As many (many) hot takes in various media outlets have proclaimed: adaptations are all the rage. Of course, adaptations have been around since the earliest days of moving pictures—and have always varied wildly in quality and success. For every Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, there’s a Legend of Earthsea or a Queen of the Damned. And even the ones considered successful often have their fair share of unsatisfied fans. What is it about transforming a written work into a film (or miniseries, television show, etc.) that gets us so excited (or so worried)? It’s easy to guess why studios love adapting; having an existing, successful script and built-in audience is certainly an advantage. Considering how often hardcore fans are disappointed in the big-screen iteration of their beloved source material—and casual viewers couldn’t care less—I often wonder what keeps bringing us back for more. Is it simply curiosity, the tantalizing prospect of seeing what we’ve only imagined?
What kind of magic do you need to make a good adaptation? What even is a “good” adaptation? Is it a faithful reproduction of the source? Does it use the material as a springboard to create something different? Is it a blueprint, or is it an outline? When is a novel/story/comic the complete basis of a film or TV adaptation, and when is it just inspiration? Does it matter when you experience the original vs. the adapted version? I wish I had the space or the time to dive into these questions with the depth they deserve. For now, however, I’m hoping to scratch the surface a bit with a rather specific test case.
Not so very long ago, I was what I like to call an “adaptation purist.” You know the type: the nit-pickiest, killjoy-iest of fans, the ones that can never accept deviations from the beloved source material and have to talk about it to everyone that mentions the movie. Loudly. And over the years, no film has triggered my fangirl ire quite like Practical Magic.
The book never really had an organized fandom, per se, though it was a bestseller when it came out in 1995 and the author, Alice Hoffman, was fairly well-known among a certain set of readers. I didn’t know much about it when I first encountered it by chance at the library when I was probably around 13 or 14, back when I was still picking most of my reading material at random from the options the nice librarians had set face-out on the shelves. Practical Magic isn’t a perfect book, but I found it at the perfect time in my life and it hits all of the right buttons for a comfort read, one I could return to again and again. I’ve read it at least a dozen times and can recite entire passages from memory at this point.
I’ve probably seen the movie Practical Magic almost as many times since it first made its VHS debut in 1998. This is actually rather odd, considering that until very recently I didn’t particularly like the film. It takes a deeply interior work about women’s lives and family dynamics and boils it down to a thin plotline about romance and poorly-planned necromancy. The music and tone are all over the place. Moreover, two of the book’s most interesting characters are aged down and clipped almost completely out of the story. In spite of this, and in dire need of witchy watching for my favorite holiday, I decided to re-watch the movie around Halloween last year and, for maybe the first time, I actually enjoyed it. I had been growing more and more mellow about it over the years, but this time I genuinely had fun. Maybe I was helped along by the twentieth anniversary appreciation pieces I had read around the same time, but I think it may have been something else…
Another witchy adaptation, the first installment of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, was released on Netflix around last Halloween as well. Usually, being an “adaptation purist” also means that you simply MUST ALWAYS read the source material before you see a film or TV adaptation. However, I was too excited for Sabrina (and too wary of being spoiled by the internet) to wait, so I binged the show over a few days and resolved to give the comics it was based on a read soon after. The show was great—flawed and uneven in places, but a lot of fun. A week or so later I read the first 7 or 8 issues of the comic series. And now I know my opinions on adaptations have definitely shifted, because I think the show is better than its source material. Realizing that it is, in fact, okay to think these thoughts—thoughts that a younger me would have considered bordering on blasphemous—I wanted to reconsider my experience with Practical Magic, and adaptations more generally.
And here is where I notice the first major difference in my experience of Sabrina vs. Practical Magic: order of operations. I read Practical Magic first and saw the movie later, but with Sabrina I experienced the show before going back to read the comics. Perhaps we tend to imprint on our first experience of a story and that may be what determines the nature of our comparisons. True or not, I find that the comics are less interesting than the Netflix show. Like Practical Magic, the show borrows elements of the source material and uses them to very different ends, though I would argue that, in this case, it adds interesting material and fleshes out the characters we meet in the comics (rather than cutting and simplifying, as the movie did). Frankly, I found the comics, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a bit of a letdown; they basically just ask “what if Sabrina the Teenage Witch was, you know, dark?” And it is very, VERY dark. The kind of darkness that sacrifices character and story for creepiness and shock value.
The other major difference, obviously, is grounded in the distinct mediums involved. Cutting a novel down to a movie that clocks in under two hours is very different undertaking than spreading an already-thin comics story across ten episodes of television. I’ve always known, logically, that film and books offer fundamentally different experiences and the languages of these mediums are not always compatible. The same goes for comics and TV, or short stories and film, or any combination thereof. Each does something unique with its material, something that doesn’t translate entirely when it is moved to a new format. This theoretical knowledge hasn’t prevented me from completely melting down about the “betrayal” of a lousy adaptation—but when is that reaction fair and when is it just being a fan who is impossible to please?
Buy the Book
Magic for Liars
Stephen King famously hates the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining. From a creator’s perspective, it’s hard for me to blame him. Kubrick borrows only the barest elements from the novel, alters all the characters to suit his vision, and completely trashes the theme of addiction and recovery that runs so strongly throughout the book. King hated the film so much that he heartily supported a new version (a made-for-TV miniseries) that was more faithful to the source. We all remember Kubrick’s Shining; I don’t think most can say the same for the later, more faithful “correction.” And that’s the conundrum that runs my brain in circles: what can you call a good adaptation? I don’t think it’s very fair to consider films like The Shining to even be an adaptation—its inspired by an idea, perhaps, but it is its own beast. Sometimes you get lucky and the author of the original work writes the screen treatment—and the stars align in some unnamable way—and you get films that are as good (or better) than their sources, like The Princess Bride or Interview with the Vampire or The Shawshank Redemption.
