Why do we keep giving book adaptations a second chance on TV?
One Day is just the latest example of a beloved novel that was turned into a disappointing film and then a show
TV Features Clary
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. We know this saying well, so why do we forget about it when it comes to book adaptations? Why, when a film or TV version of a bestselling novel is so bad, do we give it another chance and try again?
Sure, life is all about second chances. Maybe the person who gave off a bad first impression is much better when you meet again. That first day at a new workplace was terrible, but you tried on day two and it’s worked out. Even that restaurant you ventured to right after it opened deserves a second chance once it’s settled into its groove. But book adaptations? If a book—especially a hugely successful one—doesn’t work the first time round on the screen, it’s probably a sign that something about the material doesn’t translate from page to screen.
That’s certainly the case for David Nicholls’ hit 2009 novel One Day. The book is gorgeous, with each chapter moving us to July 15 in another year of Emma and Dexter’s life; the pair meet at university and never become a couple, but their stories intertwine in the subsequent 20 years. One Day has all the hallmarks of something that you think would make for a great film: nuanced characters, a sweep-you-off-your-feet plot, and an ending that truly surprises. The fact that it’s a huge bestseller, in multiple languages and countries, made it a no-brainer for Hollywood executives. And yet, the 2011 film version of One Day was lackluster, devoid of heart, and even a little boring. Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess tried their best, bless them, but their best wasn’t enough to rescue the adaptation.
But now Netflix has decided it wants to have a second go at Nicholls’ book, with the miniseries version of the tome premiering February 8. That’s despite the fact attempt one was largely panned by critics and the central conceit of skipping a year between chapters just did not work on the screen in the way it did on the page. (It’s worth noting here that Nicholls wrote the screenplay as well, and has written a number of successful TV shows and films.) When such a huge part of the book—the bit that made it unique and compelling— doesn’t work visually, what are you doing trying to bring it to the screen again?
One Day is not the only adaptation that’s failed because time was an issue. In 2009, Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams starred in the film adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s romance The Time Traveler’s Wife. In just one hour 47 minutes (the kind of film length we dream of now), it attempted to tell the story of two lovers who spend decades weaving in and out of each other’s lives. It’s no wonder it didn’t work, despite the film’s poster telling us it’s from an “acclaimed bestseller.” Still, HBO tried again with a series more than a decade later, and, unsurprisingly, it was greeted with pretty mediocre reviews.
TV and film execs love a bestseller and they especially love a fierce fandom, because it signals a built-in audience (which of course is part of the attraction of taking any sort of already existing IP, whatever its format). They have exactly that in Cassandra Clare’s The Shadowhunter Chronicles, a huge network of connected books (currently 30 across a number of series, including manga adaptations, short story collections, and a codex). The books have everything: vampires, werewolves, love affairs, magic, good vs. evil, hot people. They’re the definition of epic.
When the first film in the adaptation of the series was released in 2013, it was a peak time for YA books on the big screen. Twilight had just finished up a five-year run (look, we all love to hate it and that still earns the studio money). The Hunger Games had come out the year before and its sequel Catching Fire was also out in 2013, while the first films in the Divergent and The Maze Runner films would both be released in 2014.
Despite this appetite, The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones was a dud—so much so that it’s not the first film in the adaptation, it’s the only one, which feels almost unheard of in an age where everything seems to get a sequel. Diehard fans of the books disliked it, while new audiences just weren’t attracted (unsurprising when you consider all the one-star reviews). Adapting Clare’s works—which are doing quite well, to understate it, as books—should have been quietly forgotten about, but instead, Netflix decided it would have a go with a series, bringing Shadowhunters to the small screen in 2016.
It sort of worked, if we’re being generous. The space and time allowed by a series meant better development, but it suffered both from boring lead characters (we could feel ourselves falling asleep every time we had to watch Clary and Jace interact) and a little too much happening. Still, Netflix made a total of three seasons, which did get marginally better as they went (although let’s face it—we were all only watching for Magnus and Alec, right?), but it never really took off. Clare wasn’t involved in the series, and some fans certainly felt that absence.
