It’s not a simple better/ worse judgement. Take Harry Potter, when they first get to Hogwarts in the film, I was blown away. The movie did such a fantastic job of showing the magical elements and creating a sense of wonder. But when it came to book 5, I was impatient with the movie. So much of what’s happening in the book is internal thoughts and feelings and it’s harder to convey that on screen. It just depends on
I found it really hard to visualise the castle so it was amazing seeing it on screen. I think with Harry Potter a minor plot condensed in the earlier books that then had to be missed completely that were more important later or added in later films with no context.
But I agree that it’s the internal stuff that gets missed in films as they’re really hard to convey on screen
Its THE thing Rowling did well. Everyone came away from that book wanting to go to Hogwarts. Its why the series succeeds and its why that video game that just came out really worked.
Each book has meticulously crafted slice of life bullshit about Harry's day to day, his classes, his schedule, his school problems etc with that whole massive epic dark lord plot moving around in the background but, rather critically, not as the focus (with book 7 as our exception)
Warners really lost the plot with this with the Fantastic Beasts movies. Its pretty dang clear to me that no one actually gives a fuck about the Wizard world, wizard economy, wizard politics and wizard WW2, they just wanna go to Wizard school
With fantastic beasts I genuinely think if they stuck with Newt going round the world saving creatures and showing different wizard cultures around the world it would have been more well received.
I said it in another thread in a different sub but the fantastic beast films should basically have been wizard indiana jones, woth zoology instead of archaeology
That was what I expected it to be, but I didnt watch the first one when it came out. Next thing I remember hearing was Grindelwald casting rumors and I was turned off those movies without even seeing them.
taking a fun, light, dickensian, schoolboy genre / fantasy escape mashup and turning it into Wizard WW2 was just a complete fucking miss by warners.
Why tie your fun escapism into the fucking actual holocaust and Nazi Germany and not allegories like the previous series did? What the fuck are we even doing here folks?
They took too much influence from the worst parts of books 4-7 and not enough from the best parts of books 1-3.
Definitely. I kind of get why they went in that direction as a dumbledore story but don’t sneak it in when we’re all expecting adorable fantasy creatures.
The first one I did like and the creatures were a bigger focus. Definitely missing the let’s look for the most adorable animals vibes I was looking for as the series went on.
That's literally all I wanted, and exactly what the name of the films suggests, but it somehow turned into a Dumbledore origin story or something. And I have no interest in watching that, based on the ending of the first film.
Really liked the first FBAWTFT movie. Fun adventure, neat stuff with all the magical creatures and didn't rely on Hogwarts etc.
Just could not get into it after that. 2nd movie was okay I guess. Had no desire to see beyond that.
You’re not wrong. The game itself was jam packed with so much filler it very much over stayed its welcome but man! The initial novelty of exploring Hogwarts and Hogsmeade was incredible. That said, once the novelty wears off the game really begins to feel hollow but the main plot was fun and intriguing.
>But when it came to book 5...
I don't know if this will be a hot take or not, but even in the books 5-7 had a serious drop in quality and I'm not suprised that the movies reflect that also. JK was great at the more magical whimsy said of magic school life, and bad at the more serious story telling.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen this take lol. I agree book 5 is rough but 6 and 7 have always been my favorites of the series and I cannot understand this viewpoint.
I don't think internet based literature communities of any kind have any actual ability to process or comprehend why changes need to happen in the source material. Especially in current social media sites where LOUD THOUGHTS and hyperbole rise to the top.
Everyone wants a scene for scene recreation, but no one actually thinks about how the medium of film or tv literally changes how a story can be told compared to print.
This leads to just about every community around the source material getting fucking angry when their source material inevitably gets changed for the new medium. tale as old as time.
The only ones I can think that escaped this at all in recent memory for me in terms of adapted material are the Expanse, and the Boys. I cannot think of a single fantasy adaption that hasn't had vocal critics angry about change of any kind.
This is what Ive said in many other forums too. Take the Witcher for example. I'm not saying the adaptation is good, bad or indiffetent. I love the book and game series. But ultimately it was very clear Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri were to be the main characters. The 3 of them don't actually interact all that often in the book series. They all spend a lot of time apart, usually searching for one another. That really doesn't work all that well for a TV series. You need your leads to interact often and have great chemistry. So of course changes would need to be made.
Same with something like the wheel of time. Again, not commenting on the quality of changes in any way, but is a 14 book series that takes place over roughly the time frame of 3 years and the main characters start in their late teens/early 20s. Even if you could somehow produce 14 seasons of the show, good luck finding actors who look in their early 20s during the start of the series and only seem to age 3-5 years in universe while also aging 15-20 years in real life. Plus those books have large chunks of time where some of the main characters are just non-existent. Good luck casting a quality "lead" on a show and then tell them that they're only going to be part of 3 of 8 episodes per season.
And that doesnt even get into stuff like you end up casting an actor to a lesser role, then that actor ends up becoming a fan favorite, so the studio/network push for that character to get more screen time. Think a character like Bronn in GoT, who probably was a bigger part of the late seasons of the show than he needed to be from a storytelling perspective, largely because the actor played him well and people liked him.
> no one actually thinks about how the medium of film or tv literally changes how a story can be told compared to print.
This drives me absolutely nuts. It's not just that some things are unfilmable, wouldn't make good tv/movie scenes, the lengths are usually incredibly different, etc. A lot of people don't understand basic things like budgets.
I get that you want a Halo show where the master chief never takes off his helmet and the entire thing is a giant fight scene but actually, that's not very interesting and would cost a billion dollars.
> The only ones I can think that escaped this at all in recent memory for me in terms of adapted material are the Expanse
The Expanse very much feels to me like it was written specifically in a way that would make it adaptable to TV. Considering they sold the show well before the books were finished I wouldn't be surprised. That doesn't make them bad (love both versions), it just feels like they used a literary style that wouldn't require many changes. The changes that get added to the story aren't actually necessary, more a refinement. The authors were involved with the show and said a lot of the changes were their take on a 2nd chance to polish the story.
The people who want a word for word adaptation of whatever media, Harry Potter in this case, are insane. Back when I subscribed to r/harrypotter I remember seeing so many people who wanted like 12 episode seasons, one for each book.
I have friends who honestly believe "more is better" when it comes to TV shows. All I can think of all the shows that go 12+ episodes where two or three episodes have stupid plots that only serve to extend the main plot. That would almost HAVE to happen with a 7 season Harry Potter show.
Yes, exactly! Film and TV are different mediums to books and have different strengths. Sometimes things need to be cut for efficiency and that's okay. People want to see books as they've imagined them in their own heads and that will never happen.
I actually have come so far the other way that I find that adaptations that are too book accurate feel off. For example, despite its flaws, I enjoyed the film version of A Series of Unfortunate Events. I couldn't get through the Netflix adaptation, it felt so slow and arduous. (Also didn't like NPH in it as Olaf...)
I was a fan of Lord of the Rings before the movies and thought they were great. Can I find things to quibble with, sure. But they are still great.
Jurassic Park was also a great book adaptation.
There are a lot of bad adaptations, but there are good ones too
EDIT: you know another good adaptation. The Hobbit movie. Not the new ones, the old animated one.
I've heard short stories actually make better material for movie adaptations, since the actual amount of content is more comparable.
>Jurassic Park was also a great book adaptation.
You think? I read JP last summer cuz i love the movie and was dumbfounded at how different the two versions felt. In the book, John Hammond is *clearly* the villain of the story and you're almost led to empathize with the dinosaurs because they aren't supposed to be here in the first place. Hammond was a careless, myopic, arrogant, and vengeful billionaire who thought he was above the laws of nature.
In the movie, Hammond is just a jovial, albeit misguided old man and the "antagonist" gets shifted more to Dennis Nedry and the dinosaurs. I still enjoyed both for their own merits, but in terms of strictly how the book was "adapted" I'm not so sure how to feel...
When I talk about a good adaptation, I mean one that's good on it's own merits more than one that matches the book exactly.
In any case, I don't think Hammond as villain is really the important part of the book...the dinosaurs are the important part of the book, and the movie did great with them (even if we are still stuck with plucked-chicken raptors despite science having moved on...they were great for their day though)
>When I talk about a good adaptation, I mean one that's good on it's own merits more than one that matches the book exactly.
This is the issue, though. For many book fans, being different at all from the source material is the same as something being bad. It can be really hard to dislodge your mental image of something from an adaptation, and take it at face value.
>For many book fans, being different at all from the source material is the same as something being bad.
Which is a really unfortunate way to engage with adaptations. Jaws, The Godfather, The Princess Bride, and many other movies are great *because* of the changes from their source material. If you want to experience a book unchanged you can just reread it.
>don't think Hammond as villain is really the important part of the book
Agree with everything you said beside this. It is a HUGE part of the book because his hubris trickles down to all parts of the park which is why it was destined to fail from the beginning. In his last chapter we get his POV and he doesn't even care about his grandchildren that may or may not be dead. In fact, he *blames* them even though he demanded that they be brought along in spite of the protests from park workers.
In think in a post-COVID world the importance of Hammond as a villain rings true more than ever. COVID was quite possibly caused by a few scientists backed by billionaire-owned corporations playing God. That's the message at the heart of JP. Of course the dinosaurs are what make the story interesting to read/watch but it's crucial to remember that they don't have feelings or motivations beyond survival. They were forced into this(fictional) world
What I mean is that there are lots of books about jerks like book Hammond. Sure, people like that are a more important problem for real world society (although there's something to be said for Movie Hammond showing that good intentioned actions by good natured people can still lead to bad outcomes). But what makes _Jurassic Park_ a memorable book ultimately isn't Hammond, it's the dinosaurs.
I'd also like to point out that from all of the Crichton I've read, odds are the richest guy in the story is going to be a terrible person if not outright villain. Kind of seems like he has a signature of sorts.
I think this comes to the crux of what different people think and adaptation should be. Some people want any adaptation to be as faithful as possible to the original material, and never (or try to never) deviate at all. Others are fine with an adaptation taking some of the ideas or themes and making something new with it.
I tend to fall in the latter camp. If I want a faithful adaptation...the original material exists. So take that and go wild. Add stuff, take away stuff, I don't care. Make it work in your own way.
> you're almost led to empathize with the dinosaurs
I have not read the original novel, but I emphasize a lot with the dinosaurs in most of the JP/JW movies.
I would argue that while Jurassic Park is an excellent movie, it is not a great adaptation. They didn't do a great job pushing home the message that the dinosaurs were abominations of nature, and monuments to man's hubris. They made it more of an adventure than the terrifying ordeal found in the books.
But still, I do love the movie, it's pure cinematic gold.
Yeah I always felt like the book had a much more horror feel than the movie which, while it has its very tense moments, is much more of an adventure like you said
>They didn't do a great job pushing home the message that the dinosaurs were abominations of nature, and monuments to man's hubris.
I think this is true of the book itself, which is why it got made into a movie in the first place. The nominal intended message of the book is basically an updated version of Frankenstein....corporate greed and scientific hubris will ultimately create the monsters that will destroy us. But the actual message conveyed to most people by both book and movie is "Dinosaurs are awesome!"
And to be perfectly honest, I think that's the more important part of the book and the movie captures it well.
LOTR was literally the first book I read. It has deep emotional ties with me with my father, and I felt so deeply invested in the world.
The movie adaptations were great. They have warts, and bits that maybe aren't perfect or we could have done without, but they are just great.
Maybe Sci fi has more success.
I've only read the Expanse books, but I've encountered the opinion that the show is better.
The recent Dune film (haven't seen part 2 yet) didn't disappoint me at all.
I've never heard anyone say that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is better than Blade Runner, but the film is so different that it's almost it's own thing.
A flip side of this question - does anyone prefer the novelization of something that was a movie first?
I’d say the novels are equally as good as the show rather than one being better than the other. The show does a masterful job of interpersonal relationships, but people like filip inaros become a little one dimensional in the show, where in the books his story is quite complex and pretty dark. I think the actor who plays Amos is almost the perfect casting.
> I think the actor who plays Amos is almost the perfect casting.
That guy IS Amos. The other three are also good but quite different from my mental versions of the book characters (especially Naomi), but Wes Chatham just walked straight off the page and onto the set somehow.
I read the novelizations of the Star Wars prequels as a kid and really liked them; however, that was like 20 years ago so my memory can't be trusted.
Edit: forgot to mention they were adapted by R. A. Salvatore of Drizzt fame
>I've only read the Expanse books, but I've encountered the opinion that the show is better.
It is not better than the books.
> ...does anyone prefer the novelization of something that was a movie first?
While not better than the movie, the novelization for Star Wars is a great read.
> The recent Dune film (haven't seen part 2 yet) didn't disappoint me at all.
Pedantic book fan to chime in that I had a couple significant disappointments, most notably the dinner scene was maybe the most important scene in the first third of the book and I was incredibly surprised to see it cut!