I can’t remember if I was excited when I found out Practical Magic was being adapted into a film. When I did encounter it, I was immediately irritated. It leaned very hard into the witchcraft element and the novel isn’t really about magic or witchcraft as a practice or ideology. Magic, as such, is a bit of an undercurrent to the story, something that may or may not be literally real; Hoffman uses elements of magical realism throughout and you’re never quite sure if the Owens women are witches in a literal sense or if “magic” means something else altogether.
The story centers on orphan sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, beginning with the loss of their parents as children and skipping and jumping across their lives before coming back into focus when the pair are in their mid-to-late 30s. As far as very basic overviews go, the film and the book are on the same page. But whereas the book is mostly focused on the interior thoughts and motivations of the characters, movies (generally) need to focus on a plot, so the death of Gillian’s abusive boyfriend Jimmy is reworked into a plotline about irresponsible magic use and a very on-brand late ‘90s homage to the power of sisterhood.
But if I remove the experience of the book—just mentally set it aside while considering this—does the movie stand on its own just fine? Honestly, yes. It’s a product of its time in a lot of ways, and yet ahead of its time in its focus on the relationships between women, family, and community. One of the major changes from the book to the film was the fleshing out of the aunt characters, played magnificently by Stockard Channing and Diane Wiest, who make the film about a million times better every time they are on screen. The film has different goals than the book—and that might actually be okay.
To hope that a favorite novel or story will come directly to life via moving pictures is something we keep clinging to—but it never really does, not in the way I think many fans desire and demand. Some of the most faithful adaptations are often failures, mostly because of the soullessness that can occur when creators are unable to bring their own vision to the material; attempting to reproduce someone else’s work has got to drain some of the magic out of the whole process, leaving a vacuum. Meanwhile, others make additions, edits, and eliminations that certain hardcore fans hate but that most people accept as necessary, like those made in the Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Harry Potter films (and while they aren’t SFF, I’d add most classic literature adaptations to this pile as well).
And what does it mean when we say that an adaptation is “better” than the original? Is it still an adaptation, or is it something separate and new? The NeverEnding Story comes to mind; better or worse is sort of thrown out the window when the film becomes so beloved by a certain generation that few realize it was based on a book at all. The book’s author, Michael Ende, hated the film version. And then there are cases of notoriously “bad” adaptations like Mary Poppins: Disney gutted P.L. Travers’ original work to create something entirely different, enraging and deeply wounding the author. Yet the film is beloved as a classic, and many fans have forgotten (or never knew) it was an adaptation at all. As in the Stephen King situation, you have to consider: as a viewer, does it matter? In so much that we will likely always be determined to judge an adaptation against its source (and authors will always be rightfully biased in favor of their work), yes, it does. But really, in a practical way? Probably not.
So, has this little comparative exercise taught me anything? Not in a direct way, no. But it did help me to pinpoint and articulate some nebulous ideas I have been toting around in my brain for a while. I think I’ve finally come to accept that expecting an adaptation to completely capture a book may be wishful thinking—even in the era of big-budget prestige television—and that sticking mindlessly to that expectation will cost you a lot of fun. I could have spent years just enjoying Practical Magic for what it was, instead of obsessing over what it wasn’t. (The same can’t be said for Queen of the Damned, which comes from another favorite book; that movie is still really terrible). But I think I’m finally in recovery from the adaptation-purist stage of my life—just in time to put it to the test with Good Omens and the completely off-book Game of Thrones finale around the corner!
What adaptations have you struggled to accept—or simply refuse to? Which ones do you love? And which ones are you looking forward to (or maybe dreading)?
Amber Troska is a freelance writer and editor. When she isn’t reading, you can find her re-watching Stranger Things again.
It’s a good question, but one I don’t have a great answer to! For example, I love the recent Lord of the Rings movies, but everybody has their various nitpick with them or thing that they can’t get past (wihch is subjective). For Harry Potter, there are a lot of debates over which movie did it best – in some ways, I appreciate the first movie’s adherence to the plot for worldbuilding purposes, but also think (for example) that Order of the Phoenix improved on the book in that it just seemed more enjoyable to watch. I also used to be a bit of a purist – and still will get upset if I feel that vital themes are being totally missed – but in the end I do think it’s best to let movies be movies and use the tools in that medium to tell the best story it can.
And sometimes it can be fun to watch something that brings something new to the table, like with various comic or fairy tale adaptations. But at other times, it can feel like the adaptation is barely that, and was just a chance to take advantage of the name-recognition.
I think you meant “For every Lord of the Rings… there’s a Lord of the Rings“.
Honestly, I can’t imagine what that sentence actually meant as I haven’t seen the latter two, and none of the Lord of The Rings movies have been particularly good, while Game of Thrones has been spectacular.
Ender’s Game is a good litmus test for this topic. Pretty good adaption overall but lacking some of the teeth of the original, largely because of the significant aging up of the main character and significant time compression of Ender’s development and training.
Another is American Gods which is generally following the book but includes many updates to reflect society since the source was authored (e.g., Technical Boy) and numerous side trips that go beyond and are intended to enhance the source material. I really like it (less so in the second season) but it is progressing at a SLOOOW pace that, I’m sure, is driving some fans crazy. .
