Hi
everyone,
ProtoformAl,
Shiro and I are three friends who want to share our opinions on video
games, movies and books. Most of the post on this blog will be
related to the three mentioned topics. Some may be dedicated to a
particular franchise or to a single title. Sometime, we may focus on
a particular medium. After this quick presentation, let us introduce
our first post: Are there some franchises (books or video games) that
won't make the transition to the big screen?
Making
adaptations of others media is one of the thing the cinema industry
really tend to do. It is done for various reasons: to surf on the
previous success of the first medium (book adaptation, video games
adaptation, etc...), to expose to a greater public a well developed
storyline which had a small impact and which deserves a wider
audience. We could go on for what reasons can make a story being
adapted for the silver screen. But is there a limitation of what can
be transferred from another medium to cinema? Are some franchises not
suited for a cinema adaptation?
One
of the first reasons (and maybe the most obvious one) of difficulty
to translate a medium to movie is the complexity of the topic and the
wide range of meaningful characters. Movies have a format of around
105 minutes for purpose of distribution in theaters (longer movies
can sometime drop the attention of the viewers). So some stories have
to many plots and subplots to fit the standard movie format. Let's
take for example the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles, there's around 12
books in the whole series ad it will be impossible to do a single
movie to handle all of the different characters and plots. This
series to be fully adaptable would requiere several movies. They made
two movies based on the first three books of the series (Interview
with a Vampire, based on the
eponymous first book of the series) which was a success and
Queen of the Damned, based on
the two following ones, which received less praise from critics and
viewers).
Another
reason can be the fate of the main protagonist. Major studios tend to
give us stories with happy ending (there are some exceptions like
Fight Club (suicide
attempt of the main protagonist) or Le professionnel
(a French movie starring Jean-Paul Belmondo in which he gets shot in
the final scene)). Those kind of ending may not be well received by
the mainstream audience. It could be risky to adapt those kind of
materials.
One other reason may also be the topic of the first medium (mostly if
it brings some controversy). Controversy tend to make people
uncomfortable. At the moment, no particular franchise come to our
head to help us develop a little more about this particular point.
This is all for this first post. Hope you have enjoyed it. More will
follow in the future.