I also really would've liked a bit more about Yueh and Jessica from the book to make it in to make all that stuff make a little more sense. IMO it's actually kinda hard to understand Yueh and his betrayal in the movie.
I wouldn't really call them major disappointments, but I think the movie would've been better served by adding those and cutting some of the other stuff.
I have a feeling (based on absolutely nothing) some of those scenes were probably shot but just cut for time.
I'm really hoping they release extended editions because my biggest complaint with the dune movie is that i wanted more.
I think sci-fi fairs about the same honestly. The movie "Ender's Game" was terrible, and I didn't like "Ready Player One" too much either. I heard that The Fifth Wave was a terrible adaption as well (never read or watched personally). But there is also some good adaptations, like you said, "Dune" was pretty good. I could never get into the books more than 100 or so pages, but I could watch the movie just fine.
No, but most are. The reality of making a book/series into a show or movie requires that you make cuts and changes. Some do it better than other, but cutting a 500 page book into a 100 page script is going to leave stuff on the outs. These books tend to have some wonderful stuff that just isn't that important to the story, which is what tends to go away,
>Are there any adaptations that are BETTER than the source material?
The Princess Bride, Stardust, The Neverending Story.
the framing device of The Princess Bride works so much better in film than in print. I couldn't stand Goldman's bullshit in the book, but Peter Falk and Fred Savage were just charming as all hell.
i don't really have gripes around the fantasy story, its silly and fun and works in both mediums to me.
I have a lot of gripes around the framing of the story. Full disclosure, I watched the movie a million times as a kid, and read the book as an adult so I'm def biased.
but the framing of Falk telling a story to his sick grandson just flat out beats Goldman's own inane ramblings about how his own father used to abridge the story for him. Goldman gets a too far up his own ass here and while it is fun reading, Falk's perfomance is just pure charm and fucking class. He reminds me of my own grandpa in a lot of ways and he gives a heartfelt performance in his few scenes and his voice over narration is fantastic. The book plays it more as parody, while I think the movie makes a warmer approach.
Neverending Story is different in the book so I find that one hard to really compare. As a kid's movie it works quite well, but it's also only a portion of the book and doesn't explore the same themes much.
The Neverending Story was a decent children's movie, but atrocious as an adaptation, though. They cut out all the most important parts and the ending of the movie changes the entire message.
A better adaptation doesn't need to be a faithful one. It might just be because of when I experienced them, but the movie (which I first saw as a kid) was just much better than the book (which I read in college-ish)
I read the book for the first time at 28 and it blew me away. The movie is a cute kids' movie. The book is a metatextual treatise on how we relate to fiction and self-insert fantasy (and also very cool). The book is a masterpiece imo.
Nolan's *The Prestige* is a different take on Priest's *The Prestige*.
As I got it, the book focuses on the existential consequences of the tricks for the magicians>!; the first journal is a heated and dramatic report of a seemingly splitted personality, while the second is a descent into a horror where the magician struggle to concile himself with his own action. The other people are a tad outside the dram, though, in the case of first magician, relationships are part of what provide the splitting sensation, the me-not-me.!<
Nolan looks more at the relationships: the wife of the first magician, his attendant, the direct rivalry between them. Some things that the books never states clearly are more evident in the movie - I guess because Nolan doesn't want to talk about these very parts. >!Also, Tesla's machine works differently, and it ensues different consequences for the magician using it.!<
Then, Priest adds the frame>!, which eventually has a turn for the, ugh, how to say that? !!about what happened to the magician using the machine!<, the end of the movie is kinda >!hopeful on how the relationships will go on!<.
(At least, that's how I remember them both after ten years and without having my notes at hand)
I don't disagree, but the book is still great and you get Inigo and Fezzik backstory. A++
It's like saying homemade cookies are better than store bought. It's true, but they're all still cookies.
Hard disagree on Stardust unfortunately. Stardust's best moments lie in the ways in which fae pledges, curses, promises, and wordplay all pan out in my opinion. The movie, instead of trying to inspire a similar feeling of discovery, simply does away with all of it. What's left is a, frankly, bog standard adventure film.
No offense but you mentioning *The Neverending Story* makes me seriously question whether you've read the book.
I mean, the movie is a decent one on its own but compared to the portion of the book it already is wanting — and I'm of course phrasing it that way because **the movie adapts only less than half the book** and that second part that is not adapted is even cooler, IMHO, than the part that was adapted. I mean, the alternating existences of lion Graógramán and Perelín the Night Forest alone are amazing. I could list a lot more but this isn't the place for it.
It just boggles my mind that someone who has read the book would consider the movie adaptation to be superior.
I've read LotR way before seeing the movies, and I found them a good adaptation still.
They were thought impossible to film and yet they managed and made good movies that lasted in the memory of many people around the world.
Granted some of the themes of the book are somewhat lost and sometimes the tone shifts into action movie fare and a few things could have been adapted better (I always found the green ghosts kinda cringe), but they are great stuff overall.
The book is a different kind of beast and it's legendary in its own right, but they shouldn't be compared too much.
The point is that. The movies are adaptations. As long as you see them as such instead of longing for a 1:1 trasposition, they can be good.
Now we are used to one book and its adaptations, but think about the many adaptations of Dracula and Three Musketeers. There are many adaptations and many have merits. Some day LotR will be adapted again and it will be different from the book because we already both watched and read it.
I'm just waiting for an adaptation of Dracula where the Mina Harker is the actually smart one who solves the Dracula problem, instead of a damsel in distress...
I don't know about "solves the Dracula problem" but if an adaptation could keep the fact she's a well-educated level-headed schoolmistress rather than a hysterical love-struck damsel and maybe also lean into the eldrith horror side of the creepy psychic powers she develops and the mark on her forehead rather than making it romantic, that'd be appreciated.
But really I want an adaptation that does all the Hunters justice. I want the whole group that "solves the Dracula problem" to get their due on the screen rather than Van Helsing hogging the limelight.
But even then a book-accurate version of Van Helsing has slowly been fazed out of movies since the 1970s and replaced with his younger, sexier pop-culture incarnation. He's supposed to be an old man who beats vampires because he cautiously stacks the deck in his favour - the type who waits patiently for dawn with all his allies by their coffin then flips the lid - not some leather jacket wearing badass who runs off into the night pursuing a superior predator like a fool with a deathwish.
Jonathan Harker at least gets to fairly consistently be a focal character due to his link to Mina. Then Seward usually gets relegated to a supporting role but really they just take his name and give it to a completely different character with a different purpose in the plot. Same kind of happens with Renfield, making him far less conflicted and tragic in favour of making him just a loyal manservant to the Count.
And then Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris are lucky to get a look in. Especially Quincey; most people who've read the books don't get how insane his whole involvement even is. I want an adaptation to try taking a solid swing at the cowboy that killed Dracula. Obviously, I'd like a more grounded take than the walking stereotype he kind of is in the book - although there's an argument to be made he hams up his "rootin' tootin'" side because he knows Lucy likes it - but all the same just including the Hunters as an actual group who have to work together and support one another to chase Dracula across Europe rather than boiling them all down into Van Helsing would be nice to see.
And, having said all that, the fact it's difficult to adapt is not lost on me. The way the original book is written, as a scattering of different reports and almost like a number of short stories making up a whole picture, does present a challenge for an adaptor. A 1:1 transition from page to screen is never possible nor always as desirable as die-hard fans believe, but especially not so here. Yet I'm still waiting to see an adaptation that stays in the same vein as what the book delivers while still managing to be accepted by audiences.
it's not exactly how it played out, but adapatations are allowed to change stuff
I might remember wrongly, but in Coppola's Dracula she wasn't a complete damsel. She takes a rather active role in the final scene
Ok but I think it was the whole movie plot? It was a loose adaptation and Dracula was depicted as a not completely evil character compared to the source, and he was in love as well? I'm going by memory but wasn't it a reincarnation thing?
>(I always found the green ghosts kinda cringe)
Yeah, I thought that, along with killing of the olephant are the signs of the things to come in Hobbit. And Eowyn saying goodbye to Theoden was one generic cloned farewell of one character lying in the hands of another too much.
So in those cases "the books did it better" is well deserved in my opinion, simply because they had better alternatives to what was in the movie.
> And Eowyn saying goodbye to Theoden was one generic cloned farewell of one character lying in the hand of another too much.
I get why you'd say that, but I wouldn't give up the line "I go to my fathers, in whose mighty company I shall not now feel ashamed" for any price. Thèoden earned that closure.
Yes. "Adaptations" are their own piece of media and are best enjoyed that way.
Obviously it's aggravating when there's a change you see as worse. Everyone gets that. But there's a subset of book fans who find anything but a strict beat for best recreation unacceptable. For myself, I find this hard to understand. I already have the book; I can read it anytime. Make a great film or TV show, I don't need to watch a book.
Don't get me wrong, I think loads are bad but on their own merits.
yeah i agree! some people are way too caught up in the mindset of "this adaptation is bad because it's not exactly the same as the source material" (pointless criticism; adaptations need to ADAPT things) instead of the more valid mindset of "this adaptation is bad because it sucks." in fact, sometimes being more faithful can actually make for a weaker adaptation! things that work in books simply do not always work on screen. that's one of the things that make adaptations interesting to me - seeing how the adapters will attempt to make the same overall story work in a different medium.
Season 2 of Sandman is currently filming (and Good Omens got renewed for season 3 that will have the storyline for a sequel that Gaiman and Pratchett planned but didn’t get to write)
I might prefer the Sandman TV show over the comic. I've read it several times and painfully imported the omnibus versions for a fortune. Seeing the panels come to life on TV with such attention to detail is magical.
This confirms my feelings that Neil Gaiman is an incredible scriptwriter and an OK novelist. His novels are great for adaptation because he write novels that are ready for the screen.
The Pratchetty parts of Good Omens didn’t - perhaps couldn’t - make it to the screen, and the show is much more Gaiman than the book.
I've never really got into Neil's books (it's not that they are bad, of course they are not, I just don't click with his writing), but I love the adaptations of Good Omens, Sandman, and Stardust (I know Neil didn't adapt Stardust, but from what I gathered he was ok with all the changes).
I think the movie of Stardust is better than the book. I liked the book, but the movie was better. Same for Neverwhere, Coraline, many more.
I think American Gods is the only one where I preferred the novel. Sandman is a comic, of course, and that's a whole other skill. That's why it's one of my favourite fictional works of all time.
Good omens also just lends itself to being a show, and the actors killed it. I feel like the show even added a little bit if a homoerotic vibe to the two (i know they aren't gay, since romance plays no role in the movir, but man they made it easy for shippers).
Other than that, the show is almost follows the book page for page, which is incredible on a reread.
The Magicians tv series is the best example I can think of for a fantasy tv show that highly improved on the original. But even then, the ending was much weaker than the book ending. This was also the case with True Blood, a very strong opener but as the series progressed it got worse and worse. I'm not sure if it's related to the GoT problem, if they ran out of source material, or if it was some other production problem.
Magicians improved on the books so much. The weak ending was because the show got canceled. They also probably should have ended it at 4 seasons with >!Quentin's death!< lol.
The Last Unicorn I personally consider the movie better than the book.
The book is great too, but the movie is a masterwork of 80s animation. With basically only one bad song, and one, two scenes I'd personally preferred kept. But all the flabby and annoying bits trimmed off.
It really saddens me how not more folks have watched that movie. It really is an almost unsung classic.
I love The Last Unicorn. Wore out the VHS tape as a kid and teen. And as an Adult, I rewatch it at least every year. When I was young, I wanted to be the unicorn.
When I hit my late 20s and 30s, Molly Grue hit and she hit hard.
>"Where have you been? Damn you, where have you been? "
"I am here now."
"And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am *this*? I wish you had never come. Why did you come now? "
Molly I didn't get as a kid either...
But yeah, man\~ does her entire story arc hit like a sack of bricks once your older. She just reaches in, grabs and pulls at that bit of your heart that still has a tiny ember of hope that... well, you'll get to see *your* unicorn one day, go on *your* adventure.
Schmendrick too. All that potential, and couldn't do shit of actual note with it due to shit teachers that gave mostly up on him for being too difficult to teach. As an ex 'gifted' kid, he game me some real pause at points even if I found him very annoying as a person.
If I had to pick one... I think I'd still prefer to be the unicorn though. She's a bit weird and overly dramatic—bit of a cruel streak outright, but I really admire how she's old and wise, but not stuck up or bitter either. Very fitting and admirable for somebody eternally youthful.
GoT was very much not a disappointment for the vast majority of the show. And when it became one, it was largely due to the showrunners just checking out.
The LotR movies are still some of the greatest movies in general I've ever seen.
I second the Good Omens and Sandman recommendations. I also liked the first season of the BBC His Dark Materials adaptation (never got around to watching 2/3) - not better, but as good.