The one I always think of is Jurassic Park: Lost World, both book and movie were enjoyable, but they only share 1 scene so they feel more like shared world stories than an adaptation. (As for the first movie, I felt a lot of the character changes were for the worse in the movie, the lawyer’s redemption in the book was more believable than Hammonds in the Movie)
I think the first question is “is the adapted work a good specimen of the new medium?” If the movie of the book is a bad movie then it’s not a good adaptation. If it’s good movie, then does it really matter if it’s a good adaptation? I guess that depends on viewer expectations. If you were really looking forward to the Scouring of the Shire, then I guess it does.
I have solidly moved well away from the purist side of things and try to appreciate an adaptation on its own merits. Take the relatively recent (last year) adaptation of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon by Netflix. I watched it and generally enjoyed the setting, characters, plot, and resolution. The book had been on my to-read list for some time but I’d never gotten around to it. A friend of mine, Dianna more of a purist on these things, thought that the adaptation was terrible and advised me to read the book because it was going to be so much better.
So I read the book. And I enjoyed the book as well. There are certainly some aspects that are modified, some characters that are amalgams of multiple characters together. Certain aspects are glossed over, others emphasized, some created out of whole cloth, but on the whole, I thought it was a fairly decent adaptation and you could see more than just the bones of the story in it. Again Dianna said that it is terrible and I should read the following novels because the Netflix series screws up the continuity of the whole story. I read those too and she has a point, though for me it wasn’t enough of a compelling reason to dismiss the visual serial and I came up with what I thought would be good compromises that would smooth over the inconsistencies and still retain the flavor of the story.
Clearly we are of two different minds on how well this adaptation worked. I think some of the purity aspect comes down to how invested one is in a work of art. The more a work becomes part of your own self, it’s sort of a foundational stone, and one is far more resistant to seeing variations on that work. The work becomes sacred in a way, and the adaptation or variation becomes a betrayal. For my own part I knew roughly that it was futurist SF and the general premise, but I watched and read the two in relatively short order and deconstructing it and analyzing it was no big deal.
It could be an age thing or distance issue as well. Dune is another novel with frequent stabs at adaptation and none of them have particularly felt right to me, and a good pure adaptation might be great, but I’m more and more open as time goes on to seeing interpretations of character, casting choices, and so forth that brings out interesting nuance to a character, or plot point, even if that wasn’t there in the original.
The Princess Bride is an interesting case, since William Goldman had success writing movie scripts before he wrote the original book, and then he also wrote the script for the movie. One of the remarkable things about it is that the book and movie are very different, despite having nearly all the plot points in common.
Neil Gaiman’s Stardust got a good movie adaptation. I remember enjoying the book, then finding out there was a movie some time later and enjoying that too.
The key might be low expectations. Lord of the Rings is so beloved, you’re bound to step on some toes with every tiny little change to the source material.
@3 I’m not sure how you can say Ender’s Game was in any way a good adaptation. spoilers for book/movie ahead.
It lacked the soul of the novel. The battle room was pretty, but if Ender doesn’t think he is playing a game, it kind of derails the entire story. They made an attempt at the mind game but if Ender doesn’t just give up and decide to fail his test, not knowing it isn’t a test and do the unthinkable, the entire premise for having children fight their war falls apart.
They used him up and destroyed him in the book because they saw it as necessary to win the war. But the movie just kind of plays with the idea of “let’s have children fight battles”. And having Bernard be part of his team at the end was bizarre. His relationships with the other children really didn’t have any weight and them being on a bugger world at the end made no sense at all because if they have light speed travel the way they fight the war makes no sense.
I don’t need word-for-word recreation in my adaptations (they usually don’t work across mediums like that anyway) but in this case it was like someone read the book jacket and tried to make a movie out of that.
@3 @9
Apologies if that came off a little ranty. I was just really disappointed in that movie.
I think the big problem a lot of adaptations have is that novelists aren’t screenwriters and screenwriters aren’t novelists. Two very different skillsets, two very different audiences
I am much more prone to forgive an adaptation that doesn’t follow the novel if the movie is good in and of itself. One of the reasons Jurassic Parks works so well is that even with all the changes (and there are a lot of them), a lot of the central themes from the novel still exist and the movie is just so well made.
For me, I would say a good adaptation is one that matches tone, theme, and main characters’ arcs with the source material. Plot beats matching is less required EXCEPT for those beats which directly affect one of these three area. And this is where I think a lot of adaptations fail – they strive for plot beat accuracy while missing the other points, or more subtly, misapply the plot beats that are needed for tone/theme/arc.
The big problem is how much to match and what constitutes a match because even then, I think you can have a good adaptation when fudging in a couple of spots.
Jurassic Park is a great example to me of how this can go right while even changing from my stated three requirements. The tone of both book and film feel the same – cautious awe followed with suspenseful action bordering on horror. The themes are a near lock – don’t play God with nature because you will screw it up and and suffer the consequences. But on character arc, the arc of John Hammond is COMPLETELY different. He’s not the same character at all. But, he’s really the only big change (at least that I can remember) in terms of arc changes. Both film and book work and I would still say the film was a good adaptation. So, I think you can fudge on one of the three, and not very far, if wanting a good adaptation.
How then to explain The Shining? I think @5 has is exactly right – this is just a good film, regardless of where it got its inspiration from. Does that make it a good adaptation though? I don’t think so.
Perhaps the best thing a producer/director can do to make a ‘good’ adaptation, apart from simply releasing a work that can succeed on its own merits, is to lampshade at least some of the notable deviations from the source material. It shouldn’t be done to the point of self-parody, but audiences are more likely to accept changes if they feel the creators are respecting—or at least acknowledging—their expectations.
