Spoiler Why do studios leave the source material?

I just don’t get it.
Can someone please explain to me why.
Why start a series or a movie on an existing game, book or whatever. When the studios had no intention of keeping with the same story.
Why not just come up with your own series and movies. Why have a background your never planning to use.
Why!
There must be a reason.
I must be missing something.
Please help me understand.
The Wheel of Time
Rings of Power
Witcher
Dude WTF.
Does anyone understand why this happens?

 

Becuz of money

 

Apart from genuine ability to replicate a scene because it would cost money or a lack of resources.
the other reason is director's ego they have a need to add their own style and view to the movie or tv show just because.
then there are other factors like fitting a large portion of a book into a 2hr movie which means cutting out a lot same goes for these new TV series that only have 6-12 episodes instead of 24-50ep.

Most companies that sponsor these works don't really care about the movie they just care about using the fame/title of the book to get ppl to buy a movie ticket that alone makes them 10-20 times the cost of the movie.

The best example is Final fantasy spirits within that trash used the title for a trash movie, but they gained millions from just the sales.

 

But Dude!
Of course things cost money, but dude a lot of it doesn’t have anything crazy that needs to be seen. Besides before movies went ballistic on gore. A director had to get the audience to believe or imagined something behind the scenes. Back in the day. The movie would show a person being strangled in shadows. Instead of actually cutting his throat. You didn’t need a person guts spilling out. So let me get this straight. Your telling me directors have been so terrible train. They can not create anything without special effects? Than that director needs to be blacklisted.
As to content. Dude half or more of the content isn’t even in the games or stories. So the whole squeezing down a book to fit a show or a movie is BS.
As to sponsors. Well that maybe true, but still.
Why use an existing title. You want to build something. Fine, but don’t plagiarize something you have never read or seen. Do they just read the first page and the summary on the cover. Than they think they know everything.
Dude that’s so STUPID

 

There can be lots of reasons. First, and the most obvious, is that there's certain parts of the source material that won't work in the adaptation. Different media work in different ways, and trying to be overly slavish to the original is often a bad idea. Next, the people working on the adaptation think that they've found a way to improve on the original. Before you jump to the assumption that this is automatically a mistake think on this: the best video game adaptation of all time is probably the Arcane cartoon, and it contradicts the source material in several ways. All of these changes served to make the story better, so it's not an idea that's entirely without merit, even if it can be hard to pull off.

Another big conundrum is that the original material primarily caters to the most fervent fans but the adaptation is meant for a general audience. And change in audience often calls for a different approach to the material. Finally, and this is probably a lot more common that you might like, a lot of the creatives working on the adaptation don't like or respect the original material. The producer of the Witcher series said the quiet out loud and admitted that this is what happened in the writing room. Another famous example is how the director of the Starship Troopers film hated the book so he made something that works as a direct counter to the original work's messages. Usually this ends up in a disaster, but as Starship Troopers demonstrates, this can produce something pretty darned good.

 

The old style of movie making is gone erased from Hollywood. they still use props, but most CG effects are saved in a server to be reused this saves money time and are easy to repurpose at best they edit some to keep up with current resolutions.

If you want great film making Jackie Chan is one of the few who actually produce their own prop and stunts and they do it in one big take which cost money, but does it anyways, but most of Hollywood doesn't do this most fight scene or horror is done in cuts and most of the action you don't see the hit they cut it and just show the reaction to the hit while adding special effects.

like most big studios have sound library to add SFX to their movies CG studios have a CG library to repurpose CG objects and area they might use in a sequel or other movies.

 

With the Rings of Power, what I’ve heard is that Amazon did not have the rights to important source material, so had to make stuff up. My guess on the others would be laziness/arrogance/money.

 

Most of the time the whole reason of buying an existing IP is for simple name recognition.
The buyer and seller have a contract which may or may not include Quality Assurance or Lore Acuity.
For Rings of Power - Very little was taken from the actual lore of Lord Of the Rings

What We Know: Supposedly it was to tell a better story, or be less constrained by Tolkien related material
What Was Implied: Amazon wanted to save money, the writers and directors didn’t like the Tolkien story and wanted their own focus, and making a new story while running under the assumption of a similar story is basically aiming for a larger audience.
What Happened: Story was a strange mishmash, with super ridiculous events.
That’s how it goes. And yes, it is all a question of money but not the one you might be thinking of.
The money question is 1) allocation - where the money is being spent & where the head of the production decides it should be used on and 2) influence - what should be emphasized with the product and who is the audience (The audience being the streaming service’s populace)

Now very clearly the show wasn’t a grand success but it still managed to hit parts of them - High Viewership and publicity for even attempting a LOTR TV show, Large Controversy over changes etc, and Content for Amazon Prime.

 

1. They don't want to show certain things because other people have deals on certain characters. I think I saw something about John Constantine having his live action appearance rights linked with a certain actor and a certain studio rather than being solely with the maker hence we got John's "aunt" rather than John in the Sandman live action. Plus there are others which are probably more obvious like Fox partially having the rights over quicksilver and the scarlet witch and thus Disney and Fox made a deal around the appearance of the two.

2. Some part of the thing is just ridiculously more expensive to make or just does not look good in the medium some of this has become a lot easier and cheaper over time like mixing live action and animation parts. But skimping on money and making things "feel" more real can often be prioritised.

