Hated Tropes
[HATED] Adaptations done intentionally without help from the source
Halo TV show: Before the show came out, the writers were praising their decision to not look to the games for inspiration when making the show
God Of War TV show: Chris Judge, the actor of Kratos in the games from 2018-Now, spoke up about his dislike on the show not hiring anyone who worked on any of the previous games. One of the original creators of Kratos also spoke up about them not having faith in the adaptation.
Supergirl 2026 film: the director for the film not only said he decided to not read Woman Of Tomorrow, the comic the film is adapting, because he wanted to do his own thing, he also didn’t look at comic art for inspiration to design Lobo and instead used an AI image generator to design Lobo’s look for the film
There's no way in hell that would happen because Randy Pitchford would veto the fuck out of it.
The original Claptrap voice actor, David Eddings, feuded publicly on social media with Randy over pay. Then he claimed Randy Pitchford had physically assaulted him at GDC 2017. He left the company that year and was replaced in everything Borderlands from that point forward. Borderlands 2 was the last project he was on.
Randy Pitchford is a PoS, but he also still controls the company and Eddings isn't going to be allowed involvement in anything under his watch.
His last game was Tales from the borderlands, not 2. since he left to work for rooster teeth he wanted a proper actor paycheck; I can't remember if he actually made an extra bit to voice claptrap when he was a VP or if he did it as a part of his VP salary and Randy basically wanted to pay him nothing.
100% they needed to do something with an IP they bought rights for and they just took whatever Sci-Fi garbage someone had already written as a screen play. I was with it for almost tye entire first episode until Chief took his helmet off for the last 10 minutes.
I genuinely tried to give it a fair chance because the overall costume and set designs were VERY Halo…. But holy shit was it a horrible adaptation. Fucking Uwe Boll would’ve done a better job than whatever that was.
I was willing to give it a shot because it was all wrong from the beginning, but as long as they stuck true to the “core” of what halo is I could’ve looked past it…… but the only thing Halo about it was its skin. I’ve said it before it’s the MiB “Edgar Suit” of adaptations. You look at it and think “ok yeah, this looks like Halo” but god damnit if it wasn’t a fucking cockroach the whole time.
some new scifi story that wasn't appealing enough without a big brand.
Agreed. Halo (the show) was actually really well done if you ignore everything associated with Halo. Excellent casting, excellent production values, but the in-universe parts took what could have been a great new IP and, well, we got what we got.
You mean the one where the elite human solider responds to an alien attack on a human colony? And then they’re exposed to an ancient artifact from a long dead alien civilization which starts giving them visions of the impending destruction of civilization at the hands of an eldritch horror rogue bioweapon that killed its creators?
The writers so obviously thought their entire audience was a bunch of idiots or didn't care about the little Halo details, that is just one of so many examples.
That is why the Fallout show is so successful. When Lucy left the vault and pointed her gun at everyone (which new players *always* accidentally do), only for them comment in-style with the games about putting her gun away I was sold.
Having MC with his helmet off during the show is one thing, but doing it in marketing material was definitely a statement by the creators that they didn't care about the source material and that fans would just have to suck it up and watch what they were given.
Didn't the actor say it is difficult or impossible to act with a helmet?
Did he hear about Darth Vader/James Earl Jones? Or Judge Dredd? Or Din Djarin/Pedro Pascal? Their faces or head were covered and they acted fine. The few moments Din had his helmet off were tense and fit with the show's plot.
Well tbf James Earl Jones was just the voice explicitly because they weren’t really happy with David Prowse’s line delivery, but he fit the build they wanted and could do the physical stuff well but they dubbed over with James. Pedro Pascal also does mostly voice work for helmeted scenes as Mando because it is hard to deliver lines helmeted, and they’d end up having to dub over it anyways since the audio would suck.
All that being said, you don’t hear either of them complaining about it. You signed up to play a character famous for never taking off his helmet, you don’t get pity from me for having to either act with a helmet on or end up just being the voice
Its all bullshit anyway, Halo 4 (for all its faults) did a bloody fantastic job of humanising Chief, and between the scene of Cortana sacrificing herself and Chief on the ships deck with Lasky immediately after, you can do emotional scenes without even a human in a suit. They just fucking sucked at directing, and the show proves that it wasn't a face reveal they needed.