Some of the friction with adaptations undoubtedly derives from creators who genuinely fail to recognize that a significant fraction of the audience won’t ‘get’ their particular interpretation of the source material. However, I wonder if more of the issue arises from the marketing side: fans of the original are likely to constitute the bulk of the target audience, which provides an incentive to downplay the inevitable changes and present each new adaptation as “the best one yet seen on screen!” to avoid losing any potential customers. It would be refreshing to start seeing campaigns for screen adaptations that embrace the changes that are inevitably part of the translation from one medium to another.
My enjoyment of the film Practical Magic was never marred by the book. I loved both equally as I do its more dour prequel, The Rules of Magic. However, I do hope Rules of Magic never gets a film adaptation. FYI: I have found Practical Magic on blu-ray disk paired with The Witches of Eastwick, a movie I definitely loved far more than John Updike’s rambling book.
In some cases, you HAVE to stick to the source material in order for the movie(s) to make sense. The Harry Potter movies were an abomination. If you just watched them, without ever reading the books, you would be thoroughly confused. The choices that were made were just mind boggling. From not bothering to explain the Marauders (a key book element) to the gender-segregated magic schools of Durmstrang and Beaubaxtons, complete with women with boob hats and guys with big sticks they liked to bang on the ground, real tough like.
I too was a source-material purist for most of my formative years, but mostly only when I encountered the source material first.
I read Annihilation a couple years before the movie came out, yet I thought the movie was also excellent. Their differences are along the same lines as Practical Magic. The book is very cerebral, while the movie is more external and plot-driven.
Jaws is quite a bit different from the book — and stronger for it. Because if it was like the book, it would’ve been close to three hours long and played like a soap opera with subplots about unhappy marriages, infidelity, loads of ennui, and the mayor being involved with the Mob or some such. Gah! Just back to the shark!
Austin@14
The Harry Potter films were one of the rare adaptations that did not really NEED to attract an audience beyond readers of the books. This likely affected how the directors approached the films.
For me, a good adaptation is one that adds to the experience and changes it while still remaining faithful. It sort of “slides” in as a supplement. True Blood (the early seasons, at least) and The Hunger Games are both good examples of this. True Blood gives us so many different perspectives compared to the book that it’s a useful companion, and the book still stands on its own in a unique way because it truly gives the reader Sookie’s interior world. The Hunger Games is the “other perspective” in a really interesting way; the audience gets to experience how the viewers in the Capitol experience the story — I genuinely think that one must experience both the novels and the movies in order to really get it.
Game of Thrones, by contrast, feels like a waste of time to me. The books already provide strong visuals and multiple perspectives, and I’m not interested in watching multiple seasons of a story I already know. In that sense, I prefer adaptations that substantially change elements (e.g. The Dresden Files TV show) to absolutely-faithful renditions, because then at least I get a new experience; I treat it like fanfic. Some fanfic is good, some fanfic is bad, but I don’t dislike it merely because it’s “AU.”
There’s a certain irony in the specific case here, because the linked “Chilling Adventures” comics are themselves adapted — and sharply different in tone — from the original version of the Sabrina character first appearing in Archie Comics continuity in the 1960s as Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The earlier Melissa Joan Hart TV series is adapted from that material, and its success is arguably a major reason that the entire Archie franchise has retained its popularity into the 21st century.
Moving along, though….
Animation has generated a number of interesting examples over time, with two of the most prominent and interesting cases perhaps being The Secret of NIMH (from the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H.) and Disney’s version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Don Bluth animated NIMH is an extremely free adaptation of the book, with a different narrative focus and elements of magic, and yet is generally regarded as an excellent and even ground-breaking movie on its own merits.
The Disney Notre Dame is a more complicated case — there’s a lot of variance from the book’s plot (not surprising given the novel’s doorstop size and the Disney audience), the overall tone is somewhat inconsistent, ranging from broadly comic (the gargoyles) to poignant (much of Esmeralda’s arc, particularly the song “God Help the Outcasts”), to startlingly dark (Frollo!), and yet the music is possibly the most ambitious and brilliant of any Disney animated feature ever. I liked the film for what it was, but it came in for a lot of criticism when it was released. More recently, the Disney organization oversaw a further adaptation of Hunchback into stage musical form, with that production a bit more rooted in the novel and more consistent in tone. [The stage version has not made it to Broadway as yet, but there is a very worthwhile cast album available.]
Shifting gears a bit: among the least successful book-to-movie adaptations of all time, it’s hard to find examples to rank below The Seeker. You don’t remember The Seeker? That was the 2007 movie which began its life as an adaptation of Susan Cooper’s classic novel The Dark Is Rising, but ended up veering so far off the path of the original book that its distributors removed all references to the book’s title from the US marketing campaign halfway through production. Neither Cooper nor the books’ fans were remotely happy with the film, for good reason — it wasn’t much good as either an adaptation or a Disney-esque fantasy adventure, Ian McShane’s best efforts as Merriman Lyon notwithstanding.
On a cheerier note, book-to-film is not the only path the adaptation game can take. Consider, for instance, the career of master thief Carmen Sandiego — from a series of educational computer games (!) to a live-action PBS game show (Rockapella theme song for the win!) to a surprisingly well-scripted ’90s animated TV series (with none other than Rita Moreno as the voice of Carmen!) to a brand-new streaming series that’s getting enough positive buzz to make me seriously consider a Netflix subscription.
I’m going to go ahead and suggest that simple appropriateness of the source material for the medium is key. Its not the only thing, but its kinda like how breathable air is needed form humans to survive. Without it all the other challenges are secondary.
