do you want your favorite books/comics/etc. to be adapted into other media?

I'm watching The Sandman on Netflix, which is probably the most faithful adaptation of something I was previously familiar with that I've ever seen. And it's terminally boring! I fell asleep for a few minutes during the first ep and realized I knew exactly what I'd missed based on my memory of the comic. There are some bright spots, but mostly I experience it as testament to the ingenuity of the original medium, where, e.g., lettering can communicate character in an effective & economical manner, and you can seamlessly transition into surrealism. Instead I have OPINIONS about the casting/acting, the cgi, etc.

However, when I was obsessed with the comics as a teen, I thought a lot about adapting it and would have been thrilled to hear this was coming out (though back then I thought making an animated adaptation made more sense, and I think that remains true). Someone mentioned wanting to see an Octavia Butler adaptation in another thread recently, and I mentally recoiled from that idea, even though at one time I think I would have been psyched for that too. The MCU thread sometimes has people hopefully speculating about some more obscure character being introduced, and I don't really get it.

So my answer has become an absolute "no" with zero exceptions. But I'm curious about "yes" responses: what about the prospect excites you? What adaptations are you fond of? What is it about seeing non-cinematic media turned into cinema/tv that interests people?

I should say, plenty of films I like are based on novels or plays (esp. classic Hollywood), but I will almost certainly never read them. I'm curious about source material you already cherish, not adaptations in general

A Second Age adaption of Tolkien would be nice. (I realize there's something else currently happening.)

I don't know Tolkien beyond the obvious—are those complete works? I can definitely see being interested in a trusted filmmaker taking on something unfinished or scattered and making it into a cohesive story

I think it works if you can get it to popularize the older, probably more obscure work and it’s handled deftly.

I think there’s plenty of PKD stories that can be adapted in productive ways if handled properly.

I still have not watched Dune because I love the book so much.

xxpost -- yeah and that's kinda the problem: the two showrunners are youngish dudes who have never done anything like this before and it's...not perfect so far in terms of what you're talking about in specific in this thread. (It's not an outright failure, but it's simply not the general history as he set it up; indeed part of the problem is that there is no one formal story as such for that period, more an overlapping series of histories, family trees, smaller details etc.)

If the adaptation's good, then I'll take it, but I'm not exactly pining for any particular adaptations.

To me the best case scenario is Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring: it's an incredibly good adaptation, has its own identity/integrity independent of the source material, and - importantly - doesn't have the side-effect of overwriting my experience when I'm rereading the book, i.e. I still have no problem forming my own images in reading the book, without visualizing Viggo as Aragorn, etc.

jmm otm

Jackson's trilogy is the gold standard.

kingfish: do you think there's something specific about PKD that makes that true? Or is that just an example of an author you like and think has been adapted well?

Ned: yeah that sounds pretty challenging honestly! But I suppose in general that could be enticing: something you think is actually quite difficult to adapt and being curious how the hell they'll pull it off, like a novel with strong first-person narration or something that takes place across millennia

I agree about Fellowship actually, though for some reason I decided to watch the Hobbit movies earlier this year, and that might be informing my current pessimism on this issue

Ned: yeah that sounds pretty challenging honestly! But I suppose in general that could be enticing: something you think is actually quite difficult to adapt and being curious how the hell they'll pull it off, like a novel with strong first-person narration or something that takes place across millennia

What we (meaning my cohosts and I) were hoping for was something that actually showed something of the main theme of the Akallabeth in particular, though they wouldn't have had the direct rights: a real sense of what time is like for the Elves where they are always 'there' where men, dwarves etc age and die. Having a series plan where you, say, cast the regular Elf actors as needed and then each season looks at a different point in the history, showing how Numenor increasingly fears/loathes/envies the Elves over many generations where the Elves themselves are much more unsure and honestly uneasy about their own fate where Men get to seem to escape this existence. It's a risk but not insurmountable! And what's odd is that the series IS showing hints of that already but the timeline now being rushed really changes the impact.

A comparison point here would be the Foundation series started last year, given that the source material are loosely connected stories set over three hundred years that have no character continuing each time unless you count the Hari Seldon recordings. But instead of going an anthology route they went for having clone emperors continually rebooted from source cells, holographic AIs and a whole lotta suspended animation so they can have a core cast carry through. It's A solution (and it means more Lee Pace so sure) but not THE solution.

I increasingly feel about adaptations of works that I love the way I feel about biopics: generally, just...don't? If you have a real vision of how to make this movie/TV show its own thing that, like, riffs on the original in an intriguing way without either a) producing a wan seventh-generation carbon copy of the original work's characters or plot beats or b) completely perverting the intention of the original work to your own dumb and pointless ends, then yeah. Just don't.

'OTHERWISE just don't.'

This is what I love about Ilxor. The fact that ancient threads from 2001, 2002 are periodically revived and you can see what people thought about back then. You can see the "six years later" responses and the general flow of time. What did these people from fifteen years ago have to say about Joe Leen and the Jing Jang Jong? Etc.

So, what did Ilxor think about Sandman in... oh, hang on. Three hours ago? What?