I couldn’t believe as part of the marketing campaign that the actors and producers were openly bragging about avoiding the game completely and making assurances that the show will benefit tremendously from it.
Never watched it, but from what I’ve heard about how much they got it wrong, I would not be at all surprised if they said that the Halo rings were designed to CREATE life in the galaxy.
They went as far as Halsey giving the order to eliminate Master Chief because he disobeyed her and that the 2nd gen Spartans are mind controlled thralls lol.
The art team honestly nailed almost every part of the design of Halo, the weapons, armour and covenant aliens are all super well done. The prophets CGI in particular was quite impressive and very accurate. It's a shame they were attached to such a shit project though.
By all accounts, Sonic the Hedgehog should have been this, but fan backlash on an ugly model of Sonic had somehow turned this into a franchise, even if the Knuckles spinoff is the low point
The film adaptations of “Hitman”, with both screenplays being written by the same guy (Skip Woods), ignore several key elements of the video game series, such as the focus on stealthy assassinations, 47’s relationship with Diana and the ICA, and 47 being basically the only proper clone of his kind.
Two different film adaptations, almost ten years apart, rehash the same story twice: Agent 47 betrays his organization over a young woman, in an over-the-action movie. Ironically, the video games took some of these elements (such as 47 going rouge) and made them work better than how they did in these films.
What pissed me off most about the first wasn't even how it strayed from the original, but how they recycled visuals from the TV show Dark Angel for the flashback scenes.
I actually love that weird fact ... only wished they gave credit of the source material, which they don't and you would only know if you watched Dark Angel
Fucking world war Z. not a single thing in the book was on that screen other than the title. in fact, they did the complete opposite of the book! fast zombies instead of slow methodical ones, a fucking cure instead of the indomitable human spirit, the Lobo? not even a thought.
While I agree that this should have been a mini series at least, I'm not sure about the Zs crossing the Jerusalem wall.
In the novel while they did have the inspection points and quarantine, it was a terrorist/civil war that gave them the most problems. Most of the information we have on that part is from the Professor/Engineer and the old spy.
The old spy talked about the 10th man and the plans that were made. While the Prof talked about coming over from Palestine, the time in the quarantine camps, and the beginning of the attacks by the hasidic(? Orthodox) that did nit want the Palestines there. Then its fairly left off the info board for the rest of the book.
One of the most flat out bizarre scenes I have ever seen in a film that. Isreal actually treats Palestinians as human beings which results in everyone getting massacred.
A funny kind of inversion of this is the Attack on Titan live-action movie. The manga's author Hajime Isayama himself suggested making several changes to the film so that it would be distinct from the manga & anime.
It could probably work if they just focused on other scouts during the collapse of the wall or they could’ve made it like a survival horror movie with citizens trying to flee to the interior while dodging titans. Kinda like Quite Place or something
It's always funny seeing ads for anime adaptations. Especially when Japan does it themselves, the sets are bland as hell, they get the cheapest wigs for characters that are meant to be blonde, or they don't bother at all and all the ladies that had distinct hairstyles in the cartoon all have the same lady from the Ring hairstyle.
French movie Immortal: Ad Vitam is also an inversion: it was directed by Enki Bilal who created original Nikopol comics, and he made many changes like moving the setting from 2023 post-apocalyptic fascist Paris to 2090s New York ruled by a genetics mega corp and many more.
If there is one unintended positive to come out of this disaster, Toriyama was so pissed off at being cast aside and watching his creation be fucked up by idiots who had no idea what they were doing, that he came out of retirement and revived the entire Dragon Ball franchise out of spite.
Dragon Ball is now a bigger success than it had ever been before.
Honest Trailers getting the Abridged crew to comment on it in character was pretty great too. "You make a movie and you don't have the great Vegeta?! Wait is that the Namekian, oh, well, bullet dodged."
James Marsters, who played Piccolo in this dumpster fire, is actually a big DBZ fan and was fighting tooth and nail to get the movie to be even tangentially near any trace of source material, including Piccolo's appearance. He discusses in interviews that he and the other actors were bascially tricked by the studio and that production was nothing like what they'd been promised ahead of time. Which reminds me of what Bob Hoskins talked about following the Super Mario Bros. movie back in the 90s.