I’ll give you two examples to demonstrate:
Hunger Games: Short, faced paced action novel for teenagers = appropriate for a short, faced paced film for teenagers.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin: Long dramatic novel told over decades which uses musings on medicine, music and love to makes its points. What “visual” elements are in the novel are genuinely depressing (Nazi’s committing atrocities, soldiers feet being frozen off, attempted rape) rather than visually arresting. Was not a good film and its hard to see how the source material would ever work for a film (TV series – possibly).
On my list of best adaptations: The House with a Clock in Its Walls
On my list of worst adaptations: The Seeker
I’m curious to see how Netflix will handle the Witcher series.
That is an odd example, in which the original books were already adapted into a popular video game series. The author has stated several times how much he hated the games, even going so far to sue the developers. And after his deal with Netflix it seems he’ll have a bigger control of the end product.
It’s going to be an interesting dilemma. Do they please the author and risk alienating part of the fanbase, or just ignore him to captivate the gamers? Either way, I’ll be watching
In my book, the main factor over whether I find an adaptation successful or not is whether I am emotionally attached to the adapted property.
Emotional attachment is a very valid point here. I know very little about a lot of the Marvel properties, often all that I absorb from wikias or passing references on line. So my view on Professor X is that he’s a very good guy and when I see something (say if Legion does address this) that implies otherwise, that’s where I begin to take offense. Conversely, I know more about Elizabeth II (albeit none of the crown is an actual adaptation of one source material) and far less about Victoria (ditto re it’s sources and how it “adapts” them) but I probably have more qualms about how Victoria is writing due to some of the licenses they made in that series but more about the way the characters are acting (I’m also more attached to the second piece of media). My criticisms of Sabrina are more with an attachment to the volubility of Salem from the original comics and the original TV show than anything else. Something like Riverdale just reeks of being someone’s fanfic where they just took some names, settings and a few other elements but built a world on tropes and then pushed it out through a word processor. THAT’s where I have a problem with something that’s an adaptation and it has little to do with any attachment, emotional or otherwise, to the source material (which I certainly don’t feel towards Archie) than to the fact it’s not particularly enjoyable, at least to my eyes.
It does seem to depend on which version you encounter first. For example my first exposure to ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, ‘The Shining’ & ‘AngelHeart’ was in the cinema, and I’d regard all three films as superior to the books. In fairness, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’ – the book – is essentially a work of literary fiction. It sounds a lot like ‘Practical Magic’, in the sense that it is not explicitly magical and magic is not a core theme. The film lacks the book’s subtlety, but this is no bad thing. ‘The Shining’ (again, the book) has, like, scary topiary? People talk about the film and the book being two very different beasts, but I actually think the film sticks pretty closely to the book’s themes. I used to cite Nicholson’s one note performance as the film’s principal failing (although the same could be said of Shelly Duvall) but I didn’t find the character in the book particularly nuanced either, and I reckon Kubrick pretty much nails the Overlook Hotel. And what about that maze? Pretty cool, huh?
Mickey Rourke gives ‘AngelHeart’ an emotional centre that the book lacks (although the film sticks pretty closely to the book in every other respect, bar setting the second half in New Orleans) – ie, the mc in the book is way too philosophical about discovering his true nature.
One last example. LOTR. I think Jackson’s New Zealand background gave him a unique perspective on the books and he brought something to the project that was absent from the books themselves. The first film in particular is great.
There is some evidence, I believe, that this is a bit of an urban myth. Travers loathed the songs and the animated sequence but was happy enough with the film to lobby Disney for a sequel.
A ‘true to the source’ adaptation would have killed the James Bond franchise stone dead as the literary character is (intentionally) humourless and cold. It was the decision to give him a sense of humour that, imho, made the films flourish and it’s noticable that Bondmania really took over with Goldfinger which is, essentially, a black comedy.
For myself, I think that once an author/creator sells the rights to someone else, they pretty much lose any say in what happens to their material. The British crime writer, Reginald Hill, was so appalled by the first TV adaptation of his Dalziell & Pascoe detective stories that he bought back the rights and only subsequently sold them with the legal proviso that he would, essentially, be the script editor.
I rather like it when an adaptation plays around with the source material. The film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (one of my favourite novels) varies strongly in pacing and style from the book and I loved it. I now have two where I had one – the novel and the film. The film Starship Troopers is an entertaining critique and affectionate send-up of the original novel done by a director who as a child in occupied Holland had seen a military dictatorship up close and personal.
@9, 10. No problem. I share your view that Ender’s Game was flawed. But it had strong acting performances from the aged up kids and the high quality adult team, and the plot was competently handled, even if lacking some elements I wanted to see.
This topic drives me nuts, because I find myself in the middle and each side seems ridiculous. Here are some examples:
– On the loose adaptations are fine side, I watched The Dark Tower movie with my wife. She is a huge King fan and had already read the entire Dark Tower series before she convinced me I needed to read it. After watching the movie, I was appalled, and she was delighted. I asked her “That had absolutely nothing to do with the books at all! Why not just make a new story instead of calling it The Dark Tower?” Her response was “What do you mean it wasn’t like the books? It had a gunslinger. It had a Jake.” Really? It had A JAKE!? That’s literally all it took for the movie to be a good enough adaptation for her.
– On the other side are people on this very site discussing the Wheel of Time series. Comments like ‘Rand has to be really tall and have red hair’ are completely unnecessary. Nothing plot wise would be sacrificed by eliminating that piece of lore. Oh but Aiel are tall with red hair? Well just remove that piece too. The story isn’t about what an Aiel looks like, it’s about the Dragon and Aes Sedai and the Dark One escaping his prison and all the people fighting against him. Appearance is the easiest thing to change.