3. The show writers want to make the series in their own direction but the show runners want something on X-series and set in x-time period and thus the power struggle between the writers and runners comes out in the final product and you get a weird mix of lore accuracy and lore inaccuracy. Then there are just the companies who do not even care about the accuracy of the media produced and instead only pay lip service to it and are instead just using the stories name to make money for themselves by attracting a ready made audience.

4. People with no passion are put on a project and instead of getting writers and such who would be passionate about it you get someone who uses parts of the source material to write the story they want to write cause it has to be tangentially related to the media. Then it gets okayed cause the next person doesn't want to waste money on too many rewrites and they also likely don't care overly much about the source material and on and it goes. Till it reaches people who care but don't have any sway to change it.

 

Mostly what Toastedrossi said.

Being able to have some flexibility when adapting things is important. It's honestly impossible to be 100% truthful to the source material when making an adaptation.

Let's imagine like... A 100,000 words book adapted into a single 2h movie.

How long would it take to read said book? A quick googling says the average reading speed is 250 words/minute, so this book would take 6-7h to be read, give or take some.

We now have to adapt those 6-7h of reading into 2h of movie... We also can't show the internal thoughts of characters and scenes to have more movement than what a book would usually show... Yeah, some changes are inevitable. Not just cuts, but also changes to make things still make sense even with the cuts. This is plain inevitable. It just can't be helped due to different constraints of the different types of media.

The same holds true for stuff like... Webtoon adaptations of novels. They need to make a lot of cuts on internal thoughts of characters at the very minimum, so it's inevitable that some stuff will feel different.

And going the other way around, a novel adaptation of an anime also needs to make changes... Like adding a bunch of internal thoughts to the characters, even if that wasn't on the anime. You need to start replicating an epic scene that is strongly powered by the soundtrack and visual effects without having access to any of those tools too.

Different medias are just different. Changes are inevitable.

... Granted, some people do a good job at it (like Arcane) and others make garbage (like Eragon)... It happens.

 

@ToastedRossi
Could you point out a movie or series that was “overly slavish to the original”. That was bad?
Never played the game that Arcane was on, but this idea is not so hard to believe. Let’s look at the original “Jurassic Park”. I read the book before the movie. It was a bad move on my part. I have learn to watch the movie. Than read the book. There was many changes in the adaptation, but I found it still enjoyable. So I understand where your coming from.
As to Starship Troopers. I thought the director was an ahole, but still it wasn’t so bad. As a B movie, but I like the book better thou.
Still I strongly disagree on this point with the examples I made.
The Wheel of Time
They use the same names and species, but otherwise nothing was the same. It would have been better to have the series and called it Flame & Ice.
The Rings of Power
While LOTR was sometimes longer than most movies the fans loved it. It kept true to the story for the most part. Don’t get me wrong there should have been more drugs and other things, but they still kept true to the source material, but this. The dude who made this adaptation probably only read the summary of one book and throw the series away.
The Witcher
According to the tv series. The Witcher is not base on the witcher, but about his side characters

It’s just blows my mind.

The problem I have is that they didn’t shrink the amount of time by taking scenes away. No. They added content that was never in the book. It never needed the content to keep it relevant or consistent. If anything it made it a mess. An adaptation should stay true to the source.

I’m just saying

 

Ah, that may happen at times too, it's usually just a mess when it happens.

Like how The Hobbit made 3 movies for a very small book... It's particularly noticeable on the last movie, because it covers like... The last 5 or so pages of the book IIRC. That one was pretty weird.

OTOH, the LotR movies made one movie per book, and they had to make plenty of cuts to get the books to fit into movie format... And quite frankly, they did an excellent job. It's honestly more enjoyable to watch the movies than to read the books of LotR (mostly because of Tolkien's writing being subpar).

But in any case, I was more talking on broad terms instead of commenting on specific adaptations, since quality may vary a lot from one adaptation to the other.

 

Good point

 

There aren't a whole lot of specific examples out there because even bad producers out there will avoid doing this kind of thing. But there were a lot of TV adaptations back in the day which would use a lot of the original text as dialogue and they are extremely slow as a result. Or as another example, the Atlas Shrugged novel has a 60-page speech by one of the characters. Anyone dumb enough to film the entire thing would end up with one of the most unwatchable things ever.

The film is way more clever than the book though.

 

I agree. It’s the nature of different media adaptations. Just like a novel being adapted to manga. It’s just necessary part of creativity. The same goes for anime, tv and movies. But the big difference is how they respect the source material. In many adaptations from novels to manga tend to keep with the original. They don’t create their own version of the same story. What would be the point. Just create your own content.

As to Starship Troopers. How is it clever when compared to the book?

 

One of the problems with adaptations is that a lot of them aren't labors of love. Instead it's just a job for the creatives assigned to it. A good example of this is Peter Jackson for the Hobbit movies. He didn't want to make the films but he was forced into being the director for them.

The film is a satire on the dangers of fascism.

 

Perhaps….they’re making it watchable..for the younger audience, since some novels have r18 scenes…or maybe they have to exclude a lot of scenes that they have recorded already...because a movie or an episode can only last for a short time (like how a movie usually only lasts 2 hours) and not all scenes can be included in the final product..

 

I treat it like fanfic. You know that one asshole in the reviews who complains the author should've made this/that change(s) to the story so it would be "better", instead of creating original works themselves and throws a tantrum when they don't?

....Now they work at Netflix (lol).

 

Your the best Bro. Lol!

 

They think their fanfiction is better -_- Huge ego. No one ever trashed their work growing up. Who knows.