Nowadays a lot of movies are being made. In the mall, if you look at your left, you’ll see a movie poster, you look at your right another movie poster. Without movies, I honestly think that life would be very boring. When it comes to movies there are a lot of genres such as action, romance, comedy, sci-fi, thriller, drama and adaptations. Adaptation in movies is where a certain literary work (i.e. novels, comic books) is being translated on to the big screen.
In a year there is more or less than 20 books that is being adapted to films. Why this many? Here are some reasons:
1. MONEY- When a book becomes a best seller, some producers (in the studio) will strive hard to get the rights for a film adaptation and as soon as the film is released the studio will earn some greens because some of them are centered on teens and romance like “Twilight” (a bloody awful film).
2. HISTORY- Some books centers on the history of a country and this is huge help to people because they will have a much more clear idea on what happened in the past.
Even though that was only two reasons, it’s still enough to have an idea as to why adaptations are made. Other adaptations don’t stick close to the source material, it’s like they are just using the ideas and making their own film (which in my opinion is basically plagiarism).
Here’s my main point, must adaptations stick really close to the source material or must they change some scenes to emphasize the story more? Here are some things that might happen if either of these were done:
If you stick to the source material like sticking to page by page some fans of the book will be happy about it but some will be not. Why? They will be happy because they would love to see their favorite book on the big screen. Some of them will not be happy because the fans will react and say “They don’t have any originality, they just copied what happened in the book! This is stupid and lame.”
An example of a film is that stick close to the source material is The Lord of the Rings trilogy (the book is written by J.R.R. Tolkien and directed by Peter Jackson) and Harry Potter franchise (the book is written by J.K. Rowling and directed by, Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuaron and David Yates, . Fans say that this film does not stray away from the source material and it is really faithful. An example of a film that is not faithful is Babylon A.D. (directed b Matthieu Kassovitz). Fans of the book stated that it was one of the most horrid book adaptations ever and it does not give the book the justice it deserves. It basically bastardized the book.
To finish this short article, I want to ask you, what entertains you more? Being faithful to the book or not?
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