HEY! The 90's Super Mario Bros might be a dumpster fire, but countless 90's kids loved the movie. I still to this day want the Stompers from that movie
Extra fun fact about that. There's a DLC for Xenoverse 2 that essentially tells a what-if where Goku wasn't immediately murdered by Goku Black after getting his body swapped with Zamasu.
So we get a whole mission with James Marsters doing a Sean Schemmel Goku impression and it's pretty good.
The Halo show was particularly egregious with just how far up their own ass the producers were. Absolutely deranged to make a video game adaptation and not bother to familiarize with the fucking game you're adapting.
I love Forward Unto Dawn. It's not perfect, but imo it's one of the most underrated videogame movie adaptations ever made. I re-watch it all the time.
It's weird because you can tell it was made with a lot of love and passion for Halo. Even things that conflicted with lore (like Master Chief not actually having that rank yet so he wouldn't be calling himself Master Chief) you can excuse because it's fanservice FOR the fans.
But with the Halo show, it's like their motto was "screw the fans" the entire time.
This isn't always a bad thing. Howl's Moving Castle was an excellent movie in its own right, but it basically abandoned the entire story of the book, and shoved most of the characters through the "Just a friendly guy" filter, with Calcifer, the Scarecrow, and the Witch getting it worst of all. (The castle itself, too, I guess. Becoming some sort of emoting, weird, mongrel walker thing, instead of, y'know... a castle (that moves).)
That said. The director, Hayao Miyazaki, brought a print of the film to the UK in 2004 so Diana Wynne Jones could see it in a private viewing as she was very ill at the time (she died in 2011). He is, apparently, notorious for not liking to travel outside of Japan.
A rare example of this done right is Dreamworks How to Train Your dragon.
During production the film initially followed the novel the film was based on more closely but dreamworks felt the story was too kid friendly and that it would negatively impact box office revenue. Thus the final film had nothing to do with the book outside of the character’s names and some of them vaguely resembling their book counterparts.
Just a few notable differences.
Toothless is a small green common or garden dragon. And by small I mean he’s smaller than Hiccup.
The Vikings of Berk aren’t at war with the dragons. In fact the practices of training dragons has been a long established tradition for generations. The first book actually opens with Hiccup and his class visiting a nursery to claim dragon eggs to raise.
In the film Hiccup is basically friendless at the start. In the novel Fishlegs is an outcast like hiccup and the to are best friends.
The big evil bad at the end of the first film is a large dragon called The Red Death. In the novel it’s a pair of giant dragons called the green and purple death.
In the film Hiccup’s heroics against the Red death and training of dragons makes him a hero and he maintains that status throughout the film series. In the novel Hiccup’s fame for defeating The Green and Purple Death’s is short lived and throughout the book series he is continually treated like trash despite his heroics.
One of the more notable differences is in the books the dragons actually talk. In the novel dragons have their own language of which Hiccup can speak fluently.
Astrid is not mentioned in the first book at all. In fact she didn’t exist whatsoever. She did appear to be loosely based off a character who did appear in the third book named Camicaze.
To be fair, this is actually an example of them reading the source material and then making their own take, which is entirely different from just refusing to check the source material before adapting.
Nothing wrong with changing up aspects you feel dont fit the adaptation if you've actually checked the source.
Alternatively comic book writer Mark Millar has voiced being chill with Hollywood adapting his work however they want, as his original work still exists.
It’s the paradox of Millar being an edge lord hotshot that he doesn’t feel like a bad adaptation can taint his work so he doesn’t get involved with them, resulting in the adaptations being free to improve on his work.
The Watch series. They looked at the work of Sir Pterry Pratchett and then completely ignored it or failed to understand any of it. Even the… less than ideal previous adoptions.
I kind of appreciate the Sky adaptations because arguably they're a great example of why a faithful adaptation isn't always a good one. They really do try to copy the books (for the most part), but it highlights just how much of Discworld's brilliance was built on the medium of writing and Pratchett's way with words. When stripped of that and turned into film, the adaptations lose a lot of the magic, no matter how faithful they are.
The Watch on the other hand seems it like it took the books, opened them up, and then took a steaming shit on them.