An author’s removal from their series can be a death knell. Rick Riordan’s beloved Percy Jackson series spawned two films that never really went anywhere and are disliked by fandom as well as Riordan himself. But Disney+ wanted to have another go, and to be fair to them, it seems to have worked: Kayleigh Dray gave it a B+, noting that “the series has more than enough room to breathe and obsess over the books’ lore when it needs to.” It’s the rare example of a second-chance adaptation working out. But one amongst many isn’t a stellar argument for trying again with a book especially when there’s so much other material out there that might indeed do better. Only working as a book doesn’t make a novel any less brilliant, and not everything is meant to be in multiple formats.
But studios won’t listen. Just this month, HBO announced it was going to adapt Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places for a series. And yes, Dark Places already exists as a film. It came out as recently as 2015 and starred Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Nicholas Hoult. And yes, it wasn’t great. But why would that stop a network or streaming service?
As for One Day, only time will tell if Netflix’s adaptation fares better than its filmic predecessor. It may well do, since a series can give its characters and story much more time than a single film can. (And for what it’s worth, The A.V. Club’s Mary Kate Carr, who disliked the 2011 film version, enjoyed the show, grading it a B+.) But if the history of second-chance adaptations tells us anything, it’s that Netflix’s One Day will be the exception, not the rule, if it delivers.
76 Comments
Is the answer “Risk Aversion”? People with money for producing movies and tv shows are afraid of anything that is not proven?
yeah, but on the other end some of these (re)adaptions didn’t do well the first time, so if anything there’s more risk the second time around.Though this is probably moot since apparently the original books still have a following.
Right, Look at streaming lately and one can legit question decisions being made.
It’s pretty typical for a film adaptation of a novel to fail because 90-120 minutes is way too short to adapt a proper book. A single-season series makes more sense.
That entirely depends on the novel.It’s common for that to be an issue when it comes to recent fantasy and scifi because of trends in the genre toward longer novels that are densely packed with lots of characters and details.But not all books are like that. Take Jurassic Park for example. The movie is pretty faithful adaptation of the book, and probably wouldn’t be improved with the amount of filler needed to pad it out into a full tv season. Most of Michael Crichton’s novels are easy to adapt to movie. Same with John Grisham novels.
As someone else replied, it really depends on the book.
To add, length is less of a factor than most people think. For some genres, much of the fluff is merely visual worldbuilding that is more easily condensed in a visual medium such as a movie than a book. Dozens and dozens of pages describing visual details can easily be translated into a few minutes of screentime, and that’s a big boon when it comes many novels. The most notable example I think of that shows this is American Psycho, where the book would spend many pages on Patrick Bateman describing in precise detail the exact paintings, clothes, and various products that he engaged with during his travels, clearly to be evocative of the high-end existence he lived in. Visually, you can do that nearly instantaneously, and in the movie, only a few lines are devoted to him outright mentioning specific names and products (because we can see how expensive and luxurious everything is without having to denote his shoes being Gucci, his chair being an Eames, or his painting being a Rothko print). American Psycho also isn’t a particularly short novel.
Conversely, The Great Gatsby is a short novel, but has a hard time with adaptations because they often don’t get the point the book is trying to make (and usually because they haven’t read Fitzgerald’s other works). They either focus too much on how expensive is luxurious everything is, and lose the personal aspect. Or they try to focus on the personal aspect but miss the reality that Nick is both an unreliable narrator and someone who is dealing with the cognitive dissonance of both loving and loathing the temporary life he lived when he was in Gatsby’s orbit, in addition to often turning Gatsby into a one-note character who veers to either extreme of characterization (either the ultimate victim who did no wrong because his love was profound, or a cynically calculating monster whose “love” was more obsession). Compared to American Psycho, Gatsby is positively paltry at approx. 48k words (Psycho has a little under 120k).
Instead of length, what tends to matter more is the structure of the book. A shorter novel that takes place over a longer span of time might need the length of a TV series rather than a movie versus a longer (in word count) book which takes place over a shorter span of narrative time, or a longer book where much of the length is visual description or excisable dialogue. Not to mention the fact that some books are formatted in a way that diving them into individual stories instead of one grand novel would also work.