– In the middle are people like me, who just want the show to be as faithful as possible. The only reason I get excited about a book becoming a movie or tv show is that I want to see the book acted out on screen. If it’s not going to be recognizable to the book, then why should I even be interested? It’s the book I’m a fan of, not someone else’s re-imagining of a book. Game of Thrones is a good example of being close to the mark, but not close enough for me. Not that I dislike the show. But from an adaptation stand point, it follows very close in many ways, which is good. But some of the changes I just don’t understand why they were made. Does it lessen the show? No. It’s fine. But why change it if it worked fine in the book? On the other side of the middle was the show Legend of the Seeker, loosely based off Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. It was kinda-sorta following the books. The characters were there, the very broad overall plot was there, and a few key scenes were there. And yet enough of the tone and pacing and themes and many side characters and important book moments were missing that it fell closer to being unrecognizable to the books. Again, why? That show failed, so I have to think if they had put something together that closer resembled the books, it couldn’t have done much worse.
I’ve read books where it feels like I’m reading a movie. I can picture the scenes in my head and the character dialogue is real enough that it sounds like it could be their script. Why can’t someone shoot that? Everyone always talks about the medium being different so you have to change things, and yet changing it is ALMOST ALWAYS for the worse! In the world of seemingly infinite Netflix production, somebody take a risk. Adapt a book as close to the source material as reasonably possible. It doesn’t have to fit into neat little 8 45 minute episodes anymore. You can have a 30 minute episode followed by an hour and a half one. One episode can be funny and the next one dark. We viewers will survive! Obviously we enjoyed the books that paced themselves that way.
asaptations by definition are different and must be to match the different media. For example we wanted the Potter movies to keep the complex plots, world building, and character development of the books; Crimes of Grindlewald showed us why that doesn’t work in a film.
As a Tolkienoid, I don’t like the movies much. I deal with this by convincing myself that it’s a different story about different people who just happen to have familiar names…
@@@@@ 26 Starship Troopers is, IMO, an adaptation that did what most fans actually are afraid of: ruining the source material. The source material is the same as it has been for decades, but in the popular opinion Starship Troopers is about the movies and its sequels, so it has ruined the source material for the population at large. The story that was told in the novel is known to very few and it’s very unlikely that someone would try to adapt the novel more faithfully. So if one wanted to see a story about super soldiers that use nukes as ammo and about a boy growing to love the service in the military they can’t find it now, because people think Starship Troopers is basically WW1 (grindmeat battles in which infantry is useless and killed by droves), but with bugs.
@@@@@ 8
For me the Stardust movie is a perfect example of losing what made the source material special. Its like someone took the book and said “How can we make this as generic as possible?”. So, Victoria becomes a generic mean girl with a generic jock boyfriend. There is a generic big action scene at the end. There is a generic happy ending.
For me the worse possible adaptation was Starship Troopers. It took a short juvenile novel about taking responsibility and doing your duty, and turned it into some sort of neo-Nazi fanfic. To me, it seemed like someone had only read some cliff notes version of the plot, churned it through some internal anti-Nazi filter, and then wrote the script.
I had loved the book, and was so thrilled it was a movie, I took my wife on our anniversary to see it. She then spent the rest of the weekend trying to console me! It missed on some many points, it would take another article longer than this one just to list them all…
My favorite movie adaptation of a book is “Murder My Sweet,” based on “Farewell My Lovely.” Dick Powell is in many ways my favorite Philip Marlowe and Mike Mazurki is marvelous as Moose Malloy. “The Thing,” which barely qualifies for “inspired by” trashes H. P. Lovecraft. The only plus is Jim Arness as the monster. I enjoyed the LOTR movies except for the Rankin Bass cartoons. The “Game of Thrones” TV series is probably better than the books, which are tiresome hack historical novels with added magic. The TV isn’t much better but has good visuals. Likewise, it would be virtually impossible to make a good movie out of “Ender’s Game,” a cliche ridden adolescent wish fulfillment fantasy. I’m still waiting for the movie of “Slan.” “2001” is an odd case because it expanded the Arthur C. Clarke short story hugely. I’m a serious “Expanse” fan and I enjoyed “Altered Carbon” too. “The Magicians” is different from the books in tone and has to have an open ended plot to keep the series going. I like the cast a lot.
I can’t get past the first paragraph, which seems to indicate that The Lord of the Rings was a GOOD adaptation?
Really?
Right, then, that kind of invalidates all other opinions in this article for me.
I feel like adaptations can be too faithful. Zach Snyder’s Watchmen was so faithful that entire shots might as well have been lifted from the graphic novel. Now Alan Moore hated it because Alan Moore is the KING of Adaptation Purists to the point of denying the possibility of a quality adaptation per se. Having said that, and conceding that Zach Snyder appears to have had his soul sucked out leaving a shambling man-shaped spiritual void wandering the earth, I suggest that the movie doesn’t work as a movie precisely because it wasn’t sufficiently altered.
Two things Jackson gets dinged for (Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire) had to be gotten rid of in a film version of LotR…the former because it would DESTROY the pacing and building tension of the hobbits journey from the Shire to Bree with a ridiculous brightly colored episode of Morris dancing, the latter because while an extended second climax can work in a novel, he already took heat for the 20 minute denouement…imagine the ire another hour of hobbits recapitulating the themes of the main story would have created.
I’m not middle of the road…what I want in an adaptation is the story and its main themes brought to a new medium and altered so that the story retains the themes of the original work and possesses merit in the new format. If you do that, I don’t CARE what liberties you took with a favorite character or story element. I feel like that’s what any “purist” ought to be looking for.
A feature-length film is too short a medium to closely adapt any book. An adaptation has to decide what it wants to bring forward from the book, and sometimes that means the tone or message changes. I’m totally cool with that.
