Maybe people have forgotten about this, but Neil Gaiman’s Stardust was the worst adaptation I have ever seen. I watched Power Rangers (2017) and the Assassin’s Creed movie each three times, but neither hurt me as bad as Stardust, and I will die on this hill.
It started out fine, but writing fell off a cliff for seasons 2 and 3. They decided to go for shock factor and edginess instead of keeping true to what people have loved about Castlevania for decades: a silly adventure of a cool hero fighting classic monsters.
One moment that sticks as being particularly bad is Trevor vs Death. In the games, Death is cavalier and succint. For the animated series, they have him constantly shouting profanities.
Yhea the witcher was a disaster even though they had a really good cast imo. There’s basically only one company I “trust” to make a good adaptation and that’s HBO.
the new dune gave me hope for the future. maybe it carries over to other films and series. maybe the success of an adaptation that tries to stay true to the vision of the source material will send a message. yes, i also dont believe myself
I know Netflix adaptations are a meme at this point but they’ve been killing it lately. Just off the top of my head I can tell you Sandman, One Piece, The Last Airbender, Three Body Problem and Scott Pilgrim were all pretty respectful and well-made adaptations.
The Last Airbender was more of a quick and dirty cash grab that they sucked all the heart and soul out of with an outright disdain for the characters and message of the source material. But at least the effects were decent.
Oh yeah it was heinous. They surgically removed every character flaw and scrap of growth from every single main character. Instead of Katara becoming a master waterbender through sheer determination and force of will convincing Pakki to train her, she just becomes a master water bender off screen with no real training. Sokka’s ego and fragile masculinity was removed so he’s just competent, respectable goofball from the outset with no growing to do whatsoever. Aang isn’t a fun loving kid struggling to grapple with the weight of becoming the avatar and dealing with the guilt of running away from his responsibilities. Instead he just gets right with the program and has zero internal conflict because in the Netflix show they made it so he didn’t run away from home, he only got caught in the storm by a stroke of bad luck while out of a leisure flight to clear his head. Suki isn’t an intelligent and skilled warrior who organically bonds with Sokka after his growth from backwater jerkoff to humble and honest man, she just sees the guy naked and goes google eyes over him because he’s hot. Zuko isn’t banished for refusing to fight his father, he’s just banished for fighting and losing.
There’s a more in depth video on this on YouTube that Drew Gooden made where he makes the excellent point that Netflix removed every internal conflict and character flaw of each character and turned them all into perfect Mary Sues with no growing to do or conflict to resolve. They’re just one dimensional stand-ins for the original characters. Theres a reason the shows creators no longer wanted to be associated with the adaptation. All Netflix wanted the IP for was the fight scenes. Which are admittedly pretty rad in the Netflix show. But they weren’t interested in the characters of the show or what the show was trying to say.
That’s the Scott Pilgrim adaptation where Scott is only really in it at the beginning and end, the big bad is future Scott’s toxic masculinity, the evil exes are mostly pretty cool about things and present and future Ramona fuse into a goddess at one point, or am I thinking of a different one? I wouldn’t exactly call it an adaptation so much as an entirely different work in the same universe.
I have a conspiracy that it’s part of a psy-op to make individuals feel like they somehow hold stake in the corporation, so they’re more likely to support corporate decisions.
I’d say these are web startup terms. When you’ve got a team that looks like:
angel with a bunch of tech startups under his belt
ceo / biz dev / marketing guy
ceo’s roommate who’s doing sales, biz dev, media schmoozing
web developer
genius functional language purist who does server admin too
Those meetings are gonna have “content creators” connected with lines to Articles to Feeds to Subscriptions and then a line to “content consumers” all in little boxes up on the whiteboard.
“Content creator” is a term for a fungible model of a person whose role in your machine is to fill the content tank so the subscriptions engine can run. How many content creators by Q2 of this year.
I know this is about video games but… When Netflix made Deathnote it’s like they went out of their way to piss off the fans. Actively spitting on the source material.
He was killer as the voice… But the fact that they made ryuk a straight up villain as opposed to the impartial observer that he always was was just another level of rage.
I have simply stopped acknowledging that there is any link between adaptations and their “source” materials. It has made things so much easier to enjoy. Netflix Cowboy Bebop has no connection to the original inside my head; they just happen to have the same name. Now, I can simply enjoy (or not) the adaptation for it’s sake. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever my preconceived notions are.