Some of that is true, but nothing you said changes the fact that the length of a film is way too short to properly adapt nearly any actual novel. This take really reads like someone who doesn’t actually like books and thinks everything but the plot is unimportant. That’s the kind of thinking that causes terrible adaptations.Also, you’re confusing structure with just the time span. Time span is way less relevant than the number of important scenes anyway. Structure actually is important, which is why novels that aren’t nearly entirely narrative make for terrible adaptations. Your example of American Psycho is 100% backward. The film didn’t address huge important aspects of the novel visually; it just didn’t address them at all, missing an enormous part of the novel, which it appears you missed out on.That does hint at a major problem with very many adaptations. With only a few exceptions (generally not very good books), whittling a book down to just the plot ends up cutting out most of what makes the book good and unique. Gatsby is respected because of the prose, not the plot.
How you derived any of that from what I said is confounding, but I’ll bite.
Some of that is true, but nothing you said changes the fact that the length of a film is way too short to properly adapt nearly any actual novel. This take really reads like someone who doesn’t actually like books and thinks everything but the plot is unimportant. That’s the kind of thinking that causes terrible adaptations.Since you didn’t take any amount of time to define what constitutes an “actual” novel, you’ve made no actual point with any sort of clarity. Further, a narrative is primarily comprised of two things: plot and characterization. In a movie, anything that isn’t advancing the plot or providing characterization is essentially wasted time on the screen. Thankfully, because movies (and TV for that matter) are visual mediums, much of the visual worldbuilding in novels can be significantly shortened because you no longer need to spend hundreds if not thousands of words merely describing things.
Also, you’re confusing structure with just the time span. Time span is way less relevant than the number of important scenes anyway. Structure actually is important, which is why novels that aren’t nearly entirely narrative make for terrible adaptations. Your example of American Psycho is 100% backward. The film didn’t address huge important aspects of the novel visually; it just didn’t address them at all, missing an enormous part of the novel, which it appears you missed out on.My last paragraph in my initial response broke this down. Structure can (and often does) include time span, amongst other things. Further, it’s how you deal with the time span which impacts the structure, be it scenes in a screenplay or pages in a novel. The two things are inextricably linked when it comes to adaptations of novels, because you’re always saddled with the limited amount of visual time that the adapted format affords you. Further, considering that one of the main complaints by viewers of movies and TV adaptations are the use (and misuse) of timeskips, to say that time-span is somehow less relevant than the important scenes is offbase (made even worse when you consider that many of those narrative excisions for the passage of time often result in the audience having to make inferences which may or may not be correct, which is unsatisfying in most genres). Those scenes derive a good chunk of their importance due to where they sit in the narrative, time-wise. If they were truly important independent of their narrative chronology, then you could have a satisfying adaptation by merely throwing the “important” scenes in without any respect for the narrative passage of time. Could it work? Of course. But the potential for it to become an absolute mess is magnified when you extend the adaptation length from a feature film to a TV series.
To your point about American Psycho, having read the book numerous times, I fail to see how the film didn’t address many of the visual aspects of the book. In the book, Patrick Bateman spends an enormous amount of page-time pointing out in detail the name brands of almost everything he comes across. It works in the novel because it characterizes him as both neurotic (he knows all of this from visual acuity alone) and superficial (he genuinely believes they matter). However, those pages don’t need to be fully fleshed out and adapted in the movie because the cinematography can satisfy the descriptive elements. Not only that, but there are enough scenes and dialogue in the film that shows how much of a superficial and neurotic mess Patrick is (pointing out how Halberstam wears Valentino couture and Oliver Peoples glasses, the entire scene about the business cards, Carruthers assuming that Patrick is coming on to him in the restroom and remembering Patrick’s red paisley Armani tie while he’s being choked, Patrick being upset at the cleaners for bleaching Cerruti, etc.,) that you don’t need to directly translate his internal dialogue listing 100s of different brands. Hell, one of the reasons that Glamorama never got off the ground as an adaptation is that so much of the book was spent listing off name brands and celebrities (not to mention the actual plot got semi-spoofed/taken by Zoolander) that you wouldn’t get to the actual plot until nearly half-way through.
The major points of the book that were excised were, contrary to what you’ve said, satisfy the two conditions (advancing the plot and providing characterization). More specifically, the scene in the novel where Patrick murders a child in Central Park and convinces the child’s mother that he’s a doctor, and the scene where he causes a rat to “enter” a prostitute he’s hired. Those scenes weren’t at all fluff (such as the pages devoted to mere description that are better shown in a movie rather than told by Patrick), but due to the utter brutality (which was conveyed in scenes adapted in the movie), they were cut.
