictions in general. The most talented writers probably want to tell their own stories with their own characters and settings, so the people working on someone else's IP are either not creative enough to do their own thing or else are mostly there for the money. Of course if the IP in question is good enough then people will be excited to work on it, but then we're back to the problem of struggling to live up to the source material.

[sarahlevine]

Tone is often lost in translation too. Especially in translated poems. Poems are about the spoken word, so when something is said differently, it feels different.