Calling it something else is the cheat code to avoiding most stupid criticism.
You wanna set Akira in Baltimore? That sounds awesome. Delinquent kids tooling around on dirtbikes through overgrown abandoned offices, even less organized than bosuzoku. US military factions and three-letter agencies grappling with one another, while offscreen, the states descend into regional powers. An American lens on transformative power biting us in the ass.
Just call it literally anything but Akira. Otherwise it will never be judged on its own merits.
Borderlands is about to get a movie. The trailer looks awesome, the cast is made of respectable actors, the characters seem to be as diverse and chaotic as in the source, and everything just seems sooo good.
Except, while we see many previous characters, there only appear to be one (two?) characters that actually resemble their source counterpart in both look and feel, and they don’t even appear to be in the main cast.
Still gonna watch the movie in theaters though. I’m sure it’s gonna be a blast, especially for those who don’t know the games. And who knows, perhaps they manage to fix some characters, or they might not be as bad as in the trailers and hype material make them appear.
The fact they cast Kevin Hart for Roland, who was the straight-man in the games, is what really seems off. It should have been The Rock or Idris Elba.
Jack Black as Claptrap makes sense, but it’s one of the ones I’ve heard more people say doesn’t. He’s perfect in every way except the sound of his voice. 🤷🏻♂️
Jack Black’s personality and mannerisms are perfect for Claptrap, that voice is near impossible for humans to do unassisted and they can definitely due some doctoring to his voice to make it more robotic without ruining things
Sometimes it works well. I really enjoyed the movie ‘Nimona’ and found it fascinating as an adaptation because it feels like it captures the “spirit” of the original comic, despite making significant changes to the actual text (which I think were necessary to make the story work in this format)
The only Uwe Boll video game adaptation that was actually good was Postal. Especially the scene where Uwe Boll plays himself as both a Nazi and a pedophile.
Adaptations are usually cash grabs because Hollywood is allergic to taking any risk or making anything that isn’t middle of the road, bland, mass appeal bollocks
“Lets take this unique ip, remove the unique bits and just have it be the same as every other shite movie we make”
They only want the name value and a guaranteed audience, sick of it. Make something new FFS.
Maybe I’ll get shit for this, but I really hate the whole “remake a movie but make the character black” purely because it’s lazy and makes it so you’re giving a black character a white story.
Take some fucking risk and make original black characters that actually represent real people and their heritage, rather than just wanting to remake a movie but mark off the black character checkbox. It’s a disservice.
Maybe I’ll get shit for this, but I really hate the whole “remake a movie but make the character black” purely because it’s lazy and makes it so you’re giving a black character a white story.
I’m white af so I tend not to comment on stuff like this but I agree. It always makes me think, like wouldn’t it be more productive to make a new character?
No, because that’s risky, and lazy race/gender swaps allow them to play the “It’s not a bad product, you’re just racist/sexist” to both gaslight consumers, as well as explain to investors why they keep having massive critical and/or financial flops.
“It’s not our fault (Large Studio Remake of a classic IP) lost millions of dollars, we made a great movie! It’s the consumer base being bigoted! Please keep giving us money.”
Isn’t Marvel (or was it DC?) known for having it out for gingerheads? If character has ginger hair and white skin, there’s mighty chance they’ll switch to black actor in movie lol.
I was thinking this. I don’t think other cultures even want media where it’s an existing story but the races are swapped. They want original stories that connect to who they are and their experiences.
One of the best recent examples I can think of is Everything Everywhere All At Once. That movie was steeped in Chinese culture, not just a story in new york in a bland city block apartment with Chinese faces.
And it worked. The Chinese heritage and how it evolved into the American-Chinese hybrid that many first-generation Chinese families in the US live through was a central theme of the movie. The movie would not have been the same without it.
And writing a proper and engaging story is not needed because the white-to-black change covered with a thick layer of CGI is good enough to justify the existence of the movie. A two week rush job to knock out a script should do it
If you think “not specifically a black story” is what makes anything “a white story,” you will be getting shit because that’s just bigotry.
The role of ethnicity in most caucasian-cast roles is surely negligible, since casting them is the default, and most stories are not about that because it is the background radiation of American culture. Even the best example of a new alternate character, Miles Morales, parallels a dude who grows up lower-class in NYC. Suffice it to say there’s people like that who don’t look like Pete.
