I can't count how many times my favorite books and comics got turned into film, TV series, or even animated features. A summary of my verdicts were 50/50. Some adaptations were really good or a-okay, and some were just terrible. But I think most of us can relate to the situation, wherein the movie adaptation completely ruins the book(s).
Lemme share all of you a simple story. Before I officially became demigod, I watched The Lightning Thief before even reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympian series. My thoughts on the movie? It was fine. Interesting, but it didn't wrap up my mind. A year later, my friend recommended the Percy Jackson series to me and she lent me all her five books. After reading the first book, I was immediately hooked. I was mesmerized by how much depth most of the characters had, enticed by Riordan's writing style, and overwhelmed by the Greek Mythology references. Overall, I fell in love with the Percy Jackson series and I officially declared myself as a demigod.
But right after I read the first book, the first thought that came to my mind before everything else was this, "Oh my god, the movie ruined the book."
The moral of the story? If you want to start on a book series and you learn that it became or is becoming a movie or a TV show, start with the movie or TV first. You will encounter spoilers, no doubt. But you will be spared from the feeling of disappointment. The question is, why do movie adaptations suck?
When I learned that The Mortal Instruments Series was going to have its own movie adaptation, I emotionally prepared myself for the worst. A huge part of me knew it was going to be terrible. A lot of people of the TMI fandom knew that, too. So they bombarded Cassandra Clare, who is the amazing writer of the Shadowhunter series--with lots of questions regarding the movie. Obviously, most of my fellow shadowhunters were concern who was going to play the main characters and how much of the plot is going to be in the movie. But in the end, Clare's answer is always said that it is out of her hands because she already sold the rights of her book to the filmmakers, and that the ones producing the film have the last say on what's going to happen in the script. I have to admit, that did not make me feel better. The good news was that Clare was highly involved in the production, but that did not stop the film from its downfall. I guess the main point of this story was to tell you that it is actually up to the filmmakers on how the story goes. Like, no matter how genius and creative the story is to you, they still have the power to change it. After all, to them it is just an adaptation. I don't know if they know how much these stories mean to us.
I guess I will never understand how the film industry dissects a plot from a book, but I do understand why we end up getting disappointed. It is because our imagination will never theirs. You can say that is the main challenge when you attempt to make a book series into a movie. If you want to make it a big hit, you should be fully aware that your target audience will be the readers. Don't just research the fandom, be the fandom. Because chances are a reader's vision is far different from a director's vision. However, I think trying to understand a reader's vision is...impossible. Because you're not just focusing on one member of the fandom, but thousands. Millions. Probably billions of readers. And each of us have a different version of this scenario. Each of us have a different idea of what our favorite hot male character would look like. Each of us have a different interpretation of what this feeling in the book is trying to express. And most of the time, our imaginations are just insane. They're so insane, they can't be comprehended in reality..sadly. The way people from fandoms envision their favorite characters is like how a women would set impossibly high standards for a mate. That's why most movies seem like they ruined our favorite books, somehow. Our standards are just way too high.
Till the next post~
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