The Witcher famously did this, with writers openly bragging about it. They unfortunately fumbled several key themes of the books and games to produce a bland, generic fantasy show that was blatantly written by committee and for some reason reversed the age gap between Geralt and Yen to make Yen barely an adult.
Henry Cavill ended up leaving as a result of all this and certain people tried to imply it was because he was a chud bigot misogynist. Lots of women hed worked with came forwards to defend him and it became increasingly clear he quit because the show was dogwater.
The executives won't hire people who created or assisted with the original IP because Hollywood is entirely built on nepotism, and thus the new directors/writers have this elitist attitude that a video game or a 30 year old book or an animated show MUST be inferior to their own storytelling
The executives WANT there to be significant changes because they falsely believe that:
They are guaranteed a viewer base from the existing fans of the IP
The only way to expand that viewer base beyond existing fans is to change the story
They also believe that they have no obligation to see a project all the way through. They're only here to make as much money as they can as quickly as possible, and any publicity advances their "next fiscal quarter" agenda. They don't care how a project ends because they'll either cancel it early or have a dedicated enough fanbase that will consume whatever bullshit they pump out.
The reality is that the sort of spiritual purpose of an adaptation is not to create something new or different or better. The purpose is to reach people who may not have comprised the original medium's audience. People who may have been turned off by experiencing this great story as a video game (The Witcher, Halo, God of War) or a book (Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, The Witcher) or as animation (One Piece, Avatar: TLA), can enjoy the existing, beloved storytelling because it meets them where they are.
Number 4 is that it's really hard to get a new project off the ground, but much easier to convince execs to green light an adaptation (for all the reasons you said). Therefore you'll get writers who want to make their own project looking around for existing material they can use as a "disguise" so they can tell the studio execs it's an adaptation and hence increase their odds of getting their project green lit.
Creative types want to leave their touch on the end result. Or sometimes they have their own stories that they want to tell. However, genre like big epic sci-fi or fantasy just don't get funding unless it's attached to an IP so they'll change the IP to fit their vision.
That's how you ended up with master cheeks or Witcher season 4.
There’s a few things I think that play into it. For one, studios view it as “current fans are already a lock but we need to get non-fans to watch it too.” There’s some merit to this, because generally you do need to appeal to a wider audience due to higher production values, but that usually means they end up changing and/or simplifying too much and alienating the fans of the source material.
The other big one from what I can tell is that lots of these young writers want to write original stuff, but that’s way harder to get greenlit, so they either accept jobs writing for these adaptations or get offered spots after presenting an original idea the studio thinks they can just mold into an adaptation. Iirc The Witcher was the former, where the writers wanted to do their own original story but Netflix wanted to use its big name IP, so the writers ended up just shoehorning their own stuff into the show because they couldn’t get approved to do original stuff. It was quite a bold move though to sit down in recorded interviews and actively express your hatred for the source material of your adaptation. They were I think just the worst case of this where they both hated the original and got let off the leash to write their own stuff (that wasn’t particularly good anyways) and alienated everyone.
Plus it didn’t help that Andrej Sapkowski is a famously crotchety old asshole who hates everything, so I’m pretty sure he came on set early on and shit on these already whiny writers and made them even madder
I thought he was fired because he kept trying to suggest ways to make it more like the books and they didn't like that he clearly knew more than them about what Witcher fans enjoy.
Last I checked, it was a combo of that, him constantly trying to keep it accurate to books/games, and IIRC he generally wasn't a fan of doing sex scenes and they kept pushing that?
I'm not 100% on the last but i remember it coming up. I have read there was clashing between him and the writers because he'd suggest stuff closer to the books/ask questions about why things happen and they'd tell him to worry about acting only.
Idk what the fuck they expected. Cavill loved the books.
Literally one of the early promos for the show is him sitting in a chair and reading a passage from one of the goddamn books. And it worked because A. he's clearly a fan and B. it builds some hype.
https://giphy.com/gifs/CWNak4UeNK1JS
This is an averted case. Originally, Bryan Singer did not want any of the actors to read the comics because he thought the suits were embarrassing. Thankfully Kevin Feige snuck some comics in for the actors to read
It still amuses me having the first X-men movie call out the yellow spandex costumes of old, only for X-men '97 to eventually do the same with the X-men trilogy's black leather costumes.