Like, when Netflix adapts Death Note, there’s no specific reason to say Light should’ve been black… because the source material is Japanese. It takes place in Japan, all the characters are Japanese, and it is very directly about Japanese mythology, so setting it in Seattle immediately means they can do whatever they want.
When they adapted Cowboy Bebop and actually made Jet Black black, there was no specific reason (name aside)… because he’s from fucking Ganymede. The only character who’s from Earth is Faye, who’s from Singapore, which no longer exists. Does it matter that they cast a Hispanic woman? Who exactly is done a disservice, by that change?
Not every black actor playing a black character has to be “a black character.” They’re just people. Relax.
Ya at this point, I’m too hurt. I dont acknowledge the existence of live adaptations until the reviews come out. Have seen Netflix One Piece and HBO TLOU. Still have not seen Netflix Bebop or the Avatar Netflix / shamalonanon movie.
I’ll be honest with you, the first episode of Netflix Bebop did actually feel like a Cowboy Bebop episode, I thought it was actually quite good. Then it… kinda went downhill, as I recall.
I mean I thought it was a pretty great adaptation, that being the keyword. An interpretation of the original. I mostly really enjoyed the cast, they definitely seemed into their characters. Shame we only got that season, I feel like it had a lot of room to grow from.
One of my dirtiest secrets is that I saw the Shamalang Airbender movie before I watched (or even somehow was very familiar with) the animated series…
And I thought it was fine! I didn’t hate it!
Now, ATLA is in my top 5 favorite shows of all time and I’ve watched it like a half dozen times. Pretty sure if I went back and watched the film I’d hate it.
But still, I wonder if it really wasn’t THAT bad if we weren’t expecting it to be just like the show.
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… An entire season of the Master Chief without his armor, having lengthy conversations and getting emotional about things he can’t control. But he gets to wear his armor for the last episode.
I refuse to watch that show, I was planning on bing in it once it was done but as soon as I heard about the absolute disregard for the IP I stopped caring and every time I see it mentioned it somehow gets worse over there.
All they needed to do is space John Wick with just 20% more high level plot
I read some of the books back in the day, there is definitely room to do a space opera, war focused scifi show without twisting the halo universe away from the games… I have zero interest in watching it though because halo 1-3 were one of my most beloved childhood franchises, I know they could have found writers and directors who love halo as much as I do and would have updated and fleshed it out in a way that felt true to the games. As it is, it just feels like the show’s target audience is people who don’t really have any connection to halo which seems like a pretty dumb idea.
I got star trek on paramount tho, so I don’t need a shitty Halo tv series adaption.
“If you don’t agree with the helmet coming off in the show, you don’t like our show” – Pablo Schreiber, actor who tries to convince people that he’s playing Master Chief. He’s disrespecting the character and then putting the blame on the audience. And he’s right, I haven’t played Halo other than Reach, CE, and half of Infinite, but I understand Chief’s competently stoic appeal and fucking hate the show.
I like those conversations about how Spartans came to be and all, but jesus even the ones that do have armor take of their helmet in the middle of battlefield, because dialogue coming up. Hollywood needs to get over it’s childish need of showing actor’s faces even when the plot doesn’t demand it, if mandalorian can do it, so can you.
That was one issue I had with Dune (part 2 in particular) their faces should be mostly covered when out in the desert, but they just had to show their faces at all times. Still, it’s a great movie but I don’t get why that has to be done.
Halo in particular has Red vs Blue, a fan series filmed in the fucking game, as proof that the barest effort can convey who’s talking and how they feel.
All the Spartans should’ve been the tallest stage actors they could find. Big ol’ dudes who can do enough with body language that the cheap seats know what’s going on… and then get in the recording booth and project like they’re used to talking through an inch of armor. Even in the games, the story is mostly told by normal-sized people dwarfed by these walking tanks.
I tried watching it as an alternative universe from Halo, but the way they plainly portrayed the fall of Reach was so dull and fast that I had to stop there.
It was just like whoops, Covenant came, we can’t do anything other than a dozen soldiers fighting in the city. Another planet, let’s move on 🤷♂️
For real. One of the best books in the lore and an amazing game in it’s own right. But it felt like they were obligated to cover it. They were like, "how can we show this on screen for as little time as possible. "
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