That does hint at a major problem with very many adaptations. With only a few exceptions (generally not very good books), whittling a book down to just the plot ends up cutting out most of what makes the book good and unique. Gatsby is respected because of the prose, not the plot.Good prose is hard to convey through a visual medium, made more difficult by the relative brevity of a 90-120 minute movie. That being said, I’d wager that most people who are going into a movie (or even watching a TV show) are more concered about the plot rather than worldbuilding elements. Of course, this is a continuum that will vary by genre, but very few movies are going to be satisfying if it’s merely people talking about nothing, or a visual tour de force with no narrative substance (even if both can be financially successful ala Avatar). Strong characterization is necessary, and it certainly helps, but there are many more bad movies which consist of good characterization with a shitty plot, rather than bad movies that have a great plot with bad characterization. In fact, if the plot is bad, that usually has a significant impact on the quality of characterization, since the relationship of the characters with the narrative is one of the main components of characterization.
It appears that we just have profoundly different takes on writing literature, something that is very clear just by looking at the labored prose you appear to think makes your arguments seem more sophisticated. I just can’t even.
I’m noticing this entire conversation is predicated on the idea that adaptation necessitates a 1:1 depiction of the source’s content, which is just impossible and, more importantly, the opposite of the word’s meaning in the first place. Things get added. Things get removed. The very change in medium ensures an entirely different experience of the source.
I don’t believe anywhere in my responses did I imply or advocate for a 1:1 adaptation of novels. The main novel I referred to, American Psycho, had a brilliant movie that decidedly wasn’t a 1:1 adaptation. The crux of my argument is to push back on the notion that novels, due to word count, need TV adaptations, or that TV adaptations are, in the aggregate, the preferred way to go over film.
Maybe you were referring to IContainMultitudes and their POV on the subject.
I wasn’t saying that to argue with you so much as agree or at least voice a similar opinion. I would’ve replied direct to Multitudes but, again, I’m not here to bicker.
My misunderstanding then. Lord knows Kinja’s formatting can lead to that haha
That’s the beauty of adapting existing successful IP, even more than once. It provides substantial cover for whoever greenlights the production if the show fails to click with the audience, and they can always take credit if the show succeeds.
I don’t know, the stink of a bad adaptation can certainly cling to the title even when it’s an entirely different set of people involved. A lot of people familiar with the first effort are likely to start off skeptical.
It’s because the people who green light these things, for all their blind spots and problems, understand Sturgeon’s Law and that it means you have to try anything a bunch of times in order to get a few good things.
Doesn’t this all get negated by the entire comic book to movie genre that has been doing the same characters for decades with hugely varied levels of success? Almost like the end result is a matter of the film maker’s collective abilities instead of whether the source material is easily transferable. If a popular IP exists, that means the production company both saves on marketing and has the safety net of a proven commodity. The market is loaded with remakes and sequels because the money should be better.
I want to know who the fuck greenlit a Presumed Innocent show? That movie is perfection
A lot of the time when a movie adaptation doesn’t work it’s because they cut the wrong stuff out, or too much. But to get a good sized novel into a 2 hour movie you have to cut out a lot, like 75%. The nice part about a TV adaptation is you don’t. Now you could still screw it up. But at least the format is no longer working against you.
But to get a good sized novel into a 2 hour movie you have to cut out a lot, like 75%.Depends on the novel.
American Psycho worked perfectly as a movie, but that’s because the novel had a lot of visual description via Patrick Bateman that took a lot of words, whereas on screen, you can eliminate a great deal of that. Further, American Psycho is not a particularly small book (it clocks in at approx. 120k words, which is longer than each of the first 3 Harry Potter novels, for comparison.)
Novels which are stuffed full of dialogue tend to be harder to cut down. If a novel is very visual, much of the verbiage is easily converted to images you can simply show the audience without having to devote an immense amount of screen time or dialogue references to. You look at some of the biggest fantasy and sci-fi novels of recent memory, and a good 1/3 of those books are devoted to descriptive text. That’s a big chunk that’s easily translated into a visual medium like film. Where they get caught up is the dialogue, because that’s usually where the crux of the story lies (and since many of these novels have a lot of internal dialogue via the thoughts of characters, that can be really difficult to translate in a captivating way that doesn’t fall into the narration trap).