The weirdest thing about this is that Henry Cavill who plays the main character Geralt in this is a huge nerd and so was was basically the only person on set trying to play it faithfully to the games/books
Imagine getting excited getting to play the main character of a beloved franchise, then get your hopes dashed when the showrunners admit they haven't even played the games.
They say they read the books, but if that's the case then they have the reading comprehension of a goldfish.
A big problem with how they adapted it (especially the first season) is that they cut REALLY IMPORTANT CONTEXT from the short stories in favor of adding more visual flare. Which works, in some instances, but leaves the actual stories feeling disjointed if the viewer is paying attention. I understand needing to edit for runtime, but the writers really needed to learn to prioritize the actual story itself over dragging out cool moments.
He at least learned his lesson and made sure that he was the major decision maker for the 40k series, thus not to be beholden to the hubris of failed theater kids
I still don't get how they butchered the first season if the book give he perfect introduction . Geralt tells some stories of his latest adventures to a priestess and has minor trouble with some locals. It is the perfect et up for a first season as you have a framing device and one adventure per episode to follow. From there you can built up and explain the setting the characters etc., in a classical TV Format and newcomers get what is going on. Then from season 2 onwards you can start the big story
Instead they did weird time jumps out of chronological order and made a joke about that one season later...
I will forever be so so so fucking enraged with the utter destruction of Yennefer’s character. SHE WOULD NOT FUCKING USE CIRI TO FUCKING HEAL HER REPRODUCTIVE CAPABILITIES! WE SEE HER LOSE EVERYTHING TRYING TO PROTECT CIRI IN THE BOOKS RAAAAAAAAAGH. THE WITCHERS WOULD NOT WANT TO FUCKING BLEED CIRI TO MAKE MROE WITCHERS RAAAAAAAGH. ESKELLLLLLL.
Actual garbage tv first season was okay but holy unfucking followable the jumps of time between shots and episodes is insane. Back and forth 10s of years.
Why you should totally buy that Yenn, the woman shouting her adoptive daughter's name from the rooftops and running across an entire castle to hug her, would just be like "I will give this kid to a Temu Baba Yaga made up for the show on the flimsy excuse that she'll fix my womb"
But it did not care about many of the aspects of the original. The original portrayed it’s fights like an old Tokusatsu. Lots of weight behind each punch, with care about the environment around them.
The fanfilm makes the giant robots feel lightweight and likes throwing buildings at the enemy.
“When I have issues with historians, I ask: 'Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.’”
It’s not historically inaccurate in the “the costumes are bad” sense. It’s historically inaccurate in the “anything that happened in the film is unrecognizable as an attempt to portray an actual historical event.”
The battle scenes are particularly atrocious. Nothing that happens remotely passes the common sense test. It’s not like they didn’t have the budget or time, they did, they just used those resources to make battles that are completely nonsensical and unenjoyable.
I blame the success of Gladiator. Everyone knows that Gladiator is historically inaccurate but is still considered one of the greatest movies of all time.
Guess ol' Ridley believed that he's an official historical movie genius now. Hubris is a hell of a drug
Well it was entertaining and had great story and everything. I don’t mind movies being non-historical if they’re great and altering historical facts make the movie better as a movie
Here it was some weird family porn movie without sex but with half of the script being dirty talks between Napoleon and Josephine, ignoring most of really interesting things about this legendary figure. I legit felt awkward watching this with parents, we just silently looked at each other from time to time with question in mind “what the fuck are we watching??”
You should see Sanderson's anecdote about someone offering to adapt The Emperor's Soul. They came back to him with something where the only things from his actual story were some character names. (Because everyone knows that a novella-length shorty story that mostly features two people in a room discussing the nature of art and identity really needs to be turned into a globe-trotting pirate adventure!)
I mean, it would have been ok if they ignored sanderson but followed Jordan's books to the letter... but nooo typical hollywood hubris says we're better than everyone else so we won't even read the books, we'll stick to bullet points from the cliffnotes.
Imagine ragging on the books for being written in the 1990's, and then you turn around and create a wife for a character just to fridge her in episode one. Actually baffling.
