If a work is beloved enough, it will eventually be made into some sort of adaptation. This most commonly means that a movie or TV series based on a book, or more recently, based on a game, will be made. There’s also many instances where direction will be taken, such as a novelization of a film or a movie tie-in game or what have you. The question then becomes how you make an adaptation good, because as anyone who has experienced an adaptation of their favorite work will tell you, something always gets lost in translation.

                A large part of why this happens is that there are different rules for different mediums. A movie has a hard limit on its run time, usually three hours at the absolute most, and largely relies on visual storytelling. Books have significantly longer to establish information (potentially as long as they want, if the publisher allows), and make an art out of describing what cannot be seen. Television needs plotlines that are both easily dissectible into episodes, and which fill the running time of each episode regardless of when the cutoff point is. I’m not going to try listing every medium out here, because I think you get the picture. Adapting something into a new medium requires that the work be refitted for that medium. This is what leads to portions of the work being changed or cut from the adaptation, and why some adaptations feel the need to add elements not present in the original work.

                There’s a few categories that we can place an adaptation into, so we’re going to define those right now:

1. Good Adaptations, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, 1408, Brokeback Mountain, or Netflix’s Castlevania
2. Good Results, But Questionable Adaptations, such as IT, Harry Potter, and the Dark Knight
3. Bad Adaptations, like the Percy Jackson films, or the recent Death on the Nile movie
4. In-Name Only Adaptations, such as World War Z, or Captain America: Civil War
5. Works with Multiple Adaptations of varying quality, such as The Stand
6. Unadaptable Works, such as Homestuck and House of Leaves

Obviously, there are far more adaptations worth talking about than this, both good and bad. I could write a whole article on the different interpretations of Snowpiercer that I have seen, but I’d rather not get lost in listing out examples.

There’s little question of what makes a good adaptation in many people’s minds. Typically, it is one that sticks closely to the source material, only making the bare minimum in changes. That’s not exactly true though, if you’ll accept the list of examples I provided as accurate. Lord of the Rings received a trio of films that are often held up as golden examples of how to adapt a work, but those films make several changes, most notably writing out Saruman at the start of the third film, whereas he was effectively the final battle in the books. Similarly, the Castlevania show loosely adapts three of the games (3, Curse of Darkness, and Circle of the Moon). None of these games have their plots fully intact during the show, merging the time periods so that all three can occur at once, and altering several characters to fit the combined story, yet the series was a hit with long-time fans and newcomers alike. So what makes these two adaptations immune to the criticism of “they changed it, now it sucks?” The intelligence behind those changes. Lord of the Rings kept nearly everything in the jump to film, and the one major change was done to fit it to the new format, as having anything other than falling action after the ring’s destruction would be unacceptable in a film, as that would disrupt the natural three act structure Hollywood loves. So while something is changed, it is done specifically to make the story function in the new medium that it is in, and a new, earlier encounter with Saruman was added to ensure the plot point was not lost in the process. Castlevania, meanwhile, makes many changes, but is careful to stay true to the themes of the games and the personalities of the characters (except Isaac, but nobody’s going to miss his original incarnation). It is still a story that is carefully crafted to allow the things people loved about the games to shine through, and fully invests into those themes rather than trying to turn the franchise into something it is not. As for the other two films I listed under this category? They have one thing in common: both were initially short stories. 1408, a horror story about a haunted hotel room, and Brokeback Mountain, the story of a doomed romance, could not be more different on paper, yet the small scope of the original stories allowed for them to be adapted in full, while the only additions made were both logically consistent with the original stories, and really only there to ensure the stories fit into their intended new run times.

Then you have adaptations that produce good results, but are questionable as adaptations. I mostly listed films here, because they are the most likely to have this problem. The Harry Potter films leave out significant portions of the books, casting aside hundreds of pages for the sake of fitting into their designated run times. The 2017 IT adaptation is one half adaptation, one half original story. The Dark Knight is possibly the worst superhero movie at actually being a superhero movie. In all three cases, I can sincerely say that the end results, the films we got, were also quite good, each becoming cultural touchstones at their respective times of release. These are harder works to discuss, entirely because the result is good, even if they failed to fully adapt the original work. Yet they are still easily recognizable as adaptations, because they retain the core elements of the original stories. Fans are often split by these types of films, but in the best scenario, we enjoy them for what they are, while acknowledging that this was the only way to get a film adaptation of the story. Each original work contained too much content for films, even for a series of films. The ever growing Harry Potter books, after the third, were twice the length of what could reasonably be fit into films. IT is over a thousand pages of nonlinear intricacies, and would never work if attempted as a one-to-one adaptation. The Dark Knight adapts multiple comic book storylines that each took over a year to publish, how could it all possibly fit into one film? Many would say these should have been TV series instead of movies, if time was the concern, and they’re not necessarily wrong. Is it right to say that a work cannot be put into a specific medium though? The purpose of adaptation is to distill the original story into a new form, ideally to reach another audience besides just the original fans. While I cannot call these films great adaptations in good conscience, I do think they are all strong works in their own right, that can stand alongside the originals by celebrating aspects of the original story, celebrating the things integral to the originals (Harry and co.’s friendship, the perseverance of the Losers, Two-Face’s descent) rather than trying to be perfect one-to-ones.

