Please Be More Open-Minded About Adaptations

“The book is always better.” That’s a sentiment we hear that’s thrown around a lot when we talk about adaptations of stories. Essentially, it translates to this: no matter what a writer does in their adaptation, their own translation of a pre-existing story, it will never surpass the original. If you’re taking a book and reworking it as a film or TV show or vice versa, rebooting an old franchise, or just simply want to delve into how you as a writer would want a story to play out given a pre-existing story engine and cast of characters, its inevitable fate is that the newcomer will never be better than the classic. It’s inherently lesser than its source material in terms of quality simply because it’s derivative. Now, I think it’s an utterly trite sentiment, and that uppity, definitive attitude towards adaptations really grinds my gears. So, if I may, I’m here to roll up my sleeves and rant away on my keyboard about it.

Obviously, there are a lot of bad adaptations of stories. Lots of Hollywood reboots, like the Disney live-action remakes and the new Star Wars trilogy are obvious pandering cash-grabs, which aren’t so much interested in retelling a beloved story with a new spin on it as they are interested in exploiting people’s love for those stories. Not really any sort of artistry involved there. There’s the case of adaptations that go too artsy, the creators of the new version believing their version to be infinitely better and smarter and cooler than the original and sacrificing the actual quality of the story we’re being told because of that arrogance. The BBC’s Sherlock series comes to mind here. And then there are just adaptations whose changes to the original story are just so ill-advised that it renders the whole endeavor bad, like turning The Giver into a Divergent-style YA dystopian film or turning Death Note into a gory American thriller. While sometimes a bit of mindless entertainment can be good, these sorts of adaptations aren’t typically well-received -- the latter of those last 2 examples got a 24% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, while these adaptations are widely regarded as terrible because of the terrible changes they make to the original story, they’re not terrible simply because changes were made.

That is to say: change can be a good thing, and source material accuracy does not and never will determine the quality of an adaptation, especially since change can be necessary when adapting a story to a different medium. Concision, for one thing, is something adaptations tend to do better. Movies based on Stephen King books are a great example of this: they cut out a lot of fat King stuffs into all his books and they’re still well-loved, classic movies, essential horror viewing. While neither the IT miniseries or the movies go into nearly as much detail about, say, the sewer system of Derry or the giant turtle god the book does, these are still widely regarded as great adaptations of the story -- and they make you wonder if these additions in the original text were really worth including. Jumping back to Death Note, many adaptations over the years have warped its plot, cutting out arcs and tying up loose ends in their own fashion. The TV drama and stage musical are able to tell their own complete stories with the same cast of characters and same basic starting point for plot in just 11 episodes for the former and 2 ½ hours for the latter -- this compared to the anime, which spends just over 17 hours directly adapting the manga, frame by frame. Adaptations can also actually make original stories much stronger in terms of theme, plot, tone, and/or character if the creator indicates a clear understanding of the original story (or if the original story simply isn’t good), and knows how to execute it in a different fashion. Phoebe Waller-Bridge created the fun, feminist dramedy Killing Eve out of the sleek, rather misogynistic Villanelle novels. Taika Waititi decided to bend the genre of Caging Skies by Christine Leunens and create Jojo Rabbit, turning a serious novel into an Oscar-winning satire. And of course, direct adaptations can oftentimes be worse: Kenneth Branagh’s 4 hour word-for-word direct adaptation of Hamlet has lower critic and audience scores than Gregory Doran’s 2 hour abbreviated version of play starring David Tennant. These adaptations work not only because they’re not carbon copies of their predecessors, but because they understand what makes the original story work, in all senses of the phrase, and how they could make it work differently.

While it can be frustrating to see your favorite story changed around in a new adaptation, encouraging storytellers to create unique takes on common stories will by and large yield much more interesting and exciting results than punishing writers for taking liberties with the plot or characters of those original stories. Our current media traffic is too cluttered with cash-grab reboots that exploit nostalgia and artistic movies that try too hard to be original, when really what we need is a happy medium, where writers can draw inspiration from another story, make it their own and not be caught up in a whirlwind of assumptions about their work simply because it’s derivative of another writer’s. The book will, in many instances as we’ve gone over, indeed be better. But don’t suppose that’s a principle by which all adaptations abide. Don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t judge a film by its book.