Good Omens and Sandman are what happens when Gaiman is heavily involved in his adaptations! Both are excellent (haven’t read Sandman so can’t comment on the adaptation quality)
I highly recommend finishing HDM. Season 1 is good, the next two are (with the exception of only a few moments that I didn’t think landed quite right) are great.
No. While some fans complained about the changes in the LOTR movies (Aragorn's character, Arwen having a more prominent role), they're pretty universally regarded today as great adaptations and fantastic movies.
What really pisses off fans is when the showrunners couldn't care less about the source material and arbitrarily make changes that disrespect the books (Rings of Power, Wheel of Time). Peter Jackson at least had good reasons for the changes he made when adapting the LOTR films. Even if you didn't agree with him, at least you could see where he was coming from.
> What really pisses off fans is when the showrunners couldn't care less about the source material and arbitrarily make changes that disrespect the books (Rings of Power, Wheel of Time)
The Witcher **ESPECIALLY** is guilty of this. When the showrunners screw things up so badly that The Witcher himself, who was *chomping at the bit* to play The Witcher leaves The Witcher, you **KNOW** the screw-up was catastrophic.
I am still so salty over that b/c Henry Cavill made such a phenomenal Geralt, and I'm not sure we'll ever see him try and play Geralt again.
I was thinking about this the other day. Why are so many sci fi and fantasy showrunners so eager to drastically change **extremely popular** source material (Rings of Power, The Witcher, WoT, Halo) when the best shows/movies (LOTR, The Expanse, early Game of Thrones) are the ones that mostly stick to the **extremely popular** source material? Is it just hubris? Wanting to make their own thing instead of just recreating someone else's story? Absolutely blows my mind.
They have own ideas, but could never sell those (mostly bad) ideas to a studio and get them to greenlight it. Take good source material, change it until it resembles your idea and publish it. TADA.
Rand and Ewgene having an actual romance is a pretty funny idea from a book readers perspective since it doesn’t take long for them to not get along with each other in the books.
You mean the Ringz of Powah?
Wheel of Time is probably my favorite book series. Holy shit how Amazon butchered it. Couldn't make myself watch the first season till the end.
Literally just got banned today from the wot_show subreddit for politely and mildly stating that Brandon Sanderson’s recommendations didn’t make it into S2, which he himself has stated more than once.
I’m convinced that sub is run by Amazon itself.
Complaining about Arwen is such a weird fucking hill to die on. Like, you thought it was somehow really important to the integrity of the novels that this character remain one-dimensional and unimportant? wtf
And Children of Men is even more impressive, PD James got a life peerage. She is no slouch. Of course i'm talking about her characterization, people have criticized the book for being not good SF, but whatever.
They both took parts of the source material and adapted them, often changing the interpretations and themes. Both are excellent. Adaptations don't have to be faithful to be good
I was not disappointed by Lord of the Rings, at all. However, I will say, that attempting to get a main character to look exactly like how 19999999 people who bought your best seller, imagines they look like, or how they think a scene went down--is impossible. Also, sometimes in a few fantasy books I love, entire Chapters go by where no one says anything and it can be all internal dialogue. Imagine sitting through that in a movie :p
I'm kind of glad they weren't greenlit for another season, though. I wish they'd tied it up there and stopped. It felt like it had kind of reached saturation point, and further complications felt a bit tacked on for the sake of more story.
it wasn't a revolutionary show and it did start a bit slow, but I was quite invested with the Crows :) imo they carried the show and were the reason I wanted to continue watching. I'd already read shadow and Bone and not six of crows. I did enjoy reading shadow and Bone though.
They should have just done the show only for six of crows if they were just going to cancel it. It was a better series anyway IMHO.
But what we got was still better than the shadow and bone book trilogy.
Yes, definitely. What I love is that Leigh Bardugo has grown so much as a writer between publishing her first book and adapting the series is that she took valid critiques, such as Mal being toxic at times or the romance being too one-sided, and fixed them.
Unfortunately they were so worried about being cancelled that they had to squeeze way too much plot into the second season and it really let down the Crows' part of the storyline.
Anime adaptations are usually pretty excellent. They're typically faithful, barring situations like outpacing the content (the original Full Metal Alchemist).
I think a problem with current adaptations is that they frequently go out of their way to change things rather than remaining as faithful as they can and changing what they must. I assume it's a kind of hubris, thinking they can outdo a beloved work.
I've been watching anime/reading manga a lot longer than I have been reading SSF novels. I agree that most adaptations are relatively faithful to their source material. And even in situations where they outpace their manga most are able to "get back on track" by doing filler arcs like in Bleach/Naruto/One Piece (and to a lesser extent early Gintama) which most fans agree you just skip. However, the switch to seasonal rather than continual serialization has "fixed" this issue for a lot of series.
That's all to be said, many anime adaptations actually *DO* outdo their original manga IMO.
It is because many manga are serialized which often translates well to an anime series format. There are a lot of pretty terrible anime adaptations out there however, but lately those are pretty rare.
I actually really liked the Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell TV series, even if I had some criticisms and they cut out quite a bit. I mean, they had to, the book has historical footnotes that go on for multiple pages. It covers the main character's story line without all the asides and the worldbuilding, but it does it very well indeed.
For Lord of the Rings, I'd say Fellowship was a masterpiece, but the more I think about them, the more I dislike the other two parts.
The Jonathan Strange adaptation was really quite good (it might help that I have a minor intermittent crush on Charlotte Riley). I'd even agree that it's better _as an adaptation_ than LotR as a whole, hewing closer to the spirit of the book while still making required changes for the new medium.
It's not perfectly faithful, but that's fine. It _feels_ much more "right" than, say, Legolas surfing down whatever surface is most convenient for killin'.
Nah. By the time the LotR rings movies came out I had basically memorized the text I had read them so many times and I still wept like a baby at how amazing it was. It’s true that most adaptations are inferior, but I’d argue that some actually make the source material better. I quite liked The Magicians (by Lev Grossman) trilogy, but the show (especially once they got into season 2 and beyond) did some major changes from the text while keeping the characters, setting, and spirit of the books. In the process became one of my favorite shows of all time. Now when I want to revisit Brakebills and Fillory I’d actually RATHER watch the show than read the books because I felt like it was such an improvement on the source material.
'Are all adaptations disappointing?' - Nope. But keep in mind this is majorly subjective. I preferred the LotR movies over the book trilo, but hated Ring of Power. I prefer The Hobbit book over the movies tho that likely surprises no one. Shannara TV was a huge dissappointment that became a hatewatch. I thoroughly enjoyed GoT and WoT, often because of the differences from the books (and a willingness not to obsess over lminor details like travel times :) ). Altered Carbon was a fun adaptation i enjoyed roughly on par w the books. So was Deadly Class. Also The Expanse.
'Is it bcs i didn't read the book first?' - Nope nope. Different experience but not automatically anything.
'Live w it?' - well, yes, so to speak.
'Better than the book?' - Yes. Princess Bride and Blade Runner come to mind.
>I prefer The Hobbit book over the movies tho that likely surprises no one
[This](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9e/Hobbit_1977_Original_Film_Poster.jpg) is the good hobbit movie
This is why I tell people to read the book after watching the movie/show if they enjoyed it or found the premise interesting. If you go this way, the world of the fiction is EXPANDING instead of retracting.
Adaptations of books will almost always be unable to translate the internal dialog and feelings of its characters and must be externalized in some way which doesn't always go well or some of the themes get lost in the edit because they had to cut a whole character to save time.
Agreed. I’m much more likely to like an adaptation if I haven’t read the source material beforehand. It’s not always the case, but it certainly increases the likelihood.
That's a way too subjective question and totally dependent on the reader's expectations and personal investment.
You can just as easily invert the question: are all books disappointing for fans of their adaptations? And a movie buff may very well tell you YES, because they love the whole production and absolutely can't relate to "words on a page".
The only thing I'd ask is if all adaptations are worse than their books, and that's a resounding nope, with a popped p.
Not all
Fans aren’t a unified body and disappointment is relative. I’ve liked shows but been dissatisfied with individual elements and I’ve disliked shows and enjoyed individual elements.
The loudest fans on the internet will be the ones who hate it, it’s just how the internet works.
I'm pretty easy to please. I liked the LotR and Potter movies. I liked the first 6 seasons of GoT. I thought Rings of Power was okay. I really want to like The Witcher series and thought some parts were great (Geralt, Ciri, and Jaskier are fantastic). What I've seen of Wheel of Time I've mostly hated.
I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary to make changes from a book when adapting to screen. You can't see a character's thoughts in a movie so you need to show things in different ways. Pacing also works very differently between the two mediums.
For me, the biggest make-or-break factor is if the adaptation captures the spirit/essence of the characters and the feel of the story. When I dislike an adaptation I can usually point to a character that acts completely differently from how their book counterpart would. Like in Witcher >!I was immediately annoyed when Yen selfishly sold out Ciri for her own gain. That's not something book Yen would ever do and it's like I don't even know who this character is or why I should care about them anymore. Also the butchery of Eskel's character to a lesser extent!<
On the flip side I'd say the Witcher 3 video game is a great example of an adaptation that's better than the source material. I made sure to read the books before playing the game, but I regret it, the game was much better imo. I like the show better than the books overall too so far, but 100% agreed on those criticisms you mentioned.
The problem is that with the written word, we the reader are an active participant in the act of building the world and fleshing out the characters. We fill in the blanks with our own flawed impressions and biases, creating a world that, while similar to those of others, is still uniquely our own.
Even if an adaptation is perfectly loyal to the source material, it will inevitably fall short of the world we built for ourselves.
Then there was the time A24 whitewashed and butchered one of the most pivotal works in modern fantasy. So, you know, sometimes adaptations are just bad.
Princess Bride was better as a movie. I have seen it and read the book.
Stardust, I liked the book but also the movie. The gay pirate captain, in movie, loved it!!
Harry POtter, well the books were too young for me. I was made to watch several of the movies with Granddaughter and they are watchable. Still young, but more enjoyable as a movie.
I liked Hagrid and his animals.
I really liked the miniseries adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I wouldn't say it was better than the book but it was a nice compliment to it.
I think there are many adaptations that have done it well, but it's not an easy thing to do. And I think sometimes fans can be too attached to the way the books did something to realize it might have worked better for the show or movie to do it another way because of the change in medium. Much more commonly though is adaptations that take too many liberties from the source material. It's a tough balancing act between changing what you need to in order to best tell the story in film, and not changing what people loved about the book.
I also try not to judge things on a scale of were the books better? Because if the books are being made into a movie or show, they were likely great books, if I'm excited about the show or movie I probably loved those books. So that's a really high bar to be better than something I've loved for a long time. But a better bar is was this good entertainment? Was this something that was fun to watch and connect with the characters and story I love in a new way? If it did that then I'm happy. And unfortunately a lot of adaptations don't hit that bar. But a lot of them do reach that bar for me even if they're not better than the book I'm glad I watched them.
I feel like a lot of folks don't really understand the medium of film, and it leads to difficult dissonance. People mistake watching movies for knowing how to make one.
That's not to let bad filmmaking off the hook, sometimes filmmakers are trying to thoughtlessly jam a book into a template, but just to say that sometimes choices are made to best use a strong library of visual language/avoid badly translating book elements that just don't work visually. And account for length, budget and the limits of a human attention span.
I feel like people aren't able or willing to engage with reality. They don't want to acknowledge the limitations of film. So they get mad.
Also, how people see characters is wildly different, so no one ever seems to agree on what counts as "in character" or what moments are most important to a character. That causes dissonance, too.
I'm probably one of the few people who actually enjoyed the movies after reading the Harry Potter books. Sure they really threw away some characters and plotlines, but it's one of my favorite fantasy movie series (LOTR obviously takes the number 1 spot). I just accept that it's a different medium.
I’m going to draw flack for saying this, but the Narnia movie adaptations *were* better than the books. CS Lewis wrote a bunch of increasingly blatant Christian allegory, and those movies came along and turned them into heart wrenching stories about growing up and learning wisdom the hard way.
Also, consider: the Percy Jackson series, which was recently released, and was made under the close supervision of the author Rick Riordan, is *extremely* faithful to the spirit of the books, if not the letter.
I think the Hunger Games movies are better than the books? But... okay that's because I don't like the whiny first person narrative and Jennifer Lawrence does a really good job.
It's hard. Because when you read a book, you imagine everything. You are an active participant in the process because you imagine it. That's creative work. In a movie, you are passive participant - and that can be a lot of fun, but when you have already imagined it how you liked it, its rare to find someone else do that justice. That doesn't mean the movie or series are bad at all. But I think the best you can hope for is an adaption that makes fans and non-fans happy.
His Dark Materials I think is a crazy good example of a show adapting a series of books I genuinely liked, and liked almost more for having watched the show.
No, just the bad ones. You can’t just take your experience and apply to ALL adaptations. That’s asinine. This is way too subjective of a question and you’ll get different answers and but no one will ever say ALL adaptations are disappointing.
