r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Chill0000 • Aug 21 '26

Hated Tropes [HATED] Adaptations done intentionally without help from the source

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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

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265

u/Asheyguru Aug 21 '26

I think the second is more likely.

217

u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 21 '26

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.

85

u/Efficient-Big3138 Aug 21 '26

i gave up when they shows that human working for the Covenant. like wtf who is that?

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u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 21 '26

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.

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u/Kalavier Aug 21 '26

I called it "Mirror universe halo" lol.

9

u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 21 '26

My old manager and her husband loved it…. Her husband was always in the PlayStation ecosystem and had never once played Halo, and she wasn’t a gamer but loved almost anything cheesy action… so unfortunately they’re part of why it got two fuck ass seasons

7

u/Awesomeman204 Aug 21 '26

I think it was getting two seasons regardless, the second was already greenlit and being made before the first even released. Happens a lot with those kinds of situations.

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u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 21 '26

Oh yeah, you right. I do remember that now. All that planning just to make something so fucking bad.

2

u/Suspicious_Radio_848 Aug 21 '26

I’m currently watching it for the first time and this is the only way I can accept anything it’s doing. Everyone being fearful and disliking the Spartans is also bizarre.

4

u/jimothy_hell Aug 21 '26

People in the outer colonies would be terrified of the Spartans, though, they were designed to put down insurrectionists, so the people that *did* know they existed would have been terrified.

Also, posthuman dread is almost ubiquitous across franchises with supersoldiers. Most people have some kind of awe or fear around them.

1

u/simp4malvina Aug 21 '26

I think it's officially called the silver timeline

1

u/Divin3_Kick Aug 23 '26

Hi, I played only Halo combat evolved in like 2014-2016 +can't remember exactly) and it's just the pvp, I was more of a PS fan growing up and it was mostly FIFA. So my question is to you 🫵🏾

but as long as they stuck true to the "core" of what halo is I could've looked past it......

What is the core of Halo. And how would they have transitioned it to a show and not have it suck? Genuinely asking.

Cause I love "the last of us" and didn't have any hope that they would do a good job there

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u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 23 '26

The game is more than just the multiplayer. If you never even played the campaign I wouldn’t expect you to understand that there is more to it than random unnamed super soldiers killing each other. There have been other halo projects that have been made that worked so well and made sense as a side story happening at the same time as the main series. If you read the synopsis of the first three games specifically, and compare it to the synopsis of the show(which is supposed to be the same characters) they are absolutely nothing alike.

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u/Divin3_Kick Aug 23 '26

We were playing it in school during computer class. Some kid install Halo and OG COD for us to play on LAN. so we were e playing each other under our teachers nose which was way more fun that a campaign, which I'm not even sure we could play tbh.

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u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 23 '26

Yeah, then no matter what I were to tell you, you wouldn’t care. So why are you even bothering with asking?

1

u/Divin3_Kick Aug 23 '26

I'm asking what you think is the core of Halo.

I can explain what the core of Uncharted is or Dragon Age since those are my beloved games.

Do you think I'm defending the Halo show or something? I'm just trying to see how the missed the mark. By listening to a human rather than read a synopsis.

If you don't want to that's fine as well. Good day.

1

u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 23 '26

The core story is about a Super soldier with a incredibley powerful AI saving humanity after they stumble upon a universal super weapon meant to obliterate all life in the galaxy. The covenant(the alien races) worship these rings, and Humanity discovers their true purpose and is trying to stop them from being used because the covenant have no clue what their true purpose is. It’s not a super deep story, but it’s truly loved by those that actually played the campaigns. So it shouldn’t have been that hard to tell the actual story of halo. Everything after Halo Reach was made by Microsoft’s team of drones that did not care about anything other than multiplayer, so I’m not faulting you for thinking the “core” of the game is PvP. Sure that was a fun thing to do, but the actual story of Halo is about the sacrifices we make to be a hero.

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u/nomedable Aug 21 '26

It's clearly a plot that would have worked-ish in a generic SyFy late night serial. Which is why the theory that they just slapped Halo branding onto a script they had shelved makes so much sense.

But with the Halo paint on, it just becomes utter dogshit if you know any of the Halo lore.

2

u/TheWholeH0g Aug 22 '26

Calling new Alexandria "reach city" was despicable.

1

u/Mudcat-69 Aug 21 '26

It’s not entirely impossible that there would have been humans that would have worked with the Covenant though.

5

u/Efficient-Big3138 Aug 21 '26

sure but that character was completely made up with no basis what so ever. and if i recall correctly she was not only working together with them. she had some power? like it is just taken out of the arse and not from any source materal

2

u/zbeezle Aug 21 '26

She didnt have powers, exactly. They decided that not everyone was gonna be a reclaimer, but that Makee specifically was one. Her "powers" were that she could activate Forerunner artifacts, and Chief was the only other one known to be able to do it as well.

1

u/ReadingRainbowRocket Aug 21 '26

Which I'm fine with. Adaptations add brand new stuff all the time.

My main complaint was it was fucking bad AND the source material was fucking amazing.

1

u/MattyBReilly Aug 21 '26

I feel like that could have been a cool idea if it was executed right, but it wasn’t lol

1

u/MWKhan Aug 21 '26

Yeah… When I saw her my brain went “alternate timeline in the multiverse, nothing is gonna be cannon beyond the premise” and then it became some C/B tier scifi like Andromeda.

1

u/F4ST_M4ST3R Aug 21 '26

To a certain extent it makes some sense. The Prophets knew all along that they needed a human to activate Forerunner relics. Allowing one to join and keeping it hidden as their dirty little secret really isn’t that far fetched of an idea.

The execution of the idea was terrible

3

u/upholsteryduder Aug 21 '26

The entire plot point that Cortana was created to overwrite Chief's personality and take control over his body was insane to me, it's basically the complete opposite of what she was for in the games/books. She was meant to be the technological solution to problems he faced and a tactical advisor, they were supposed to be the perfect partnership of man, machine and software.

2

u/terminbee Aug 21 '26

This feels like a neckbeard thing to say but it felt like Halo was riding the train of "quirky girl saves the day." I think it's not crazy to say most people just wanted to see Master Chief fight aliens. We really didn't need the "deep" plot.

It's disappointing because it basically means we'll never get another Halo show.

5

u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 21 '26

I mean… Cortana already was the quirky girl that saves the day. They didn’t need to add in that whole plot line. At all.

2

u/NazzerDawk Aug 21 '26

What killed it for me was the idea of telling a "rogue Master Chief" story before the story even got going. Absurd.

2

u/PavlovKBI Aug 21 '26

It happens really often. Someone will pitch their indie screenplay, and the studio will say it isn't good enough to fund without attaching it to an existing IP.

Hell, half of the Cloverfield franchise is that exact scenario

1

u/Artisan_HotDog Aug 21 '26

Cloverfield wasn’t an existing IP until the first movie was made. Then it became a sort of Twilight Zone/Black Mirror type situation. I do still see your point but it’s nowhere near egregious as the Halo adaptation.

1

u/PavlovKBI Aug 22 '26

I meant that most of the Cloverfield movies other than the original were indie screenplays that were slammed against the wall until they fit into a vaguely Cloverfield shaped hole. Most of them have hardly anything to do with the plot of the scripts that got shopped to the studios by the writer

10

u/Glossed-Lam Aug 21 '26

It had 13 Executive Producers, and 7 regular Producers.

That thing was committee managed to death.

3

u/couldbemage Aug 21 '26

Highlander 2?

This is a whole additional hated Hollywood trope.

Slap a popular IP on an unrelated script.