TV adaptations can often be a trap, because when you’re given so much room to work with, you realize from reading the novel that a lot of the stuff is completely unnecessary and doesn’t really contribute anything to the narrative that can’t correctly be inferred by what’s going to be on screen. That’s how you end up with TV adaptations of normal-sized novels that still end up with fluff that weren’t at all in the original work. What’s necessarily good in a novel might not translate to the screen, but if you’re given 6-8 hours of TV, you still need 6-8 hours of TV. Because of that, those cuts can put you in a bind when it comes to a TV series, whereas with a movie, the ultimate product is easier to adapt.
I think TV shows are also a trap because there’s a presumption on behalf of the audience that the show will get as many seasons as it “needs” to adapt the book(s), and that pushes up against the economic reality of the medium.
Why, when a film or TV version of a bestselling novel is so bad, do we give it another chance and try again? Because the movie World War Z exists.Seriously, fuck that movie. The book deserves a second shot at adaptation, preferably in a way that INCLUDES THE FUCKING BOOK AT ALL.
No see clearly the source material was the problem, because according to the article there’s no such thing as a bad adaptation.
The one thing I regret most about when I ran into Max Brooks at a Minecraft convention is not asking him for his thoughts on what happened with WWZ. I know he knows as well as anyone in Hollywood how the game is played and that books routinely get slashed to bits in adaptation, but still.
FWIW, a buddy ran into him at a convention signing. Per said buddy: “so I met Max Brooks at a book signing and when I asked him about the movie, basically he shrugged and said that after cashing the check that they gave him, Hollywood was welcome to do whatever they wanted with it.”
Ah, cynical resignation, my old friend.
Yeah, I hope that his sasquatch book gets a better adaptation (apparently in development).
Yeah Brooks finally does something new and interesting with the exhausted zombie genre and the movie throws every bit of it overboard. SO disappointing because the descriptions in the novel would so vivid that translating them for screen would hardly be a heavy lift.
This is always my answer to “if you had a kajillion dollars to adapt anything, what would it be?” Because that book would be the most insane found-footage, talking-head “docu-series.”
Plus the best part of the book was the dissection of how various countries would respond to the threat. Of course in the U.S. it was to try to blow them all up with artillery.
Yep.I was talking about it with my partner the other day. The action scenes are stupid, badly-paced “guns go BRRRRRRRR” bits of chaotic carnage, and the book made the perfect case for WHY THAT DOESN’T WORK against a zombie horde the size of NYC.No Battle of Yonkers, no “Raj squares,” no thought, no ideas other than generic action and liquid plot armor.The *one thing* I dug was the weird CIA dude in prison, who said that North Korea yanked the teeth of the entire population as a response, and I was like, “Yeah, that’s something that is just nuts enough to ride the line of plausibility.” It was the only halfway clever thing I could identify in the movie.
Yeah but the book’s treatment of North Korea was even cooler, with the entire population being forced into hiding underground in an attempt to avoid contact, and no one in the outside world knowing if it was successful or those caverns were now full of commie zombies. That also seems entirely in line with the way NK would react.
And why hasn’t The Dark is Rising been one of them? It’s way more suited to a TV show than a movie anyhow.GET ON IT, HOLLYWOO!
A single season of TV is more able to actually adapt a book. If you don’t understand that, then maybe you’re an idiot?
Probably because an 8-hour series is a much better match for the amount of content in a lot of novels than a 2-hour movie.
The better question is “why do we keep trying to cram an entire book into two hours and then being surprised when it doesn’t work?”
This.
Beautifully stated!
The reminds me of reading about pitches to adapt the Game of Thrones books as a movie. They were just going to cut out everything but the wall/ice zombie story and a bit of Danaery’s story so her dragons could be a deus ex machina. Their plan was basically to remove all the interesting bits.
Jesus, say what one will about the final season, but this would have been so much worse.
In that case, it’s not even adapting one book into one film but, what, five or six (not yet finished) books into one film? Uh, why even bother?
I’m guessing some people were like “Lord of the Rings made a lot of money. How can we get in on that?Well, this author’s name also has R.R. in it…
LA Confidential showed it can actually work, but that was a true miracle of a movie we’re probably never going to see again.
Sure, there are definitely exceptions, and that’s one. But the movie MASSIVELY reworked a lot of the book, and that it turned out great is a lucky break for us.
I agree, but of course there are always exceptions.