Don't forget having the two characters who wind up seeing each other as siblings by the series end bang during season one, and having the super slow-burn (and super satisfying because of it) also bang in season one.
Like, motherfucker Lan could not sneeze without Nynave expecting it being proof of him being up to something nefarious for the first half of the series.
"My name is Nynaeve ti al'Meara Mandragoran. The message I want sent is this. My husband rides from World's End toward Tarwin's Gap, toward Tarmon Gal'don Will he ride alone?"
Also, by giving Perrin the wife, they completely invalidated the comedy (that the show never got too) of the three ta'veren being totally lost as to what to do about their respective love interests, wishing one of the others was there to pick his brains about said romantic woes as surely he will know what to do... Only to cut to the homey in question having pretty much the same issue or one close enough to make it clear that, no, he wouldn't know what to do either.
They lost me as soon as the opening monologue said that the Dragon could be any man or woman. I mean that's the whole damn reason the Aes Sedai are an all-female organisation.
Sorry guys we'll have to cut things so we can make room for the Perrin's wife story arc, the Nynaeve death fakeout and fallout, and Rand/Egwene boning. Gosh this story is so long! So unfortunate that we have to cut, but how else will I tell this useless story about a Warder and his Aes Sedai?
i really tried to give the show a chance, and i know the ending of season 1 was marred by sudden covid restrictions and things like that, but they still fell into the trap of 'we can totally do it better than the source material!' and yeah, the eye of the world ending wasn't great, but the show's was so much worse. i couldn't even watch s2 or 3.
the thing that drove me crazy was they hired a consultant (not sanderson) who had apparently 'read the books at least 4 times' (or something). her sole job was just to meet with the showrunner so he could pitch her hypotheticals like 'hey, so if we change this thing, how does that affect this other thing...?' and she tweeted once that apparently they would have routine meetings for hours doing this. i heard about in between s1 and 2 and just lost all hope of it being remotely good and never gave it another chance.
A good example: the producer for star trek 2 wrath of Kahn explicitly ignored past star trek material, instead researching naval practices, and thus shaped actors and shots to mirror that of a naval ship.
The director did the opposite, understanding the actors by watching all past star trek, and knew how to get William shatner not to overdramaticize and instead act well in a scene, by essentially exhausting him with retakes.
That movie ended up reshaping star trek to be more formal and serious, which helped set the tone for TNG and later shows to push for a sense of realism instead of fantasy sci fi like TOS (TOS had fantasy sci fi elements often due to budget constraints, and also due to being the first of its kind as a science fiction TV show to appeal to a wider audience).
Thats not to say all future content would be serious, as is thr case for IV thr voyage home, but it showed that television or movie science fiction can be taken seriously and still appeal to a more general audience vs hard sci fi.
The naval stuff certainly helped, but it was always a thing even in the old series. Roddenberry was a ww2 vet. But yeah wrath of khan benefited immensely by the militarization of the film
Surprisingly, there's a positive example of this: Star Wars Andor series. Showrunner Tony Gilroy said he wasn't a Star Wars fan, and this helped him to do something fresh and new in a Disney era full of thinly disguised remakes and nostalgia slop.
Thankfully, other people working on Andor did know Star Wars well, like screenwriters and decorators who made many references to previous movies and even old Expanded Universe.
But it wasn't that he didn't know the source material, he just didn't much care for it. Andor doesn't butcher the lore, it just expands it in a different way and from a grittier perspective.
Yeah. Theres a difference between not being a fan and deliberately ignoring the source material. While Andor was obviously a much different show than the usual Star Wars stuff, it still fits very well into the universe and doesnt butcher any established characters or the existing canon.
I still feel like Rogue One and Andor are closer to the original Star Wars than any of the other movies or shows. A New Hope was primarily about the Rebellion, with the Jedi stuff as the B-plot. The final battle is a dogfight in spaceships, after all. The later movies and shows started focusing more and more on the Jedi stuff, but in the beginning Star Wars was about a Rebellion against an evil Empire.
Well not being a fan and not caring about the setting is different thing, Tony understood that and assembled a team from people who loved and cared in crucial places, that sounds like exactly the right way to do it if you don’t want to focus on the source personally
The Dresden Files TV series had zero imput from Jim Butcher. I was at a convention where he was on a panel and he said that his entire involvement was signing the paperwork and collecting the check.