But can we please stop allowing people to say that an adaptation “ruined” a book? No. No it did not. The book still exists.
@35 Ah, but while Snyder may have been faithful in many ways visually (excepting of course the movie being BYO Squid) in other visual ways he subverts it pretty deeply, and it’s those few bits that really ruin the adaptation. One of the core bits of Moore’s Watchmen is that the underwear perverts are majorly effed up people. But Synder just thinks they’re COOL, MAN. Laurie gets de-aged and when she and Dan fight off some muggers in an alleyway they’re powerful and spry, they don’t end the fight bent over and wheezing for breath. When they have sex in the Owlmobile, complete with flamethrower queue for orgasm, it’s not a pathetic indication that they can only ‘perform’ after going out and super-heroing. It’s two good looking people celebrating, substituting the attractive topless young women for the sight of Dan’s flabby body still wearing the cowl of his costume.
I was okay with the idea of a Watchmen that had to change to suit its medium. Pirate comic metaphor was never going to be filmable. I would maybe be okay with a Watchmen that followed a different theme, provided it had one. I could not stomach one that seemed to take the exact opposite message from the work.
Watchmen was harder to take than World War Z because of that. They just hollowed out the shell of that book and shoved something else in its skinsuit, so other than the lost opportunity (my kingdom for a miniseries or series that follows the episodic and hopeful trajectory of the book) it didn’t offend me.
I thought the Battle Angel Alita adaption was well done. They hit all of the major story beats from the manga and added some nice visual effects without changing too much.
The one major difference I saw was the manga had glimpses of side characters and how desperately they wanted to reach the city in the sky, the movie just focused on one or two characters trying to get into the city in the sky.
The live action Ruruoni Kenshin trilogy did a pretty good job of adaptation, I think. And strangers coming to it could follow anyway. The RK fan in the house – the kid – at first fussed over the loss of a major subplot in the Shishio arc (movies 2 & 3), but thought about it and realized the it wouldn’t have worked storytelling-wise for a movie, and what they did instead functioned well. So..
on the following slavishly.. the kid could see sword stances and moves from the manga in what the actors did. And it generally got the s sense/theme/feel of what’s important in the manga.
Where I don’t like Jackson’s LoTR is where he failed to understand the characters. But it looks fabulous.
No one has mentioned the Wizard of Oz, which massively changes the book, but for the better, IMHO, as the book rather wanders.
@33 Joel,
“The Thing” was not an adaptation of Lovecraft; it was an adaptation of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”
Having said that it was still a crummy adaptation.
@@@@@ 39
Rurouni Kenshin has an interesting story of adaptations.
The first season of the anime was awful. Too much filler and the story arcs taken from the manga were awfully done.
The second season of the anime adapted verbatim the Kyoto arc. Really, I struggle to find something more faithful than that in anime or any other media. And it was marvelous. Probably some of the best 30 episodes of anime I ever saw. To this day I think only anime works to adapt some fiction because the only time I saw it done completely faithfully was this time.
Let’s ignore the third season, because there was no adaptation going on, only filler (and bad filler at that).
The first OVA anime had a completely different tone and drawing style from the TV series, but was also very good. It shows that an adaptation doesn’t have to be the done only one way to be good.
The second OVA anime was not good.
And then there’s the live action. The live action truly told an alternate history of the story told in the manga and anime. Some things were simplified in the first movie and then they had consequences in the other two movies, leading to different sets of events. Sanosuke, for example, is never established as a former terrorist in the movies, so he doesn’t have bombs with him when the main characters face Shishio’s plan A (the warship meant to cause a revolution / coup d’etat). So Shishio succeeds with his plan A, instead of being forced to do plan B (force the main characters to face his Juppon Gatana and himself in duels). I liked seeing an alternate version of the story in the movies.
@26 re: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy—
You have three: if you haven’t seen the phenomenally good BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness, you absolutely need to order the DVD or Bluray. So, so, so good.
They skipped The Honourable Schoolboy and went right to Smiley’s People for a sequel miniseries, which I have not seen and keep meaning to.
(O’course, if you’ve seen the BBC version, carry on, carry on…. :D )
@36 Yes the original thing still exists, but the way a person feels about it due to any adapting will have changed. It can be fairly said that a bad adaptation (or bad addition to an ongoing franchise) has ruined how a person feels about the original. To them, it has been ruined. Don’t dismiss other people’s feelings so flippantly.
@32 The film of Starship Troopers was a parody. It seems the disappointment was intentional – Verhoeven was trying to mock the original as basically fascist propoganda. it just wasn’t marketed that way (nor where the actors told they were in a parody).
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-Riefenstahl
@42
Actually, I seem to be the only person in the known universe that doesn’t like that adaptation. I saw it on first transmission and then watched it again about 10 years ago as people kept saying it was so good and I wondered if I had been too young (about 15/16) at the time. I just didn’t enjoy it. But please don’t let me put anyone off trying it as I am in a definite minority on this one.
Oh, and I’m perfectly sound on other things – Sean Connery is the best Bond, the b/w Emma Peel episodes of the The Avengers are the height of the series and so on.
One of my favorite adaptations is L.A. Confidential, which varies hugely from the book, but which succeeded at keeping some core structural elements (the three cops; Dudley Smith; the Night Owl massacre) and building a much more streamlined story around them.
I think John Carter (2012) is an interesting case because it feels like a perfectly entertaining movie that does a really poor job of adapting Burroughs’ original stories.
@Dr. Thanatos You’re right of course. Aging brain. I’ve read the story several times.
Bad adaptations, much like making a movie,then it’s successor…and so on, only keep the story alive because it’s aimed at males 18-29 who like violent video games or bad “boy humor”.