I know I’m in a minority here, but I remember enjoying most of the first Percy Jackson movie. The movie had a good pace, while the TV series really shows that the book didn’t have enough interesting content to stretch over 8 episodes.
Then again, the movie is more of a family movie, while the TV series is more of a kids show, so different intended audiences.
I’m noticing this entire conversation is predicated on the idea that adaptation necessitates a 1:1 depiction of the source’s content, which is just impossible and, more importantly, the opposite of the word’s meaning in the first place. Things get added. Things get removed. The very change in medium ensures an entirely different experience of the source. The quality of the adaptation is a different question from “is the whole source represented?”
I think it’s apparent in the remainder of the conversation that this is understood by all, but I suppose in case that wasn’t apparent, agreed. The underlying context is the article’s overall question of why we (they) keep turning books that failed as movies into TV shows, and my counter is that the medium of TV is generally going to be better-suited for such adaptations because it provides more room to retain (or expand) those elements in the book that were necessary for the full story.
I appreciate your reply and agreement; I do think the overarching conversation of “there’s too much in a book to fit within a movie” implies a desire for 1:1 adaptation. Reading again I don’t think you’re saying that, but a *lot* of people in this thread are doing so explicitly.
I don’t really think it implies 1:1 – what it does imply is that a movie, which is shorter, is in more cases going to have to cut more from the book than a show would, whatever the ratio, and therefore is more likely to suffer for it. Which is the unstated (and obvious, I think) answer to the silly thesis of this article: “If a book—especially a hugely successful one—doesn’t work the first time round on the screen, it’s probably a sign that something about the material doesn’t translate from page to screen.”
I think that gets into two thoughts for me: the thing I said initially, which is that adaptation by nature necessitates removing from and/or adding to the original work, and that the very change in medium and involvement of different creative forces has already altered the source material; and as a result (and I know I’m in the minority here) people should take as many bites at the apple as they want.I don’t think the work inherently suffers from removing pieces; I could go for sheer numbers in pointing out filmic adaptations which leave content in the book because the examples would be numerous depending on how literal I want to get (again, in the act you must edit), but two disparate examples I’d like to throw out are two from the same year: There Will Be Blood, which is a loose adaptation of just the first 150 pages of a 500+ page novel, and No Country For Old Men, which I’d point to as one of the most literal and successful page-to-screen adaptations and still leaves out a large section which reframes Llewyn Moss as a character. To me, these two examples exemplify the fact that you can use as much or little of the source as you’d like and come out with artistically successful films which honor and grapple with the themes of the original; keep it intact or reshape it as much as you see fit, but the skill lies in the hands of the adapter, not the format to which they’re adapting it. I’d even go so far as saying Blood could be stretched into a miniseries but a minute of extra running time would wreck No Country, so the question of whether they would benefit from a tv adaptation isn’t rigid from my perspective.I think it’s interesting that, and I’m falling into this trap as well, when we talk about not being able to “fit” a book into a movie, we’re talking about pure plot. To me, success or failure of adaptation doesn’t rest on the extent to which the resulting work resembles the original, or the medium it’s translated to, so much as on the prism through which it’s translated.
I also think it’s interesting that most of the examples in the article are YA series which the studios were clearly trying to turn into series franchises; not exactly the most quality-first endeavor, regardless of whether it lands on tv or in cinemas.
Not just books , a few video game movies like Assassins Creed , or …hear me out (World of )Warcraft ,lend themselves much more to TV shows , given they have long storylines spread over long periods of time . I mean both have series of book adaptations (Warcraft has been doing them for years , and has novels, short story collections, comics and manga, AC has at least a few decent historical novels).I mean bear in mind how bad games movies can be, especially compared how good the greatest of all acclaimed game TV shows Skylanders Academy , sorry Twisted Metal , sorry its my problem , I mean The Last of us. (although to be fair both are good , and its forgotten because its a kids cartoon , but Skylanders Academy probably did the best at fleshing out a series of games into an actual storyline , and with an amazing cast) I havent seen Halo btw but that was ok ? I think right?
I havent seen Halo btw but that was ok ? I think right?It was not.
You made some good arguments towards disproving your thesis. Sadly, I don’t see enough that helps prove it.
I would’ve thought a “think” piece would have a little more thought put into it, but not at the AV Club!
Can we do this for John Dies at the End?