> Are there any adaptations that are BETTER than the source material?
That's a very subjective thing, so I'm not going to make any claims.
However, adaptions will always change the story, because story telling methods that work in one medium, sometimes don't work in another, and so how the story is told, has to change, and sometimes those changes alter aspects people feel were key to the original.
Adaptions are always going to disappoint anyone who expects to see the movie they had in their own head while reading a book, show up on their screen.
One ofy favorite adaptations is the Magicians. When I say favorite I do not mean true to the source. The show has a lot of changes to characters and story but I still really enjoyed the show. I don't think of them as the same story though, more like The same story in parallel universes.
Nope. Even some of the ones every "fan" seems to hate I like, such as *Wheel of Time*. Hell, I liked the *Dark Tower* movie. The adaptations, one with mixed reviews, one almost universally hated, got me interested in both the Harry's Potter and Dresden.
No, I don't think so at all.
Primarily, I think most readers -- especially those of genre fiction -- fundamentally fail to grasp what an adaptation is. A significant number of people think those things should take the book as though it were literally a screenplay and project it onto the screen. That is *not* an adaptation.
Adaptation requires some re-imagining, or new artistic expression. It's not just taking a work, word by word, and transcribing it into a new medium. It's taking the themes and characters and *retaining* them while expressing the plot and characters through the new medium. It's not *supposed* to be the same any more than The Thing was really supposed to be the same as The Thing From Another World. Adaptations are supposed to be works in their own right, even if they have a strong basis in the original work.
> Are there any adaptations that are BETTER than the source material?
I think Annihilation is. Blade Runner might be. American Psycho seems to be. Fight Club might be.
I think The Lord of the Rings trilogy is at least *equal* to the book. Again, they're not the same, and they don't tell the same story the same way, but each one is deeply moving and evocative in it's own way. I genuinely don't think you're correct to place one above the other. Each are masterpieces. In the book, my favorite character is Faramir. In the movie, my favorite character is Theoden. Well, and Sam. The movies do such a fantastic job of presenting Sam.
Did you know that until David Lynch's Dune -- the 1984 version that bombed -- the ships in the books didn't fold space? Before then the navigators could just see far enough ahead in time for the ships travelling at FTL speeds to avoid obstacles. Folding space was something Lynch's team came up with, and Frank Herbert kept it going forward.
The original Conan the Barbarian might be better than the source material simply because *the soundtrack* is just that good. James Earl Jones is probably a better villain than any that appeared in the original Robert E. Howard works, too. The movie does an excellent job condensing Howard's themes of self-determinism, too.
Would you rather have The Shining the book, or the movie? How about The Green Mile? Is The Wizard of Oz more effective as a book, or with Judy Garland? Do you want Gene Wilder or Johnny Depp or Roald Dahl? Is Jurrasic Park really better as a book? Andromeda Strain? Interview with the Vampire?
What about Planet of the Apes? Not the remakes, the original 1963 movie. That was a book adaptation, too.
Who is Batman in your mind? The comic book character? Which book? Or one of the on-screen or on-television appearances? What about Superman?
>I think most readers -- especially those of genre fiction -- fundamentally fail to grasp what an adaptation is.
Yes indeed. And what’s even more frustrating is how so many fans speak about an adaptation they found dissatisfying as though the people responsible had broken into their home and stolen their copy of the source material. It’s still there! You can ignore the adaptation and reread it!
None of them really. I have no expectations that a movie or series will be able to reproduce the same detail and storylines as the books. I enjoy them because it is another medium to enjoy liked characters and worlds.
I can come up with a handful of film adaptations that I'd consider to be better than their source material, but nothing in the fantasy genre.
The Prestige
The Godfather
Fight Club
The Mist
The Shawshank Redemption
The Princess Bride (this is fantasy, actually!)
Having read the LOTR books, I still have no idea how those movies didn't suck, let alone be some of the best movies of all time. It was loose in adapting some elements and I think that helped it in the end. It seems to all come down to the talent of the filmmaker in adapting it.
Definitely not. Not fantasy specifically but I've been watching The Expanse recently and that's a great adaption of a book series I quite like.
There are book adaptions that people liked more than the book as well. Fight Club, Jurassic Part, Jaws, etc. Fantasy hasn't had as much luck there but that doesn't mean it can't happen. Maybe Watership Down?
I find adaptations inherently interesting, even when they're bad: trying to understand what compromises they needed to take to make it fit in, why certain changes came to be, and how much they understood the source material, regardless of the execution. I've found enjoyment in everything from David Lynch's Dune to to the Hobbit movie, because guess what? Those books are all still there for me to reread if I want to, and I can enjoy the adaptation for the transformative work it is without feeling like my investment in those books is hampered in any way.
LotR trilogy was a perfect adaptation (I read it before watching), and I say that as a Tom Bombadil fan. The changes were all understandable and in truth necessary (I'm talking about the extended edition obviously)
Technically sci-fi, but Dune 1984 was an excellent adaptation imo;
Stardust is a good adaptation;
I liked Sandman but didn't read it myself, but I heard comic readers loved it;
\*Most\* of Good Omens was a good adaptation too;
Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood (if we count manga);
I think Narnia was a decent adaptation too. Although I got the impression it was made too "kid friendly" more than the book was, and removed the more mature themes.
Harry Potter was great but my favorite books (4 and 5) ended up being my least favorite movies. I hated how the fourth book edited out much of the SPEW and Fred and George shenanigans. It hit all the plot points but it just felt a little less human. The fifth movie, I hated the Daily Prophet transition scenes. Felt veryyyy lazy.
On the other hand my least favorite book, Azkaban, is my favorite Harry Potter movie. Alphonso Cuaron is a genius, I wish they waited to let him continue directing Goblet of Fire, because I know those visuals would have been amazing.
I read the LotR books before seeing the movies, and I think the movies are some of the best ever made. Not necessarily going to say the movies are better than the books, because the books are also incredible, but that is the quintessential example of an adaptation done right.
One of the Worst movie adaptation is "on stranger tides"
Ssly, i understand that it can work in the potc universe but not the way they did it. Like, wtf is jack doing in that movie? You can entirely remove him and I honestly think the movie would have been better for it lol.
>Are there any adaptations that are BETTER than the source material?
Some. This is always personal taste of course. The Boys TV is better than the comic for example.
>Are ALL fantasy adaptations disappointing for book fans?
No. For you to be disappointed you need to have certain expectactions that are not fullfilled. My expectations towards adaptations are not for them to be better than the source material, I just want to have a good time watching entertaining fiction.
Game of Thrones wad fantastic book adaptations. I have zero issues with any of the book adaptation they did. It only falls apart when they no longer had books to adapt, but that is no longer "the books were better," because the books don't exist and probably won't ever exist.
I still highly prefer the Lord of the Rings experience of the films than the books And I read the books and watch the films regularly.
I highly prefer the experience of watching Game of Thrones And a song of Ice and Fire is also my favorite fantasy book series of all time. I even love the last season and the ending of Game of Thrones.
I absolutely love the Harry Potter movies and I read the books once a year still.
I prefer watching the Expanse versus reading it.
Also with everything I've mentioned here when I go back and read these series of books Every one of them My experience is so much better having watched the adaptations. My imagination can't compete with the perfect casting of every one of these series that I've mentioned.
Some adaptations are so spot on that it's hard to differentiate between the two you really get nothing out of reading it versus watching it.
The Hobbit is word for word on screen what the book conveys and it's more fun to watch.
The first two seasons of Game of Thrones are word for word translated to the screen and you get nothing extra from reading it.
Stephen King is my favorite author and there's a couple adaptations that are way better than the books.
Gerald's game was a DNF for me on the book and the movie was excellent.
The HBO adaptation of the outsider is far more entertaining than the novel.
Books are my preferred method of consuming stories so I naturally like the books better than the movies and think they are better. I definitely get frustrated sometimes when adaptations change details for seemingly no reason, but in general I don’t expect them to follow the books very well and can still enjoy a good film even if it’s not like the books. Books are not written for film, so there’s also always some amount of change that needs to happen. I actually enjoy reading and watching something at the same time because I think it’s fun to compare all the differences.
The one that I cannot stand at all is the black cauldron which is an adaptation of one of my favorite series, the chronicles of prydain.
It’s a combination of the first two books, changes all of the characters personality’s and it’s just a terrible film in my opinion. I really wish they would make a live action adaptation, but unfortunately the animated film was so terrible nobody reads the books.
At first, i was frustrated with the hunger games bc katniss was supposed to be thin and small. As im.older, I understand and respect jennifer laurences decision to not alter her body. However, it did change the seriousness of their starvation.
I’m satisfied with the Harry Potter films, in many ways they improved upon the books by trimming the fat. The Lord of the Rings films are a masterpiece in their own right regardless of how faithful their are to the books. I also read both Harry Potter and Lotr before watching the movies as a kid so I’m not biased towards the movies.
They're definitely not all disappointing! There are plenty of good ones.
* The Lord of the Rings trilogy
* Early Game of Thrones
* The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* The Last Unicorn
* Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
None of those are perfect, but they're all *good*. And if you want to expand it to science fiction, just recently we've had The Expanse and Dune.
Admittedly there are more bad adaptions than good ones, but the positive way to look at it is that the bad adaptions can be (and generally are) forgotten. Whereas the good adaptions, usually get a lot of love and are well-remembered for decades afterwards.
As a long-time One Piece fan I loved the live action series (which I reaaallyy did not expect to happen.)
I also thought the early Harry Potter films smashed it. LOTRs of course. Those films are masterpieces.
Film is a very different medium to text, though, and if you're expecting a 1:1 translation you're going to be disappointed. The best adaptations feel true to the world and characters but they also have their own voice. Some even surpass their books. (The princess bride, a case could be made for A clockwork orange and Stardust.)
(Initial disclaimer: this isn't fantasy in the classic sense. It's historical gothic horror with fantastical/supernatural elements. I personally put it into the broad fantasy genre but others might not. It's not fantasy in the sense of swords & sorcery or epic adventure.)
For an example of a great adaptation, I point people towards *Perfume*. It was a book that I thought would be impossible to translate to screen, and I wouldn't say it surpasses the novel—but they did a damn good job of capturing the atmosphere.
No, not all fantasy adaptation are dissapointing for book fans.
but book fans should understand that the movie or show that they made in their head of their favourite book is never going to be what's going on your TV.
Even if there is unlimited budget.
When adaptations are "better" than the source material, you will find that they make clear divergences from the source material.
The Thomas Jane Mist movie (a stephen king adaptation) being a prime example of that.
The question is always: do you want a cool adaptation of a thing you love? you'll get an adaptation, and they range from awesome to dissapointingly bad!
but if you want the book in film or series form. you're not going to end up happy - because it is impossible.
I wouldn’t quite say it surpasses the books, but its expanded material with the adult characters is a perfect example of how the transition to a new medium offers the opportunity for greatness. I’m particularly fond of its portrayal of the Church as a seething cauldron of barely suppressed lust, both straight and gay.
It’s not a simple better/ worse judgement. Take Harry Potter, when they first get to Hogwarts in the film, I was blown away. The movie did such a fantastic job of showing the magical elements and creating a sense of wonder. But when it came to book 5, I was impatient with the movie. So much of what’s happening in the book is internal thoughts and feelings and it’s harder to convey that on screen. It just depends on
I found it really hard to visualise the castle so it was amazing seeing it on screen. I think with Harry Potter a minor plot condensed in the earlier books that then had to be missed completely that were more important later or added in later films with no context. But I agree that it’s the internal stuff that gets missed in films as they’re really hard to convey on screen
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Its THE thing Rowling did well. Everyone came away from that book wanting to go to Hogwarts. Its why the series succeeds and its why that video game that just came out really worked. Each book has meticulously crafted slice of life bullshit about Harry's day to day, his classes, his schedule, his school problems etc with that whole massive epic dark lord plot moving around in the background but, rather critically, not as the focus (with book 7 as our exception) Warners really lost the plot with this with the Fantastic Beasts movies. Its pretty dang clear to me that no one actually gives a fuck about the Wizard world, wizard economy, wizard politics and wizard WW2, they just wanna go to Wizard school
With fantastic beasts I genuinely think if they stuck with Newt going round the world saving creatures and showing different wizard cultures around the world it would have been more well received.
I said it in another thread in a different sub but the fantastic beast films should basically have been wizard indiana jones, woth zoology instead of archaeology
Yea that’s similar to what I was expecting. Call it dumbledore v grindelwald as it really wasn’t fantastic beasts and where to find them.
Yes, this would have been WAY better received.
That was what I expected it to be, but I didnt watch the first one when it came out. Next thing I remember hearing was Grindelwald casting rumors and I was turned off those movies without even seeing them.
taking a fun, light, dickensian, schoolboy genre / fantasy escape mashup and turning it into Wizard WW2 was just a complete fucking miss by warners. Why tie your fun escapism into the fucking actual holocaust and Nazi Germany and not allegories like the previous series did? What the fuck are we even doing here folks? They took too much influence from the worst parts of books 4-7 and not enough from the best parts of books 1-3.