The producer, Koichi Inoue, intentionally had the production team consist of people who knew nothing about the Gundam franchise. This was done because he wanted to reduce fan bias and offer a new take on the franchise. Eventually he did have to spend time lecturing the crew on the Gundam franchise, especially since the first draft of the script didn’t even feature mobile suits
The original draft of a Gundam script didn't have any mobile suits.
Fuck it, why not make a Lord of the Rings adaptation where the One Ring never shows up? Let's write a Star Wars story where there's no stars and no war!
I'm not going to make a joke about a Halo adaptation with no Halo, because we actually got that.
I can understand these producers ignoring the original material, however stupid I may think it is.
What makes no sense is why they would BRAG about it. The whole point of adapting a work is to cash in on popularity of the original thing. So why would you openly talk about how, by design, it does not resemble the thing whose popularity you're trying to take advantage of?
They had the rights to the Lord of the Rings, but not the Silmarillion, so they had to deliberately get things wrong where they could only have gotten the knowledge from the Silmarillion to avoid copyright infringement.
I’ve said this before but a perfect adaptation for Halo would have been Contact Harvest. No Spartan IIs. Just a story about SGT Johnson and how humanity met the covenant. The perfect entry into Halo.
The GOW shit is so dumb. They didn’t hire anyone who worked on the original games because game writing and TV writing are inherently different things. And the original creator of Kratos who has spoken up against it is David Jaffe, a guy who has admittedly made some great games but is also an edgelord who also hated the Norse games because he thought they made Kratos “soft” the show is made by Ronald D. Moore, who made Battlestar Galactica and For All Mankind, so I’ll reserve my judgment until it actually comes out
Not entirely true on the third point. While Gillespie did not read Woman of Tomorrow prior to signing onto the film. Wanting instead to see how the film’s writing stood on it’s own with no expectations going in. He has actually read Woman of Tomorrow.
I will probably never get over my hate for that Halo TV show, as a big ole Halo fan it pissed me off so bad when he took his helmet off, and from there on it's just not even about Halo, it becomes extremely shitty expanse plus hey look some of the mars people look like sanghili
What’s funny is that Fallout, a series that did actually give a damn about its source material and created a fun new storyline out of it, is generally well received and will keep going and making everyone money.
But for some reason Witcher and Halo just get twisted beyond all recognition.
Look theater kids; I know you want to put your stamp on the work. But what you are trying to do, ie, high culture adaptations of well known plays, assume everyone knows the classic story.
The amazing Richard III adaptation where they had the trappings of a fascist state assumed you knew the story. So when it moved away from it it was a deliberate artistic choice. When Carmen has a more modern feminist interpretation, the entire audience still expects Los Toreadors.
Even modern adaptations know how to do this. GoT had 6 seasons where deviations from the books were deliberate choices by creators who knew what they were doing and distilled the story. Same with Denis Villenueve with Dune.
God Of War TV show: Chris Judge, the actor of Kratos in the games from 2018-Now, spoke up about his dislike on the show not hiring anyone who worked on any of the previous games. One of the original creators of Kratos also spoke up about them not having faith in the adaptation.
This is an awful example. Judge, as nice as the guy might be, has an awful opinion too. He thinks Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson should have played Joel and Ellie. His hearts in the right place but it has nothing to do with the show adaptation. Just because you were part of the games doesn’t mean you’re immediately useful for the adaptation. The games don’t even have the same writers the entire time, shifting new talent in and out.
The original creator (I’m assuming you mean Jaffe) is a fucking bitter old man who literally hates the entire series. He hates the Norse trilogy too and no one takes him seriously.
Cory Barlog / Santa Monica is stated to be heavily involved with the Amazon show similar to Todd/Bethesda with the Fallout show. We’ll see after it comes out but it’s a terrible example for this “trope”.
Yeah that example is really bad. Especially since the show barely even started filming and Kratos actor has just been recast. It’s not fair to put it next to the fucking Halo tv show
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u/Greenman8907 Aug 21 '26
Borderlands movie
https://giphy.com/gifs/w2VgGvot8vHf5tFS9l