I think Dune is a special case, in that Frank Herbert deliberately left out a lot of the obviously cinematic stuff. The battles mostly happen off the page. It's as if he deliberately left room for a "Lawrence of Arabia in space" adaptation, although as far as I know he had no idea it would be turned into a film / miniseries / whatever. It's been a long time since I read the book but my recollection is that Herbert was very efficient with his backstory, dealing with huge concepts in just a few words.

The Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines, for example, is a fascinating idea, but it was covered in just a couple of sentences in the appendix. As such there's massive room for a completely original adaptation. A kind of anti-Lord of the Rings in the sense that Dune has a fairly compact narrative, despite being a thick book. Apparently Brian Herbert did expand the Butlerian Jihad into a novel, but it was totally bum slops. e.g. it had a literal war between human beings and killer robots instead of a spiritual quest to wipe out imitations of the human soul.

I think my earliest experience of an adaption was the 2000AD versions of The Stainless Steel Rat, albeit that the first novel at least is essentially an expanded short story. A fast-moving adventure tale that lent itself to a comics version. I remember wondering as a kid why it was so hard to make a superhero film, given that Marvel and DC had been pumping out stories for decades; why was it so hard to adapt a comics storyline to the screen? Why did so many superhero films (of the pre-X-Men / Spider-Man age, e.g. the 1970s-1990s) mess things up by using awful original stories? They never tried.

I grew up at a time when the likes of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton wrote novels with the specific goal of having them turned into films or miniseries or what-have-you. Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean did the same, so it wasn't new for the 1990s. Looking back it's surprising how many of their supposedly tailor-made-for-the-screen works were adapted into something occasionally unrecognisable, e.g. almost all of the James Bond novels. From what I remember the book of Where Eagles Dare had the heroes taking great pains not to kill anyone.

Is it just that Hollywood producers want to put their name on something that they own, or are people broken?

So, what did Ilxor think about Sandman in... oh, hang on. Three hours ago? What?

I don't really get your point, but it might make more sense to make it on this thread: The Sandman on Netflix

(I think) Ashley is noting that they thought this was a twenty-year-old thread on the title topic & would be citing Sandman, thirty-year-candidate for adaptation, repeatedly through the decades of posts _amongst other books/comics), and on realising it was new, were amused by their own reaction, and rolled with it & engaged with the topic.

I wouldn't mind seeing some Peter Milligan work adapted for TV, maybe Face or Skreemer - if only to see it happen! I guess the two minute animated Shade short will have to do.

Comics in particular I would prefer not to be adapted into live action cinema or television, because my enjoyment is as much about the art as it is about the writing and no matter how well done that will always be lost in a live action adaptation (animation and video game adaptations are ok).

thanks, sic, and apologies Ashley! (I thought I was being mocked for talking about Sandman in 2022)

Anyway, yeah I'm not super excited about contemporary animation, but it is still a little confounding to me that people want to see so much live-action superhero stuff. There are zero live-action superhero movies that are better than the "Timmverse" DC animated series or the Spiderverse movie or The Incredibles.

I much prefer when they take a jot very good original and make a masterpiece out if it, like CHILDREN OF MEN. But leave the actually great books alone, please.

Not very good, that should have saud.

Said
Fuck

The Things They Carried is getting a movie, starring Tom Hardy, not sure how he's going to pull off "scrawny 22-year old" and I figure most of it's unfilmable anyway.

Every adaptation into other media requires a fair amount of reshaping and re-imagining of the material, requiring various additions and subtractions. What emerges is a new thing on its own and can be very good in its own way, but I can't say I ever yearn for that 'other' version to exist. I can only say that if I do encounter it transposed to a new medium, then I judge that version solely on its own merits, as they exist in that new medium. The book is still the book and it lives a different life. And that's OK by me.

The book is still the book and it lives a different life. And that's OK by me.

This is exactly how I am approaching the upcoming series based on William Gibson's The Peripheral. I'll watch the first episode, and if it sucks, I'll bail on it, pretend it doesn't exist, and continue to enjoy the book.

I really wish people made more documentaries about writers/books because a film adaptation as advert is just too risky and it's like a lottery winner thing where it doesn't bring more general attention to anything more than the original artifact (if it even manages that).

Most of the time I'd get excited about an adaptation is because the subject is so underexplored in another medium or the potential for the original to get more attention. But I'd much rather a documentary about SP Somtow or AA Attanasio than an adaptation of their stories which would likely be a mess.

Having said all that, I'm more interested in the audio version of Sandman than the comic or television series, because as much as I like some of the Sandman artists, much of it still looks rushed today.
And I'm grateful the original Gundam and Wolf Guy authors created novelized versions that were supposed to get across their original vision. So actually I would like more things turned into prose books.

One of my favorite novels is The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. The film version is so good you can forget that it left out the second half of the book.

I would be happy for the Justified crew to keep adapting Elmore Leonard novels and fixing them for Raylan Givens until we are all dead.

(Freaky Deaky next)

I’m generally not into adaptations of books I’ve already read (or even loved) because I already know the story and that kind of sucks the tension out for me. Trite but true!

That said, it’s fun nurturing fantasy adaptations in my head (a live version of Imzadi, a period Moonraker, a Whit Stillman Long Secret, a forty hour Count of Monte Cristo…)

In general (like a lot things) I don’t enjoy talking about this sort of thing because the “my childhood is ruined!” crew still dominates it