Of course, then there are the poorer adaptations, the ones that either fail to adapt the story, or which somehow besmirch the name of the original through their existence. Percy Jackson and the Olympians was a series near and dear to many of my generation growing up, and it got two films for its… five books? Then there’s the Death on the Nile film, adapting one of Agatha Christie’s most popular stories with some… extremely significant changes. Both of these failed as adaptations, and it shouldn’t be hard to see why. In the case of the Percy Jackson films, they simply deleted key elements from the books at will (including the main antagonist of the first book), while adding in new things that did not align with the original story (the entire last act of Sea of Monsters). These were books that should have been easy to adapt; cut out one or two monster fights, montage the camp sequence, and the story fits cleanly into Hollywood’s ideal mold. They could have done all five books in roughly the same way, yet we instead saw the writers misremember the plot of the first book, and then try to cram the last three books into a twenty minute sequence in the second film. Death on the Nile, meanwhile, adds an unnecessary backstory to Poirot, turning him into a hardened, scarred soldier, instead of the true pacifist and hopeless romantic he was in the book series. It also tried to shock audiences by changing who some of the victims were, unaware of the fact that it killed off a character integral to the book’s emotional climax. For those unaware, the book ends with Poirot playing matchmaker for some of the guests, allowing something beautiful to blossom out of the tragedy he investigated. The film unexpectedly kills off one half of this couple, leaving the conclusion feeling sad and empty. In both cases, the reason that adaptation fails is not that changes were made to the story, but that changes were made to the thematic core of each story. Percy Jackson lost its tone and most of its character development to the deletion of so many plot points, just as Death on the Nile lost its morale and became yet another generic police procedural.

Then we have the curious group of films that are adaptations in name only. World War Z generated a new protagonist and haphazardly gave him the plot points of most of the characters it removed, foregoing the book’s more unorthodox plot structure. Captain America: Civil War, left out most of the characters, as well as the actual purpose behind the titular war, telling an entirely different story than the comic event of the same name. These are harder to discuss, if only because I’m not sure what to make of them. The World War Z movie is a perfectly good zombie flick, but fans of the book have every right to be disappointed that Hollywood effectively just slapped the name of the book onto a different work. I’m not at all fond of the Civil War film, nor do I love the event it got its name from, but to see no attempt at the original story still feels wrong. I can’t speak for why Hollywood does these things, and while I know the issue is not limited to film, it still bothers me that good works will miss their chance at an adaptation simply because it was easier to use their titles to lure people into a different story that nobody knew how to market.

Finally, for the sake of completeness, I should mention those works deemed, “unadaptable.” Some works will get this label, only for it to be proven wrong, such as American Psycho, but there are absolutely pieces of media that are created for aa certain medium, and which need to remain in that medium. House of Leaves is a book infamous for its bizarre structure, and one which the author has repeatedly turned down movie deals for. Frankly, Danielewski makes the right decision every time he says no to this, because the bizarre visual formatting of his book is one which could only work on ink and paper, as the physical positioning of text, odd formatting, and wall of meticulously placed footnotes in the book tell a story in a way that simply cannot be done in any medium that isn’t the written word. On that same token is Homestuck, a web comic that tells significant parts of its story through flash animations and stylized chatroom logs. I’ve seen a printed out version that tries to just slap the text and images directly into a book, and it doesn’t work. The book itself has an index of web links the reader is supposed to follow to watch the flash animations at certain points, and the obscene length of the webcomic (and the amount of it spent watching the characters messaging each other in chat rooms) results in the work also being unfit for film and television, as any medium other than text would result in a bored audience. I mention these two stories not because I think poorly of them (I actually respect them quite a bit), but because they cleanly demonstrate that some works cannot be adapted outside of their original intended mediums, and thus should not be. That care has to be given in deciding what story to adapt, and how.

The point I’m trying to get at here, is that the thing that makes an adaptation good is not producing a new work that is completely true to the text. Castlevania didn’t do that. Harry Potter didn’t do that. What makes an adaptation work is being true to the heart of the text. In each case where the adaptation worked, whether it was precisely the same story (1408, Brokeback mountain) or not (IT, The Dark Knight), the core of the story, the thing that people most remember it for, was both left intact and celebrated. When an adaptation fails, it is typically because the creators did not put in the care to preserve the intent of the story, or personally disliked the original work in some way and made changes they believed would make the story better, or more widely appealing, without considering what they were sacrificing in making those changes. So when we next look at a new adaptation of an old favorite, let’s take a moment to consider why the original is good, and judge the adaptation on its ability to preserve and translate that across mediums.