Adapting From Paper to the Big Screen
Do you care if the writer/director makes changes to the adaptation, or does the adaptation have to follow the source material to the letter?My Opinion:
I don’t mind if changes are made to adaptations as long as they make sense and do not subtract from the overall story.
A Not Well-Adapted Adaptation:
For example, I think that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a good horror movie, but I don’t think it’s a good adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining.
I can go on about this for a while, but the gist of it is that Kubrick took the bare bones of the book (Recovering alcoholic moves his family into a shut-down hotel after taking on a caretaking job and goes insane. Oh, there’s ghosts here too.) and ignored a lot of the nuance and big details that either affected character’s storylines or explains the overall plot.
And I know that it’s impossible to condense that long of a novel down to a two-and-a-half-hour movie, but a small mention could have helped a lot.
An example of "nuance” is Jack and Danny’s relationship and the cycle of abuse that Jack perpetuates and which Danny breaks in the sequel Doctor Sleep. Jack and Danny are really close in the novel version of The Shining, despite how much Jack has hurt Danny (breaking his arm when he was two, aggression throughout the novel, and SPOILER: trying to kill Danny at the end of the novel), which parallels Jack’s relationship with his father. Jack and Danny’s relationship is what the Overlook tries to exploit throughout the novel, and it’s ultimately what saves Danny in the end. Because, spoiler for the end of the novel, say what you will about what type of person Jack Torrance is, he cared enough about his son to try and kill himself to save Danny after Jack got possessed by The Overlook.
Another important detail that Kubrick doesn’t include in the movie is that The Overlook wanted Danny, not Jack, which is arguably the entire point of the conflict. Yes, The Overlook is evil, but its primary motive is to eat Danny’s Shine (The ability that’s so important that King named the novel after it) and that’s why the hotel is so dangerous for Danny.
I also have an issue with how Tony was adapted and how that affected Danny’s character development, but this part of the explanation is already too long.
Kubrick, overall, makes Danny’s Shining and the Supernatural Horror elements background details in favor of a Cabin Fever story. This causes the movie to become a completely different story, which is why you’ll hear the movie called “Kubrick’s The Shining” when other adaptations are rarely referred to this way. Again, this is NOT to say that Kubrick’s The Shining is a bad movie, I really like this movie and I’ve watched it multiple times, it’s just telling a completely different story in a way that I believe takes the agency away from the three main characters (Jack, Wendy, and Danny).
A Good Adaptation:
An adaptation that made changes to the source material that I thought was great was Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher miniseries.
While the series shares the same name as the source material written by Edgar Allan Poe, it’s a modern adaptation where “The Fall of the House of User” is used as a frame narrative and a collection of Poe’s other short stories and poems are used to expand the story.
Flanagan and his team do a great job of adapting each story to a more modern time, while also allowing each story to be recognizable to its source material. They achieve this by keeping each adaptation contained to one episode, with the exception of the “frame”. While the characters from the different stories appear throughout the series, and things were set up in different episodes, each short story/poem got its moment to shine, and all the details were able to build off each other to create a newly added twist to the end of “House of Usher” that better explains Roderick’s actions and it doesn’t feel cheap.
But, what about comic book adaptations?
When it comes to comic adaptations, I feel like it can be difficult to decide on what is “comic accurate” and what’s not, because events in comics are always changing and being retconned. I do feel that when you look at comic adaptations that are set in a universe as big as the MCU’s, you have to expect changes because the writers and directors have to fit the movie/show into the already predetermined world that has been built upon for nearly twenty years.
It can help to know what specific comic book they’re adapting.
Using Hawkeye in the MCU for example, people were confused when he had a family in Avengers: Age of Ultron, because Hawkeye doesn’t have one on Earth 616, Marvel Comics main comic universe. Many did not realize that the MCU was adapting the Ultimates universe (Earth 1610), where that Hawkeye DID have a family. (Note: This has changed since the beginning of the MCU. At one point, the MCU was supposed to be its own Earth, but they have now decided that it’s Earth 616, but the MCU version. I’m pretty sure this just means they’re going to be adapting more well-known 616 storylines).
Either way, my same criteria can still be applied:
Does the change make sense?
Does the change subtract from the story in ANY way?
I do want to note that a show/movie can be a good story on its own but can be a bad adaptation.
Tell me your opinion by leaving a comment below, on my TikTok, @Leilasstorycorner, a video version of this will be uploaded the same day as this blog post, OR leave a comment on my Instagram post @Leilasstorycorner that I made on April 22 about this same topic.