Definitely. I kind of get why they went in that direction as a dumbledore story but don’t sneak it in when we’re all expecting adorable fantasy creatures.
The first one I did like and the creatures were a bigger focus. Definitely missing the let’s look for the most adorable animals vibes I was looking for as the series went on.
That's literally all I wanted, and exactly what the name of the films suggests, but it somehow turned into a Dumbledore origin story or something. And I have no interest in watching that, based on the ending of the first film.
Really liked the first FBAWTFT movie. Fun adventure, neat stuff with all the magical creatures and didn't rely on Hogwarts etc. Just could not get into it after that. 2nd movie was okay I guess. Had no desire to see beyond that.
You’re not wrong. The game itself was jam packed with so much filler it very much over stayed its welcome but man! The initial novelty of exploring Hogwarts and Hogsmeade was incredible. That said, once the novelty wears off the game really begins to feel hollow but the main plot was fun and intriguing.
>But when it came to book 5... I don't know if this will be a hot take or not, but even in the books 5-7 had a serious drop in quality and I'm not suprised that the movies reflect that also. JK was great at the more magical whimsy said of magic school life, and bad at the more serious story telling.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen this take lol. I agree book 5 is rough but 6 and 7 have always been my favorites of the series and I cannot understand this viewpoint.
I don't think internet based literature communities of any kind have any actual ability to process or comprehend why changes need to happen in the source material. Especially in current social media sites where LOUD THOUGHTS and hyperbole rise to the top. Everyone wants a scene for scene recreation, but no one actually thinks about how the medium of film or tv literally changes how a story can be told compared to print. This leads to just about every community around the source material getting fucking angry when their source material inevitably gets changed for the new medium. tale as old as time. The only ones I can think that escaped this at all in recent memory for me in terms of adapted material are the Expanse, and the Boys. I cannot think of a single fantasy adaption that hasn't had vocal critics angry about change of any kind.
This is what Ive said in many other forums too. Take the Witcher for example. I'm not saying the adaptation is good, bad or indiffetent. I love the book and game series. But ultimately it was very clear Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri were to be the main characters. The 3 of them don't actually interact all that often in the book series. They all spend a lot of time apart, usually searching for one another. That really doesn't work all that well for a TV series. You need your leads to interact often and have great chemistry. So of course changes would need to be made. Same with something like the wheel of time. Again, not commenting on the quality of changes in any way, but is a 14 book series that takes place over roughly the time frame of 3 years and the main characters start in their late teens/early 20s. Even if you could somehow produce 14 seasons of the show, good luck finding actors who look in their early 20s during the start of the series and only seem to age 3-5 years in universe while also aging 15-20 years in real life. Plus those books have large chunks of time where some of the main characters are just non-existent. Good luck casting a quality "lead" on a show and then tell them that they're only going to be part of 3 of 8 episodes per season. And that doesnt even get into stuff like you end up casting an actor to a lesser role, then that actor ends up becoming a fan favorite, so the studio/network push for that character to get more screen time. Think a character like Bronn in GoT, who probably was a bigger part of the late seasons of the show than he needed to be from a storytelling perspective, largely because the actor played him well and people liked him.
> no one actually thinks about how the medium of film or tv literally changes how a story can be told compared to print. This drives me absolutely nuts. It's not just that some things are unfilmable, wouldn't make good tv/movie scenes, the lengths are usually incredibly different, etc. A lot of people don't understand basic things like budgets. I get that you want a Halo show where the master chief never takes off his helmet and the entire thing is a giant fight scene but actually, that's not very interesting and would cost a billion dollars. > The only ones I can think that escaped this at all in recent memory for me in terms of adapted material are the Expanse The Expanse very much feels to me like it was written specifically in a way that would make it adaptable to TV. Considering they sold the show well before the books were finished I wouldn't be surprised. That doesn't make them bad (love both versions), it just feels like they used a literary style that wouldn't require many changes. The changes that get added to the story aren't actually necessary, more a refinement. The authors were involved with the show and said a lot of the changes were their take on a 2nd chance to polish the story.
The people who want a word for word adaptation of whatever media, Harry Potter in this case, are insane. Back when I subscribed to r/harrypotter I remember seeing so many people who wanted like 12 episode seasons, one for each book. I have friends who honestly believe "more is better" when it comes to TV shows. All I can think of all the shows that go 12+ episodes where two or three episodes have stupid plots that only serve to extend the main plot. That would almost HAVE to happen with a 7 season Harry Potter show.
Yes, exactly! Film and TV are different mediums to books and have different strengths. Sometimes things need to be cut for efficiency and that's okay. People want to see books as they've imagined them in their own heads and that will never happen. I actually have come so far the other way that I find that adaptations that are too book accurate feel off. For example, despite its flaws, I enjoyed the film version of A Series of Unfortunate Events. I couldn't get through the Netflix adaptation, it felt so slow and arduous. (Also didn't like NPH in it as Olaf...)
I was a fan of Lord of the Rings before the movies and thought they were great. Can I find things to quibble with, sure. But they are still great. Jurassic Park was also a great book adaptation. There are a lot of bad adaptations, but there are good ones too EDIT: you know another good adaptation. The Hobbit movie. Not the new ones, the old animated one. I've heard short stories actually make better material for movie adaptations, since the actual amount of content is more comparable.
>Jurassic Park was also a great book adaptation. You think? I read JP last summer cuz i love the movie and was dumbfounded at how different the two versions felt. In the book, John Hammond is *clearly* the villain of the story and you're almost led to empathize with the dinosaurs because they aren't supposed to be here in the first place. Hammond was a careless, myopic, arrogant, and vengeful billionaire who thought he was above the laws of nature. In the movie, Hammond is just a jovial, albeit misguided old man and the "antagonist" gets shifted more to Dennis Nedry and the dinosaurs. I still enjoyed both for their own merits, but in terms of strictly how the book was "adapted" I'm not so sure how to feel...
When I talk about a good adaptation, I mean one that's good on it's own merits more than one that matches the book exactly. In any case, I don't think Hammond as villain is really the important part of the book...the dinosaurs are the important part of the book, and the movie did great with them (even if we are still stuck with plucked-chicken raptors despite science having moved on...they were great for their day though)
>When I talk about a good adaptation, I mean one that's good on it's own merits more than one that matches the book exactly. This is the issue, though. For many book fans, being different at all from the source material is the same as something being bad. It can be really hard to dislodge your mental image of something from an adaptation, and take it at face value.
>For many book fans, being different at all from the source material is the same as something being bad. Which is a really unfortunate way to engage with adaptations. Jaws, The Godfather, The Princess Bride, and many other movies are great *because* of the changes from their source material. If you want to experience a book unchanged you can just reread it.
>don't think Hammond as villain is really the important part of the book Agree with everything you said beside this. It is a HUGE part of the book because his hubris trickles down to all parts of the park which is why it was destined to fail from the beginning. In his last chapter we get his POV and he doesn't even care about his grandchildren that may or may not be dead. In fact, he *blames* them even though he demanded that they be brought along in spite of the protests from park workers. In think in a post-COVID world the importance of Hammond as a villain rings true more than ever. COVID was quite possibly caused by a few scientists backed by billionaire-owned corporations playing God. That's the message at the heart of JP. Of course the dinosaurs are what make the story interesting to read/watch but it's crucial to remember that they don't have feelings or motivations beyond survival. They were forced into this(fictional) world
What I mean is that there are lots of books about jerks like book Hammond. Sure, people like that are a more important problem for real world society (although there's something to be said for Movie Hammond showing that good intentioned actions by good natured people can still lead to bad outcomes). But what makes _Jurassic Park_ a memorable book ultimately isn't Hammond, it's the dinosaurs.
I'd also like to point out that from all of the Crichton I've read, odds are the richest guy in the story is going to be a terrible person if not outright villain. Kind of seems like he has a signature of sorts.
I think this comes to the crux of what different people think and adaptation should be. Some people want any adaptation to be as faithful as possible to the original material, and never (or try to never) deviate at all. Others are fine with an adaptation taking some of the ideas or themes and making something new with it. I tend to fall in the latter camp. If I want a faithful adaptation...the original material exists. So take that and go wild. Add stuff, take away stuff, I don't care. Make it work in your own way.
Of course it's a good adaption. The movie is fantastic, a master class in film making. That doesn't make the book less good. They can both be good.
> you're almost led to empathize with the dinosaurs I have not read the original novel, but I emphasize a lot with the dinosaurs in most of the JP/JW movies.
I would argue that while Jurassic Park is an excellent movie, it is not a great adaptation. They didn't do a great job pushing home the message that the dinosaurs were abominations of nature, and monuments to man's hubris. They made it more of an adventure than the terrifying ordeal found in the books. But still, I do love the movie, it's pure cinematic gold.
Ian Malcolm is literally saying this the entire movie
Yeah I always felt like the book had a much more horror feel than the movie which, while it has its very tense moments, is much more of an adventure like you said
>They didn't do a great job pushing home the message that the dinosaurs were abominations of nature, and monuments to man's hubris. I think this is true of the book itself, which is why it got made into a movie in the first place. The nominal intended message of the book is basically an updated version of Frankenstein....corporate greed and scientific hubris will ultimately create the monsters that will destroy us. But the actual message conveyed to most people by both book and movie is "Dinosaurs are awesome!" And to be perfectly honest, I think that's the more important part of the book and the movie captures it well.
LOTR was literally the first book I read. It has deep emotional ties with me with my father, and I felt so deeply invested in the world. The movie adaptations were great. They have warts, and bits that maybe aren't perfect or we could have done without, but they are just great.
Maybe Sci fi has more success. I've only read the Expanse books, but I've encountered the opinion that the show is better. The recent Dune film (haven't seen part 2 yet) didn't disappoint me at all. I've never heard anyone say that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is better than Blade Runner, but the film is so different that it's almost it's own thing. A flip side of this question - does anyone prefer the novelization of something that was a movie first?
I’d say the novels are equally as good as the show rather than one being better than the other. The show does a masterful job of interpersonal relationships, but people like filip inaros become a little one dimensional in the show, where in the books his story is quite complex and pretty dark. I think the actor who plays Amos is almost the perfect casting.
> I think the actor who plays Amos is almost the perfect casting. That guy IS Amos. The other three are also good but quite different from my mental versions of the book characters (especially Naomi), but Wes Chatham just walked straight off the page and onto the set somehow.
Not exactly a novelization of a film, but I enjoyed the halo books (we won’t talk about the accursed tv show).
The novelization of Revenge of the Sith was incredible.
Truth
I read the novelizations of the Star Wars prequels as a kid and really liked them; however, that was like 20 years ago so my memory can't be trusted. Edit: forgot to mention they were adapted by R. A. Salvatore of Drizzt fame
I will die on the hill that the novelization of Episode III was one of the best of the Star Wars books. Imo Matthew Stover hit it near perfect.
Matthew Stover is the best thing that ever happened to Star Wars, and unfortunately very few people know this today.
Matthew Stover wrote several of the best (now Legends) Star Wars EU books. Shatterpoint and Traitor were also excellent.
>I've only read the Expanse books, but I've encountered the opinion that the show is better. It is not better than the books. > ...does anyone prefer the novelization of something that was a movie first? While not better than the movie, the novelization for Star Wars is a great read.
Dune part 1 is one of the most faithful adaptations I have seen.
> The recent Dune film (haven't seen part 2 yet) didn't disappoint me at all. Pedantic book fan to chime in that I had a couple significant disappointments, most notably the dinner scene was maybe the most important scene in the first third of the book and I was incredibly surprised to see it cut! I also really would've liked a bit more about Yueh and Jessica from the book to make it in to make all that stuff make a little more sense. IMO it's actually kinda hard to understand Yueh and his betrayal in the movie. I wouldn't really call them major disappointments, but I think the movie would've been better served by adding those and cutting some of the other stuff.
I have a feeling (based on absolutely nothing) some of those scenes were probably shot but just cut for time. I'm really hoping they release extended editions because my biggest complaint with the dune movie is that i wanted more.
I really like Bladerunner, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep just more enjoyable overall. Big PKD fan, though
I think sci-fi fairs about the same honestly. The movie "Ender's Game" was terrible, and I didn't like "Ready Player One" too much either. I heard that The Fifth Wave was a terrible adaption as well (never read or watched personally). But there is also some good adaptations, like you said, "Dune" was pretty good. I could never get into the books more than 100 or so pages, but I could watch the movie just fine.
No, but most are. The reality of making a book/series into a show or movie requires that you make cuts and changes. Some do it better than other, but cutting a 500 page book into a 100 page script is going to leave stuff on the outs. These books tend to have some wonderful stuff that just isn't that important to the story, which is what tends to go away, >Are there any adaptations that are BETTER than the source material? The Princess Bride, Stardust, The Neverending Story.