The only way we can stop a director from making mincemeat out of a book is to either have them focus on the whole story, or have the author re-write the parameters. Robert Redford changed the whole ending of The Horse Whisperer because he bought the rights as a whole so he could. We’ve seen it with others:How to Make an American Quilt, Shoeless Joe(Field of Dreams) Bridges of Madison County, The Wit And Wisdom of Forrest Gump (Forrest Gump)…to name a few.
One of my favorite authors is Anne Rice. Where I loved Interview with a Vampire, I hate the movie. I fell asleep at the first Harry Potter movie, and never went/watched another. I hate Stephen King’s horror books, but Stand by Me and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (Shawshank Redemption)were great novellas that were made into great movies.
As for Tolkien, books outweigh movies. Same with anything of CS Lewis.The movie Casablanca is far better than the play it’s based on. Gone with the Wind is a great movie and book. I saw The Grapes of Wrath movie long before I was assigned it in College. Now, at 62 I get it better than 32.
I have a love~hate relationship with Citizen Kane and the Third Man. I remember Orson Wells, who was still with us when I was young, saying he’d buy books outright and change them, add to them, subtract from them anyway he wanted to simply because he owned them outright. I asked a contemporary romance novelist about how good or bad she thought that the network who bought her book series and then changed two characters to better suit “their vision”. She said it had taken a while before she liked the changes, and, the network has added her to the writers as well.
It’s plain and simple: don’t like the book? Return it. Don’t like the TV or movie adaptation. Don’t go see it or turn it off; let the networks know why.
Wouldn’t it be boring if we all saw the same thing in the same way?
I can think of 2 films which were quite different from books which were favourites of mine, but I still enjoyed. One was Howl’s Moving Castle – Miyazaki’s version is different in many ways to the book but still a fantastic film. The other is A Wrinkle in Time. The film was very different to the book but in some ways highlighted some of the issues with the original book. Being able to enjoy both is a very fortunate thing. What I want from a film is not a totally faithful adaptation, but a new perspective, new ideas to chew on. Otherwise, what’s the point?
@26:
This is why the TV “The Expanse” is so good: the book authors are deeply involved as both writers and producers. There are changes that I personally wish were different, but I can never fault them because they are true to the spirit of the story, and it doesn’t matter about being true to the letter.
@46: You’re so right about L.A. Confidential!
An adaptation that (in my opinion, isn’t it sad that adults need this to be made explicit or they childishly feel they’re being dictated to) exceeds its source material is The Man in the High Castle. The book’s tone, a weird incantatory fever-dream, always left me a little cold as it seemed to increase the unbelievable premise’s distance from plausible reality. The show is visually lovely and uses that loveliness in place of the linguistic gymnastics of the book, and to a more appealing and involving effect. In my opinion, lest some humorless drudge swoop down and chastise me for daring to be opinionated.
I thought the movie version of Andromeda Strain was better. I’d read the book before seeing the movie and thought the movie was just a little tighter. They rolled two characters together and got rid of the one whose only purpose was to have an epileptic fit.
Sometimes “poor” adaptations make better films; for example, arguably, Blade Runner was better for not following Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? too closely.*
Now, I’ll just have to watch Les Misérables with a copy of the book to see how many liberties it takes. Certainly fewer than Disney did with Hunchback of Notre Dame.
* I also liked Ubik more than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and ADoES more than The Man in the High Castle.
The one comes to mind is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and the first film released in 1963, which followed the book pretty well and was a good, scary film. The 90s remake is considered horrible (including by me) by many-going off track from the book which proved to be a mistake with the film and relying on special effects. And yet, I enjoyed the Netflix adaptation as a TV series of the novel. It went in another direction and yet, many parts of the book were in there. It was well done. Now, season 2 will take the ghost story, Turn of the Screw by Henry James, which has many of us not sure it will work, not being a whole novel to fill many episodes. We shall see.
I’m guessing you’ve seen ‘The Innocents’, Pamela? If not, you should definitely check it out.
Of course, there is a near-perfect way to do an adaptation, which is writing the novel and the screenplay concurrently. I’m talking about the elephant in the room here, namely: 2001: A Space Odyssey. And in that particular case I prefer the movie above the novel.
Last year, I saw Zama directed by Lucrecia Martel (based on the novel written by Antonio de Benedetto, released in 2017 but only in Dutch cinemas in 2018) and that is a case where I think both the original novel (from 1956) and the movie are both superb. The movie mostly follows the novel, but emphasises the theme of the novel in a cinematical way; that is to say, the movie uses its particular visual strengths while remaining true to the original novel’s intentions.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen Annihilation yet (no cinematic release in The Netherlands, and I really prefer to see movies on a BIG screen), while the impression I get from several reviews is that–while it’s fairly true to Jeff VanderMeer’s novel (which I read)–it’s also its own thing, not unlike Zama. And there are surprising parellels between Zama and Annihilation, which adds to my interest.
Actually, if both movie and novel are not written simultaneously, then I strongly suspect a truly faithful movie adaptation is impossible, as both media have their own, unique strengths. Hence, while the movie adaptation may not be fiercely faithful to the source material, it nevertheless forms a strong companion to it. For example: Story of Your Life/Arrival and The Prestige.
Finally, there are novels (and novelists) so idiosyncratic that every attempt to adapt them never really truly works: I’m talking about Philip K. Dick, possibly the SF author with the most adaptations (almost all of them posthumously).
And then there are the novels that are impossible to adapt to a movie like Greg Egan’s Diaspora, Charlie Stross’s Accelerando or Peter Watts’s Blindsight. Or are they?