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Film or Series Adaptations?

Do You Prefer Books to be Adapted to Film or TV?

  • Film

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Live Action TV Series

    Votes: 1 50.0%
  • Animated TV Series

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other (Please Post)

    Votes: 1 50.0%

  • Total voters
    2

Terminus

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When it comes to adapting written media to a visual medium, the general go-to for the longest time was the big screens, Hollywood, the cinematic adaptation. We've seen dozens upon dozens of examples, but the most famous books have to be the Harry Potter series and the landmark Lord of the Rings trilogy (to say nothing of the monolith that is the MCU). TV was seen as "lesser," and big-budget adaptations stayed on the big screen.

Then Game of Thrones happened. An epic-scale series that couldn't be properly compressed into a 2-3 hour runtime, this was the first well-known book adaptation for the small screen. This was a watershed moment, as it proved that a well-made TV adaptation could easily do very well for itself. Since then we've gotten plenty, such as The Witcher, Good Omens, and The Boys to grace our small screens.

Now that we have plenty of series and films to compare, what do you think is the best choice for an adaptation? A single epic film, or a more drawn out but deeper TV series?
 

VikzeLink

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It depends on what books are being adapted. Some work better as movies, and other work better as series. For example, I feel like the Septimus Heap books by Angie Sage would work great as movies, while perhaps anything from the Warcraft universe (which tried to do a movie in 2016, which I personally thought was great, but the US audience just didn't go and see it enough to warrant sequels) would work better as a series, as it requires a longer attachment to the characters and a greater understanding of that world.
 

Cfrock

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I'm with VikzeLink, it depends on the nature of the story.

A Song of Ice and Fire works better as a TV series because the story is continuous, follows multiple POV characters across continents, and covers years of time. None of the books are a complete, finished stories on their own. They all build up conflicts and plots that continue into the follow up books, and so adapting them into a TV series can follow that same structure better, and incorporate the multiple perspectives and plots better due to having a longer overall runtime.

A book like, say, Nation by Terry Pratchett would work better as a movie because it's a stand-alone, complete story following one character's perspective. That can be adapted into a movie without losing too much of the core of it. A movie allows for a tighter focus on the character, and doesn't have to fill a long runtime.

Harry Potter is a tricky one, though. The books, for the most part, work well on their own, at least until the later books. Obviously they were planned as a series and the events of all the books remain relevant throughout, but because the structure is handily broken up into academic years you can adapt them to a series of movies without much trouble.

But even then, so much was lost that fans have had numerous opinions about for twenty years. Goblet of Fire, for example, was initially going to be two films until the director said 'Nah, we can do it in one,' but could they? Did they? Two and half hours might not have been enough time, whereas ~twelve hours of a TV series might have been.

But that's likely too much time for the earlier books. You wouldn't want to stretch those stories thin and stuff them with filler, so if you did a TV series, the early seasons would work better with fewer episodes than later ones.

Overall, I'd say that TV lets you get deeper into a range of characters and a serialised story, and so works well for adaptations of books that follow a similar structure. If the book is a one off, a movie would work well because you can retell the story in the new format without making as many sacrifices.
 

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