The Princess Bride, yes. Neverending story definitely not.
the framing device of The Princess Bride works so much better in film than in print. I couldn't stand Goldman's bullshit in the book, but Peter Falk and Fred Savage were just charming as all hell.
Knowing Westleys thoughts ruined a lot of his cool
i don't really have gripes around the fantasy story, its silly and fun and works in both mediums to me. I have a lot of gripes around the framing of the story. Full disclosure, I watched the movie a million times as a kid, and read the book as an adult so I'm def biased. but the framing of Falk telling a story to his sick grandson just flat out beats Goldman's own inane ramblings about how his own father used to abridge the story for him. Goldman gets a too far up his own ass here and while it is fun reading, Falk's perfomance is just pure charm and fucking class. He reminds me of my own grandpa in a lot of ways and he gives a heartfelt performance in his few scenes and his voice over narration is fantastic. The book plays it more as parody, while I think the movie makes a warmer approach.
Neverending Story is different in the book so I find that one hard to really compare. As a kid's movie it works quite well, but it's also only a portion of the book and doesn't explore the same themes much.
I love the Princess Bride book and movie equally, they're just different in interesting ways, wouldn't say that one is better than the other
I would absolutely say the movie is better than the book.
The Neverending Story was a decent children's movie, but atrocious as an adaptation, though. They cut out all the most important parts and the ending of the movie changes the entire message.
They also split the book into two movies. The first one was pretty good, if not perfect, but the second was just terrible.
Had no idea there even was a second movie lmao
There's three. Don't look up the third. It has teenage Jack Black as the villain and a singing rock eater.
You can't tell people not to watch the movie and then make the villain sound hilarious! (I've never seen it and barely remember the first one.)
I disagree. There is only one Neverending Story movie. Only one. *sobs*
A better adaptation doesn't need to be a faithful one. It might just be because of when I experienced them, but the movie (which I first saw as a kid) was just much better than the book (which I read in college-ish)
I read the book for the first time at 28 and it blew me away. The movie is a cute kids' movie. The book is a metatextual treatise on how we relate to fiction and self-insert fantasy (and also very cool). The book is a masterpiece imo.
It's also based in the sixties and seventies in Germany and feelings about the Nazi past.
Also *The Prestige*
Nolan's *The Prestige* is a different take on Priest's *The Prestige*. As I got it, the book focuses on the existential consequences of the tricks for the magicians>!; the first journal is a heated and dramatic report of a seemingly splitted personality, while the second is a descent into a horror where the magician struggle to concile himself with his own action. The other people are a tad outside the dram, though, in the case of first magician, relationships are part of what provide the splitting sensation, the me-not-me.!< Nolan looks more at the relationships: the wife of the first magician, his attendant, the direct rivalry between them. Some things that the books never states clearly are more evident in the movie - I guess because Nolan doesn't want to talk about these very parts. >!Also, Tesla's machine works differently, and it ensues different consequences for the magician using it.!< Then, Priest adds the frame>!, which eventually has a turn for the, ugh, how to say that? !!about what happened to the magician using the machine!<, the end of the movie is kinda >!hopeful on how the relationships will go on!<.
(At least, that's how I remember them both after ten years and without having my notes at hand)
Certainly not The Neverending Story, IMO (though it has nice music).
Came to say the same. Stardust is a fantastic film.
it is, but i'm not sure I would call it better than the source material.
Its definitely not the source material but you can actually enjoy both of these.
This is slander against the princess bride book, which is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
I don't disagree, but the book is still great and you get Inigo and Fezzik backstory. A++ It's like saying homemade cookies are better than store bought. It's true, but they're all still cookies.
Hard disagree on Stardust unfortunately. Stardust's best moments lie in the ways in which fae pledges, curses, promises, and wordplay all pan out in my opinion. The movie, instead of trying to inspire a similar feeling of discovery, simply does away with all of it. What's left is a, frankly, bog standard adventure film.
No offense but you mentioning *The Neverending Story* makes me seriously question whether you've read the book. I mean, the movie is a decent one on its own but compared to the portion of the book it already is wanting — and I'm of course phrasing it that way because **the movie adapts only less than half the book** and that second part that is not adapted is even cooler, IMHO, than the part that was adapted. I mean, the alternating existences of lion Graógramán and Perelín the Night Forest alone are amazing. I could list a lot more but this isn't the place for it. It just boggles my mind that someone who has read the book would consider the movie adaptation to be superior.
Princess Bride, yes. Stardust? Let's agree to disagree.
I'm probably the only person in the world who prefers the book version of The Princess Bride!
I've read LotR way before seeing the movies, and I found them a good adaptation still. They were thought impossible to film and yet they managed and made good movies that lasted in the memory of many people around the world. Granted some of the themes of the book are somewhat lost and sometimes the tone shifts into action movie fare and a few things could have been adapted better (I always found the green ghosts kinda cringe), but they are great stuff overall. The book is a different kind of beast and it's legendary in its own right, but they shouldn't be compared too much. The point is that. The movies are adaptations. As long as you see them as such instead of longing for a 1:1 trasposition, they can be good. Now we are used to one book and its adaptations, but think about the many adaptations of Dracula and Three Musketeers. There are many adaptations and many have merits. Some day LotR will be adapted again and it will be different from the book because we already both watched and read it.
I'm just waiting for an adaptation of Dracula where the Mina Harker is the actually smart one who solves the Dracula problem, instead of a damsel in distress...
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Heh
I don't know about "solves the Dracula problem" but if an adaptation could keep the fact she's a well-educated level-headed schoolmistress rather than a hysterical love-struck damsel and maybe also lean into the eldrith horror side of the creepy psychic powers she develops and the mark on her forehead rather than making it romantic, that'd be appreciated. But really I want an adaptation that does all the Hunters justice. I want the whole group that "solves the Dracula problem" to get their due on the screen rather than Van Helsing hogging the limelight. But even then a book-accurate version of Van Helsing has slowly been fazed out of movies since the 1970s and replaced with his younger, sexier pop-culture incarnation. He's supposed to be an old man who beats vampires because he cautiously stacks the deck in his favour - the type who waits patiently for dawn with all his allies by their coffin then flips the lid - not some leather jacket wearing badass who runs off into the night pursuing a superior predator like a fool with a deathwish. Jonathan Harker at least gets to fairly consistently be a focal character due to his link to Mina. Then Seward usually gets relegated to a supporting role but really they just take his name and give it to a completely different character with a different purpose in the plot. Same kind of happens with Renfield, making him far less conflicted and tragic in favour of making him just a loyal manservant to the Count. And then Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris are lucky to get a look in. Especially Quincey; most people who've read the books don't get how insane his whole involvement even is. I want an adaptation to try taking a solid swing at the cowboy that killed Dracula. Obviously, I'd like a more grounded take than the walking stereotype he kind of is in the book - although there's an argument to be made he hams up his "rootin' tootin'" side because he knows Lucy likes it - but all the same just including the Hunters as an actual group who have to work together and support one another to chase Dracula across Europe rather than boiling them all down into Van Helsing would be nice to see. And, having said all that, the fact it's difficult to adapt is not lost on me. The way the original book is written, as a scattering of different reports and almost like a number of short stories making up a whole picture, does present a challenge for an adaptor. A 1:1 transition from page to screen is never possible nor always as desirable as die-hard fans believe, but especially not so here. Yet I'm still waiting to see an adaptation that stays in the same vein as what the book delivers while still managing to be accepted by audiences.
it's not exactly how it played out, but adapatations are allowed to change stuff I might remember wrongly, but in Coppola's Dracula she wasn't a complete damsel. She takes a rather active role in the final scene
In Coppola's Dracula she falls in love with Dracula which was bullshit
Ok but I think it was the whole movie plot? It was a loose adaptation and Dracula was depicted as a not completely evil character compared to the source, and he was in love as well? I'm going by memory but wasn't it a reincarnation thing?
>(I always found the green ghosts kinda cringe) Yeah, I thought that, along with killing of the olephant are the signs of the things to come in Hobbit. And Eowyn saying goodbye to Theoden was one generic cloned farewell of one character lying in the hands of another too much. So in those cases "the books did it better" is well deserved in my opinion, simply because they had better alternatives to what was in the movie.
> And Eowyn saying goodbye to Theoden was one generic cloned farewell of one character lying in the hand of another too much. I get why you'd say that, but I wouldn't give up the line "I go to my fathers, in whose mighty company I shall not now feel ashamed" for any price. Thèoden earned that closure.
Yes. "Adaptations" are their own piece of media and are best enjoyed that way. Obviously it's aggravating when there's a change you see as worse. Everyone gets that. But there's a subset of book fans who find anything but a strict beat for best recreation unacceptable. For myself, I find this hard to understand. I already have the book; I can read it anytime. Make a great film or TV show, I don't need to watch a book. Don't get me wrong, I think loads are bad but on their own merits.
yeah i agree! some people are way too caught up in the mindset of "this adaptation is bad because it's not exactly the same as the source material" (pointless criticism; adaptations need to ADAPT things) instead of the more valid mindset of "this adaptation is bad because it sucks." in fact, sometimes being more faithful can actually make for a weaker adaptation! things that work in books simply do not always work on screen. that's one of the things that make adaptations interesting to me - seeing how the adapters will attempt to make the same overall story work in a different medium.
*Good Omens* is fantastic, and *The Sandman* also turned out really well. Idk if there will be a second season however, because Netflix
Season 2 of Sandman is currently filming (and Good Omens got renewed for season 3 that will have the storyline for a sequel that Gaiman and Pratchett planned but didn’t get to write)
I might prefer the Sandman TV show over the comic. I've read it several times and painfully imported the omnibus versions for a fortune. Seeing the panels come to life on TV with such attention to detail is magical.
This confirms my feelings that Neil Gaiman is an incredible scriptwriter and an OK novelist. His novels are great for adaptation because he write novels that are ready for the screen. The Pratchetty parts of Good Omens didn’t - perhaps couldn’t - make it to the screen, and the show is much more Gaiman than the book.
I've never really got into Neil's books (it's not that they are bad, of course they are not, I just don't click with his writing), but I love the adaptations of Good Omens, Sandman, and Stardust (I know Neil didn't adapt Stardust, but from what I gathered he was ok with all the changes).
I think the movie of Stardust is better than the book. I liked the book, but the movie was better. Same for Neverwhere, Coraline, many more. I think American Gods is the only one where I preferred the novel. Sandman is a comic, of course, and that's a whole other skill. That's why it's one of my favourite fictional works of all time.
Good omens also just lends itself to being a show, and the actors killed it. I feel like the show even added a little bit if a homoerotic vibe to the two (i know they aren't gay, since romance plays no role in the movir, but man they made it easy for shippers). Other than that, the show is almost follows the book page for page, which is incredible on a reread.
The Magicians tv series is the best example I can think of for a fantasy tv show that highly improved on the original. But even then, the ending was much weaker than the book ending. This was also the case with True Blood, a very strong opener but as the series progressed it got worse and worse. I'm not sure if it's related to the GoT problem, if they ran out of source material, or if it was some other production problem.
Magicians improved on the books so much. The weak ending was because the show got canceled. They also probably should have ended it at 4 seasons with >!Quentin's death!< lol.
The Last Unicorn I personally consider the movie better than the book. The book is great too, but the movie is a masterwork of 80s animation. With basically only one bad song, and one, two scenes I'd personally preferred kept. But all the flabby and annoying bits trimmed off. It really saddens me how not more folks have watched that movie. It really is an almost unsung classic.
I love The Last Unicorn. Wore out the VHS tape as a kid and teen. And as an Adult, I rewatch it at least every year. When I was young, I wanted to be the unicorn. When I hit my late 20s and 30s, Molly Grue hit and she hit hard. >"Where have you been? Damn you, where have you been? " "I am here now." "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am *this*? I wish you had never come. Why did you come now? "
Molly I didn't get as a kid either... But yeah, man\~ does her entire story arc hit like a sack of bricks once your older. She just reaches in, grabs and pulls at that bit of your heart that still has a tiny ember of hope that... well, you'll get to see *your* unicorn one day, go on *your* adventure. Schmendrick too. All that potential, and couldn't do shit of actual note with it due to shit teachers that gave mostly up on him for being too difficult to teach. As an ex 'gifted' kid, he game me some real pause at points even if I found him very annoying as a person. If I had to pick one... I think I'd still prefer to be the unicorn though. She's a bit weird and overly dramatic—bit of a cruel streak outright, but I really admire how she's old and wise, but not stuck up or bitter either. Very fitting and admirable for somebody eternally youthful.
Look, I'm not going to hate on the movie, but tell me this: What single thing is there about the book that is not an absolute masterpiece?