I feel like you could rework that whole series a bit and get a good 4 or 5 seasons out of it. The Zoey Ashe books are a bit more linear and cinematic, I think they would be better to adapt.
I still enjoyed the movie, but yeah no doubt.
It’s a good movie, but they could do so much more.
I keep meaning to watch that movie, because I recently read the book, and I can’t fathom how the fuck they could possibly have crammed that down into two hours.
Basically by only using the first half and tacking on a new ending.
The movie is actually good but so much is missing.
considering you seem unaware that dex & em DO become a couple in the novel, i’m not sure exactly how much you can speak to the adaptations of this book. they even get married, after all.
Harry Potter would’ve really benefited from the extra amount of screentime afforded by a tv show, even though it probably would’ve been nowhere near as high-profile at the time (when such a thing would’ve been unthinkable).I know it’s not quite to your point, but I actually think one of the benefits of the way the film/tv industry has evolved over the last 20 years is that they’re far more willing to do a tv adaptation of a book instead of defaulting to film – as there are a lot of books and book series that just work better as a tv show. A Song of Ice and Fire would probably never have worked as a film series.(Personally, I really want to see a tv series adaptation of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, as I think it would be gangbusters with a good budget and a smart showrunner; but I fear if an adaptation is ever made, it’ll be a film trilogy.)
This article was poorly conceived and you should be embarrassed.
Seconded. A short story or a novella can be made to work as a film, but most really meaty novels – to say nothing of novel series – need at least a limited series to not end up cutting way too much.
Also, the reason both Time Traveler’s Wife adaptations flopped is in large part because the book format just barely gets away with the inherent creepiness of a naked adult man telling a little girl she’ll be his wife in the future, and when you actually have to see it there’s no way past that.
I much prefer remakes where the original didn’t work as opposed to ones where the original did work. People can learn from what didn’t work and make something better.
Because His Dark Materials proved it can be successful? I seriously think it’s that simple. And while we’re on the subject, one that I’m really hoping for is Bonfire of the Vanities.
Wow, first “i miss episodic tv” and now this. You do realize books have been fodder for filmic adaptations since…the beginning of film, right? Your recency bias is showing.
Holy shit did you misunderstand the headline (which is clearly the only bit you read).
I really think the key ingredient comes down to is the original author involved, and if so, exactly how much are they involved? to your point, the Percy Jackson movies were basically a different story, but the series is more true to the book likely due to Rick’s involvement. obviously that’s not always the case, but it seems like that’s a good test on how well the adaptation will do. also fwiw, Netflix didn’t produce the Shadowhunters series. that was a Freeform show, which also speaks to why it is the way it is :/
What the hell are you talking about? “Shadowhunters” was on Freeform, not Netflix. That’s a pretty significant blunder.
The Dark Tower movie was perfect example. I got faith that Mike Flanagan’s upcoming tv show version will be infinitely better. Thankee, Sai.
I liked Radio Times review of this: Just read the book.
1) When something is good the first time, why remake it? When something is bad, remaking it (or re-adapting if you prefer) makes a lot more sense.2) Since when are film and TV equivalent mediums?
Something
I don’t see a lot of people talking about regarding this subject is
Dune. I haven’t read the books, but based on what some people have said
and other things I know about them, it’s made me think that the approach
to the current ongoing movie series is wrong. I don’t think it’s
impossible to adapt the first book into a single two hour movie, but it
needs to make necessary changes and people seem too afraid to do that.
Scenes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G from the book are all there, but they
could have condensed several scenes into minor details or reworked into other scenes, so we reach scene
G with everything we need without blasting through half of the film’s
runtime (at least). We don’t need to show the training with personal
shields scene, they can just show that they have shields. We didn’t need
the spit scene. Book fans complain about how some elements were
underemphasized, and I can totally see that. The betrayal of the
family’s, I dunno, servant guy (been a while since I saw part one)
didn’t have much of an impact. It ends with a weird random boss fight
against some screamy lackey. In spite of its long runtime, it feels like
a movie with only one act. There absolutely is a way to introduce the
world, have an assassination, and have its protagonist flee and find
Zendaya in 30-45 minutes. The way they’re dragging these out, in spite
of part one being the only Timothée Chalamet film I’ve seen, I’m already
tired of his overexposure that threatens to become the next Chris Pratt.