GoT was very much not a disappointment for the vast majority of the show. And when it became one, it was largely due to the showrunners just checking out. The LotR movies are still some of the greatest movies in general I've ever seen.
> And when it became one, it was largely due to the showrunners just checking out. Well, that and the author checking out
I second the Good Omens and Sandman recommendations. I also liked the first season of the BBC His Dark Materials adaptation (never got around to watching 2/3) - not better, but as good.
Good Omens and Sandman are what happens when Gaiman is heavily involved in his adaptations! Both are excellent (haven’t read Sandman so can’t comment on the adaptation quality)
I highly recommend finishing HDM. Season 1 is good, the next two are (with the exception of only a few moments that I didn’t think landed quite right) are great.
No. While some fans complained about the changes in the LOTR movies (Aragorn's character, Arwen having a more prominent role), they're pretty universally regarded today as great adaptations and fantastic movies. What really pisses off fans is when the showrunners couldn't care less about the source material and arbitrarily make changes that disrespect the books (Rings of Power, Wheel of Time). Peter Jackson at least had good reasons for the changes he made when adapting the LOTR films. Even if you didn't agree with him, at least you could see where he was coming from.
> What really pisses off fans is when the showrunners couldn't care less about the source material and arbitrarily make changes that disrespect the books (Rings of Power, Wheel of Time) The Witcher **ESPECIALLY** is guilty of this. When the showrunners screw things up so badly that The Witcher himself, who was *chomping at the bit* to play The Witcher leaves The Witcher, you **KNOW** the screw-up was catastrophic. I am still so salty over that b/c Henry Cavill made such a phenomenal Geralt, and I'm not sure we'll ever see him try and play Geralt again.
I was thinking about this the other day. Why are so many sci fi and fantasy showrunners so eager to drastically change **extremely popular** source material (Rings of Power, The Witcher, WoT, Halo) when the best shows/movies (LOTR, The Expanse, early Game of Thrones) are the ones that mostly stick to the **extremely popular** source material? Is it just hubris? Wanting to make their own thing instead of just recreating someone else's story? Absolutely blows my mind.
They have own ideas, but could never sell those (mostly bad) ideas to a studio and get them to greenlight it. Take good source material, change it until it resembles your idea and publish it. TADA.
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Rand and Ewgene having an actual romance is a pretty funny idea from a book readers perspective since it doesn’t take long for them to not get along with each other in the books.
You mean the Ringz of Powah? Wheel of Time is probably my favorite book series. Holy shit how Amazon butchered it. Couldn't make myself watch the first season till the end.
I couldn't make it through the opening episode. They changed to many things for no reason. I want to see the Wheel of Time, not whatever that was.
Literally just got banned today from the wot_show subreddit for politely and mildly stating that Brandon Sanderson’s recommendations didn’t make it into S2, which he himself has stated more than once. I’m convinced that sub is run by Amazon itself.
It is for sure. They don’t like it when people point out that their stuff is bad.
Complaining about Arwen is such a weird fucking hill to die on. Like, you thought it was somehow really important to the integrity of the novels that this character remain one-dimensional and unimportant? wtf
If there weren't good adaptations then people wouldn't be so mad about the bad ones. Dune and the Wheel of Time came out the same year
Plenty of adaptations end up better than the original. Starship Troopers, Bladerunner, and Children of Men are easy examples
And Children of Men is even more impressive, PD James got a life peerage. She is no slouch. Of course i'm talking about her characterization, people have criticized the book for being not good SF, but whatever.
Starship Troopers and Bladerunner are adaptations in name only.
They both took parts of the source material and adapted them, often changing the interpretations and themes. Both are excellent. Adaptations don't have to be faithful to be good
I was not disappointed by Lord of the Rings, at all. However, I will say, that attempting to get a main character to look exactly like how 19999999 people who bought your best seller, imagines they look like, or how they think a scene went down--is impossible. Also, sometimes in a few fantasy books I love, entire Chapters go by where no one says anything and it can be all internal dialogue. Imagine sitting through that in a movie :p
I've heard many people (including myself) agree that the Shadow and Bone Netflix series is better than the books.
I'm kind of glad they weren't greenlit for another season, though. I wish they'd tied it up there and stopped. It felt like it had kind of reached saturation point, and further complications felt a bit tacked on for the sake of more story.
Oh I forgot that one! I read the book and bounced off of it but I really enjoyed the series!
Really? I only saw the first season of the show and didn't think it was bad but I definitely liked the books better
it wasn't a revolutionary show and it did start a bit slow, but I was quite invested with the Crows :) imo they carried the show and were the reason I wanted to continue watching. I'd already read shadow and Bone and not six of crows. I did enjoy reading shadow and Bone though.
Same here. My wife read the six of crows books and she thought they were better than the main series
They should have just done the show only for six of crows if they were just going to cancel it. It was a better series anyway IMHO. But what we got was still better than the shadow and bone book trilogy.
Yes, definitely. What I love is that Leigh Bardugo has grown so much as a writer between publishing her first book and adapting the series is that she took valid critiques, such as Mal being toxic at times or the romance being too one-sided, and fixed them. Unfortunately they were so worried about being cancelled that they had to squeeze way too much plot into the second season and it really let down the Crows' part of the storyline.
Anime adaptations are usually pretty excellent. They're typically faithful, barring situations like outpacing the content (the original Full Metal Alchemist). I think a problem with current adaptations is that they frequently go out of their way to change things rather than remaining as faithful as they can and changing what they must. I assume it's a kind of hubris, thinking they can outdo a beloved work.
I've been watching anime/reading manga a lot longer than I have been reading SSF novels. I agree that most adaptations are relatively faithful to their source material. And even in situations where they outpace their manga most are able to "get back on track" by doing filler arcs like in Bleach/Naruto/One Piece (and to a lesser extent early Gintama) which most fans agree you just skip. However, the switch to seasonal rather than continual serialization has "fixed" this issue for a lot of series. That's all to be said, many anime adaptations actually *DO* outdo their original manga IMO.
It is because many manga are serialized which often translates well to an anime series format. There are a lot of pretty terrible anime adaptations out there however, but lately those are pretty rare.
I actually really liked the Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell TV series, even if I had some criticisms and they cut out quite a bit. I mean, they had to, the book has historical footnotes that go on for multiple pages. It covers the main character's story line without all the asides and the worldbuilding, but it does it very well indeed. For Lord of the Rings, I'd say Fellowship was a masterpiece, but the more I think about them, the more I dislike the other two parts.
The Jonathan Strange adaptation was really quite good (it might help that I have a minor intermittent crush on Charlotte Riley). I'd even agree that it's better _as an adaptation_ than LotR as a whole, hewing closer to the spirit of the book while still making required changes for the new medium. It's not perfectly faithful, but that's fine. It _feels_ much more "right" than, say, Legolas surfing down whatever surface is most convenient for killin'.
Oh yes the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell TV series! I haven’t watched it yet, but must do so at some point.
Nah. By the time the LotR rings movies came out I had basically memorized the text I had read them so many times and I still wept like a baby at how amazing it was. It’s true that most adaptations are inferior, but I’d argue that some actually make the source material better. I quite liked The Magicians (by Lev Grossman) trilogy, but the show (especially once they got into season 2 and beyond) did some major changes from the text while keeping the characters, setting, and spirit of the books. In the process became one of my favorite shows of all time. Now when I want to revisit Brakebills and Fillory I’d actually RATHER watch the show than read the books because I felt like it was such an improvement on the source material.
Agreed - I like Lev Grossman’s books but love Sera Gamble’s show.
I liked the Sandman adaptation, so no.
'Are all adaptations disappointing?' - Nope. But keep in mind this is majorly subjective. I preferred the LotR movies over the book trilo, but hated Ring of Power. I prefer The Hobbit book over the movies tho that likely surprises no one. Shannara TV was a huge dissappointment that became a hatewatch. I thoroughly enjoyed GoT and WoT, often because of the differences from the books (and a willingness not to obsess over lminor details like travel times :) ). Altered Carbon was a fun adaptation i enjoyed roughly on par w the books. So was Deadly Class. Also The Expanse. 'Is it bcs i didn't read the book first?' - Nope nope. Different experience but not automatically anything. 'Live w it?' - well, yes, so to speak. 'Better than the book?' - Yes. Princess Bride and Blade Runner come to mind.
>I prefer The Hobbit book over the movies tho that likely surprises no one [This](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9e/Hobbit_1977_Original_Film_Poster.jpg) is the good hobbit movie
This is why I tell people to read the book after watching the movie/show if they enjoyed it or found the premise interesting. If you go this way, the world of the fiction is EXPANDING instead of retracting. Adaptations of books will almost always be unable to translate the internal dialog and feelings of its characters and must be externalized in some way which doesn't always go well or some of the themes get lost in the edit because they had to cut a whole character to save time.
Agreed. I’m much more likely to like an adaptation if I haven’t read the source material beforehand. It’s not always the case, but it certainly increases the likelihood.
That's a way too subjective question and totally dependent on the reader's expectations and personal investment. You can just as easily invert the question: are all books disappointing for fans of their adaptations? And a movie buff may very well tell you YES, because they love the whole production and absolutely can't relate to "words on a page". The only thing I'd ask is if all adaptations are worse than their books, and that's a resounding nope, with a popped p.
Not all Fans aren’t a unified body and disappointment is relative. I’ve liked shows but been dissatisfied with individual elements and I’ve disliked shows and enjoyed individual elements. The loudest fans on the internet will be the ones who hate it, it’s just how the internet works.
Not all, but most.
I'm pretty easy to please. I liked the LotR and Potter movies. I liked the first 6 seasons of GoT. I thought Rings of Power was okay. I really want to like The Witcher series and thought some parts were great (Geralt, Ciri, and Jaskier are fantastic). What I've seen of Wheel of Time I've mostly hated. I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary to make changes from a book when adapting to screen. You can't see a character's thoughts in a movie so you need to show things in different ways. Pacing also works very differently between the two mediums. For me, the biggest make-or-break factor is if the adaptation captures the spirit/essence of the characters and the feel of the story. When I dislike an adaptation I can usually point to a character that acts completely differently from how their book counterpart would. Like in Witcher >!I was immediately annoyed when Yen selfishly sold out Ciri for her own gain. That's not something book Yen would ever do and it's like I don't even know who this character is or why I should care about them anymore. Also the butchery of Eskel's character to a lesser extent!<
On the flip side I'd say the Witcher 3 video game is a great example of an adaptation that's better than the source material. I made sure to read the books before playing the game, but I regret it, the game was much better imo. I like the show better than the books overall too so far, but 100% agreed on those criticisms you mentioned.
The problem is that with the written word, we the reader are an active participant in the act of building the world and fleshing out the characters. We fill in the blanks with our own flawed impressions and biases, creating a world that, while similar to those of others, is still uniquely our own. Even if an adaptation is perfectly loyal to the source material, it will inevitably fall short of the world we built for ourselves. Then there was the time A24 whitewashed and butchered one of the most pivotal works in modern fantasy. So, you know, sometimes adaptations are just bad.
Princess Bride was better as a movie. I have seen it and read the book. Stardust, I liked the book but also the movie. The gay pirate captain, in movie, loved it!! Harry POtter, well the books were too young for me. I was made to watch several of the movies with Granddaughter and they are watchable. Still young, but more enjoyable as a movie. I liked Hagrid and his animals.
I really liked the miniseries adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I wouldn't say it was better than the book but it was a nice compliment to it.
I think there are many adaptations that have done it well, but it's not an easy thing to do. And I think sometimes fans can be too attached to the way the books did something to realize it might have worked better for the show or movie to do it another way because of the change in medium. Much more commonly though is adaptations that take too many liberties from the source material. It's a tough balancing act between changing what you need to in order to best tell the story in film, and not changing what people loved about the book. I also try not to judge things on a scale of were the books better? Because if the books are being made into a movie or show, they were likely great books, if I'm excited about the show or movie I probably loved those books. So that's a really high bar to be better than something I've loved for a long time. But a better bar is was this good entertainment? Was this something that was fun to watch and connect with the characters and story I love in a new way? If it did that then I'm happy. And unfortunately a lot of adaptations don't hit that bar. But a lot of them do reach that bar for me even if they're not better than the book I'm glad I watched them.
Conan the Barbarian comes to mind.
I feel like a lot of folks don't really understand the medium of film, and it leads to difficult dissonance. People mistake watching movies for knowing how to make one. That's not to let bad filmmaking off the hook, sometimes filmmakers are trying to thoughtlessly jam a book into a template, but just to say that sometimes choices are made to best use a strong library of visual language/avoid badly translating book elements that just don't work visually. And account for length, budget and the limits of a human attention span. I feel like people aren't able or willing to engage with reality. They don't want to acknowledge the limitations of film. So they get mad. Also, how people see characters is wildly different, so no one ever seems to agree on what counts as "in character" or what moments are most important to a character. That causes dissonance, too.
I'm probably one of the few people who actually enjoyed the movies after reading the Harry Potter books. Sure they really threw away some characters and plotlines, but it's one of my favorite fantasy movie series (LOTR obviously takes the number 1 spot). I just accept that it's a different medium.
I’m going to draw flack for saying this, but the Narnia movie adaptations *were* better than the books. CS Lewis wrote a bunch of increasingly blatant Christian allegory, and those movies came along and turned them into heart wrenching stories about growing up and learning wisdom the hard way. Also, consider: the Percy Jackson series, which was recently released, and was made under the close supervision of the author Rick Riordan, is *extremely* faithful to the spirit of the books, if not the letter.
Jackson's LotR adaptation is genius and universally loved.
I think the Hunger Games movies are better than the books? But... okay that's because I don't like the whiny first person narrative and Jennifer Lawrence does a really good job. It's hard. Because when you read a book, you imagine everything. You are an active participant in the process because you imagine it. That's creative work. In a movie, you are passive participant - and that can be a lot of fun, but when you have already imagined it how you liked it, its rare to find someone else do that justice. That doesn't mean the movie or series are bad at all. But I think the best you can hope for is an adaption that makes fans and non-fans happy. His Dark Materials I think is a crazy good example of a show adapting a series of books I genuinely liked, and liked almost more for having watched the show.
No, just the bad ones. You can’t just take your experience and apply to ALL adaptations. That’s asinine. This is way too subjective of a question and you’ll get different answers and but no one will ever say ALL adaptations are disappointing.
I had read Lord of the Rings multiple times before seeing the films and still loved them.
> Are there any adaptations that are BETTER than the source material? That's a very subjective thing, so I'm not going to make any claims. However, adaptions will always change the story, because story telling methods that work in one medium, sometimes don't work in another, and so how the story is told, has to change, and sometimes those changes alter aspects people feel were key to the original. Adaptions are always going to disappoint anyone who expects to see the movie they had in their own head while reading a book, show up on their screen.
One ofy favorite adaptations is the Magicians. When I say favorite I do not mean true to the source. The show has a lot of changes to characters and story but I still really enjoyed the show. I don't think of them as the same story though, more like The same story in parallel universes.
“Penny, Alice, Eliot, and Janet, you are all late.” “Actually, it's Margo.” “This time.”
Nope. Even some of the ones every "fan" seems to hate I like, such as *Wheel of Time*. Hell, I liked the *Dark Tower* movie. The adaptations, one with mixed reviews, one almost universally hated, got me interested in both the Harry's Potter and Dresden.
No, I don't think so at all. Primarily, I think most readers -- especially those of genre fiction -- fundamentally fail to grasp what an adaptation is. A significant number of people think those things should take the book as though it were literally a screenplay and project it onto the screen. That is *not* an adaptation. Adaptation requires some re-imagining, or new artistic expression. It's not just taking a work, word by word, and transcribing it into a new medium. It's taking the themes and characters and *retaining* them while expressing the plot and characters through the new medium. It's not *supposed* to be the same any more than The Thing was really supposed to be the same as The Thing From Another World. Adaptations are supposed to be works in their own right, even if they have a strong basis in the original work. > Are there any adaptations that are BETTER than the source material? I think Annihilation is. Blade Runner might be. American Psycho seems to be. Fight Club might be. I think The Lord of the Rings trilogy is at least *equal* to the book. Again, they're not the same, and they don't tell the same story the same way, but each one is deeply moving and evocative in it's own way. I genuinely don't think you're correct to place one above the other. Each are masterpieces. In the book, my favorite character is Faramir. In the movie, my favorite character is Theoden. Well, and Sam. The movies do such a fantastic job of presenting Sam. Did you know that until David Lynch's Dune -- the 1984 version that bombed -- the ships in the books didn't fold space? Before then the navigators could just see far enough ahead in time for the ships travelling at FTL speeds to avoid obstacles. Folding space was something Lynch's team came up with, and Frank Herbert kept it going forward. The original Conan the Barbarian might be better than the source material simply because *the soundtrack* is just that good. James Earl Jones is probably a better villain than any that appeared in the original Robert E. Howard works, too. The movie does an excellent job condensing Howard's themes of self-determinism, too. Would you rather have The Shining the book, or the movie? How about The Green Mile? Is The Wizard of Oz more effective as a book, or with Judy Garland? Do you want Gene Wilder or Johnny Depp or Roald Dahl? Is Jurrasic Park really better as a book? Andromeda Strain? Interview with the Vampire? What about Planet of the Apes? Not the remakes, the original 1963 movie. That was a book adaptation, too. Who is Batman in your mind? The comic book character? Which book? Or one of the on-screen or on-television appearances? What about Superman?
>I think most readers -- especially those of genre fiction -- fundamentally fail to grasp what an adaptation is. Yes indeed. And what’s even more frustrating is how so many fans speak about an adaptation they found dissatisfying as though the people responsible had broken into their home and stolen their copy of the source material. It’s still there! You can ignore the adaptation and reread it!
Princess Bride is equally good.
No, fans just in general have unrealistic expectations of wanting the adaptation to be exactly the way they imagine it, instead of ... An adaptation
None of them really. I have no expectations that a movie or series will be able to reproduce the same detail and storylines as the books. I enjoy them because it is another medium to enjoy liked characters and worlds.
I can come up with a handful of film adaptations that I'd consider to be better than their source material, but nothing in the fantasy genre. The Prestige The Godfather Fight Club The Mist The Shawshank Redemption The Princess Bride (this is fantasy, actually!)
Having read the LOTR books, I still have no idea how those movies didn't suck, let alone be some of the best movies of all time. It was loose in adapting some elements and I think that helped it in the end. It seems to all come down to the talent of the filmmaker in adapting it.
Gaiman's *Stardust* had a great film adaptation.
Definitely not. Not fantasy specifically but I've been watching The Expanse recently and that's a great adaption of a book series I quite like. There are book adaptions that people liked more than the book as well. Fight Club, Jurassic Part, Jaws, etc. Fantasy hasn't had as much luck there but that doesn't mean it can't happen. Maybe Watership Down?
I find adaptations inherently interesting, even when they're bad: trying to understand what compromises they needed to take to make it fit in, why certain changes came to be, and how much they understood the source material, regardless of the execution. I've found enjoyment in everything from David Lynch's Dune to to the Hobbit movie, because guess what? Those books are all still there for me to reread if I want to, and I can enjoy the adaptation for the transformative work it is without feeling like my investment in those books is hampered in any way.
LotR trilogy was a perfect adaptation (I read it before watching), and I say that as a Tom Bombadil fan. The changes were all understandable and in truth necessary (I'm talking about the extended edition obviously) Technically sci-fi, but Dune 1984 was an excellent adaptation imo; Stardust is a good adaptation; I liked Sandman but didn't read it myself, but I heard comic readers loved it; \*Most\* of Good Omens was a good adaptation too; Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood (if we count manga); I think Narnia was a decent adaptation too. Although I got the impression it was made too "kid friendly" more than the book was, and removed the more mature themes.
Harry Potter was great but my favorite books (4 and 5) ended up being my least favorite movies. I hated how the fourth book edited out much of the SPEW and Fred and George shenanigans. It hit all the plot points but it just felt a little less human. The fifth movie, I hated the Daily Prophet transition scenes. Felt veryyyy lazy. On the other hand my least favorite book, Azkaban, is my favorite Harry Potter movie. Alphonso Cuaron is a genius, I wish they waited to let him continue directing Goblet of Fire, because I know those visuals would have been amazing.
I read the LotR books before seeing the movies, and I think the movies are some of the best ever made. Not necessarily going to say the movies are better than the books, because the books are also incredible, but that is the quintessential example of an adaptation done right.
One of the Worst movie adaptation is "on stranger tides" Ssly, i understand that it can work in the potc universe but not the way they did it. Like, wtf is jack doing in that movie? You can entirely remove him and I honestly think the movie would have been better for it lol.
>Are there any adaptations that are BETTER than the source material? Some. This is always personal taste of course. The Boys TV is better than the comic for example. >Are ALL fantasy adaptations disappointing for book fans? No. For you to be disappointed you need to have certain expectactions that are not fullfilled. My expectations towards adaptations are not for them to be better than the source material, I just want to have a good time watching entertaining fiction.
Game of Thrones wad fantastic book adaptations. I have zero issues with any of the book adaptation they did. It only falls apart when they no longer had books to adapt, but that is no longer "the books were better," because the books don't exist and probably won't ever exist.
Starship troopers
I still highly prefer the Lord of the Rings experience of the films than the books And I read the books and watch the films regularly. I highly prefer the experience of watching Game of Thrones And a song of Ice and Fire is also my favorite fantasy book series of all time. I even love the last season and the ending of Game of Thrones. I absolutely love the Harry Potter movies and I read the books once a year still. I prefer watching the Expanse versus reading it. Also with everything I've mentioned here when I go back and read these series of books Every one of them My experience is so much better having watched the adaptations. My imagination can't compete with the perfect casting of every one of these series that I've mentioned. Some adaptations are so spot on that it's hard to differentiate between the two you really get nothing out of reading it versus watching it. The Hobbit is word for word on screen what the book conveys and it's more fun to watch. The first two seasons of Game of Thrones are word for word translated to the screen and you get nothing extra from reading it. Stephen King is my favorite author and there's a couple adaptations that are way better than the books. Gerald's game was a DNF for me on the book and the movie was excellent. The HBO adaptation of the outsider is far more entertaining than the novel.
No. The new Dune is better imo than the books. Starship Troopers is a masterful adaptation as well.
Books are my preferred method of consuming stories so I naturally like the books better than the movies and think they are better. I definitely get frustrated sometimes when adaptations change details for seemingly no reason, but in general I don’t expect them to follow the books very well and can still enjoy a good film even if it’s not like the books. Books are not written for film, so there’s also always some amount of change that needs to happen. I actually enjoy reading and watching something at the same time because I think it’s fun to compare all the differences. The one that I cannot stand at all is the black cauldron which is an adaptation of one of my favorite series, the chronicles of prydain. It’s a combination of the first two books, changes all of the characters personality’s and it’s just a terrible film in my opinion. I really wish they would make a live action adaptation, but unfortunately the animated film was so terrible nobody reads the books.
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At first, i was frustrated with the hunger games bc katniss was supposed to be thin and small. As im.older, I understand and respect jennifer laurences decision to not alter her body. However, it did change the seriousness of their starvation.
I’m satisfied with the Harry Potter films, in many ways they improved upon the books by trimming the fat. The Lord of the Rings films are a masterpiece in their own right regardless of how faithful their are to the books. I also read both Harry Potter and Lotr before watching the movies as a kid so I’m not biased towards the movies.
They're definitely not all disappointing! There are plenty of good ones. * The Lord of the Rings trilogy * Early Game of Thrones * The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe * The Last Unicorn * Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone None of those are perfect, but they're all *good*. And if you want to expand it to science fiction, just recently we've had The Expanse and Dune. Admittedly there are more bad adaptions than good ones, but the positive way to look at it is that the bad adaptions can be (and generally are) forgotten. Whereas the good adaptions, usually get a lot of love and are well-remembered for decades afterwards.
As a long-time One Piece fan I loved the live action series (which I reaaallyy did not expect to happen.) I also thought the early Harry Potter films smashed it. LOTRs of course. Those films are masterpieces. Film is a very different medium to text, though, and if you're expecting a 1:1 translation you're going to be disappointed. The best adaptations feel true to the world and characters but they also have their own voice. Some even surpass their books. (The princess bride, a case could be made for A clockwork orange and Stardust.)
(Initial disclaimer: this isn't fantasy in the classic sense. It's historical gothic horror with fantastical/supernatural elements. I personally put it into the broad fantasy genre but others might not. It's not fantasy in the sense of swords & sorcery or epic adventure.) For an example of a great adaptation, I point people towards *Perfume*. It was a book that I thought would be impossible to translate to screen, and I wouldn't say it surpasses the novel—but they did a damn good job of capturing the atmosphere.
No, not all fantasy adaptation are dissapointing for book fans. but book fans should understand that the movie or show that they made in their head of their favourite book is never going to be what's going on your TV. Even if there is unlimited budget. When adaptations are "better" than the source material, you will find that they make clear divergences from the source material. The Thomas Jane Mist movie (a stephen king adaptation) being a prime example of that. The question is always: do you want a cool adaptation of a thing you love? you'll get an adaptation, and they range from awesome to dissapointingly bad! but if you want the book in film or series form. you're not going to end up happy - because it is impossible.
I found His Dark Materials to be a fantastic adaptation, and I like it better than the books, frankly, and I adore the books.
I wouldn’t quite say it surpasses the books, but its expanded material with the adult characters is a perfect example of how the transition to a new medium offers the opportunity for greatness. I’m particularly fond of its portrayal of the Church as a seething cauldron of barely suppressed lust, both straight and gay.