Film Adaptations

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History

An adaptation is any pre-existing work adapted into a film. 

Film adaptations became popularized in the silent era with many adapted from literature or theatrical contexts. Film adaptations have become a stable of modern cinema ever since even with their own Oscar category - Best Adapted Screenplay. The most adapted author is Shakespeare with musical films from West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961), Japanese historical epics like Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957), reaching Bollywood with the musical film, Angoor (Gulzar, 1982), and even animation with The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994). Today, ​​"it is claimed that adaptations account for up to 50 percent of all Hollywood films and are consistently rated amongst the highest-grossing at the box office” .

Filmography / Awards

The highest award given for an adapted film, is the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Some of the most well known films that won this award include: Gone with the Wind (won in 1939), Casablanca (won in 1943), Miracle on 34th Street (won in 1947), To Kill A Mockingbird (won in 1962), The Godfather (won in 1972), The Exorcist (won in 1973), Silence of the Lambs (won in 1991), Forrest Gump (won in 1994), and most recently Women Talking in 2022.

Media Adaptation Examples

Book Adaptations

Popular Examples: Jaws, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Little Women, The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Shining, The Princess Bride, The Wizard of Oz, Fight Club

Play/Musical Adaptations

Popular Examples: The Sound of Music, Grease, West Side Story, In the Heights, and also the Disney Renaissance films are loose adaptations of children’s fairy tales into musical films such as The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Mulan, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast

Video Game Adaptations

Popular Examples: Silent Hill, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Pokemon Detective Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros, Resident Evil, Angry Birds, Warcraft

The Super Mario Bros movie is the first video game movie that surpassed one billion dollars in the box office worldwide, forever changing the stigma against subpar adaptations previously.

Other Adaptations

Toys/Merchadizing Adaptations:

Barbie, The Lego Movie, Pokemon Movies

The Barbie movie just release in Summer 2023 surpassed one billion dollars in the box office worldwide, making director Greta Gerwig the first female director to earn one billion in the box office.

Comics:

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC Universe, The Boys, Lucifer , V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Men in Black, Logan

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a film franchise mastering the art of creating a universe of films to watch. The 20+ films require some cross watching in order to understand the entire timeline, and possible the most famous franchise to incorporate watching multiple films in order to understand the plots of new films.

Anime

Anime is a genre of Japanese animation with many animes adapted from Japanese comics called Manga - see Anime for more information

Other Films

Movies that remake or reimagine previous movies.

Disney Live-Action Remakes, Irma Vep (meta-take) on remaking a film, A Star is Born, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Wonka movies

Aesthetic Strategies

Fantasy Novel Adaptations

Movie series such as Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia not only share genre similarities (being all of them fantasies with massive world-building), but all film adaptations touch on themes of humanity, love, and friendship that make the films relatable for all audiences. The original authors, C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) and J.R.R Tolkien (Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit ) were friends and shared a love for the genre. "Tolkien and Lewis shared the belief that through myth and legend—for centuries the mode many cultures had used to communicate their deepest truths—a taste of the Christian gospel's 'True Myth' could be smuggled past the barriers and biases of secularized readers." The two met at in 1926 at a Merton College English Faculty meeting and were each other's first readers.

Ronald Dahl Movies

Maybe it's because director Wes Anderson has adapted four of his short stories into a Quartet of short films called, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Wes Anderson, 2023), but even with many wildly different directors adapting Dahl's films, there still seems to be a collective look. From his famous, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) to Matilda (Danny DeVito, 1996) and even Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009). A lot of his adapted films have this whimsical magical like feel to the films. Many with bright colors, music, and great characters.

Case Study

The 2010s Young Adult Dystopian Adaptations of Film

Building off of the popularity of fantasy novel adaptations in the early 2000s and the popularity of the Hunger Games book series the subgenre of Dystopia Film Adaptations shaped the 2010s with a target audience focused on younger pre-teens and teenagers. It’s argued that the popularity of the subgenre was “inspired by cynicism and anxiety in the wake of the 9/11 attacks”. These films share similar themes of government distrust and “amplify[ed] how millennials around the world were tired of tyrannical leaders” . These films were so popularized because they amplified real-world problems and projected them into younger teenage audiences growing up in a quickly advancing digital world. These preteens and teenagers could use these films as an escape from real-world issues like the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Therefore, preteens and teenagers could relate to the on-screen characters battling against the established government in these dystopian fantasies. Some example films include: The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent.

Sources

Film Adaptations - Film Studies Research https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/filmstudies/adaptations

Film Philology - The Value and Significance of Adaptation/Film Studies in Literature https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361195480_Film_Philology_The_Value_and_Significance_of_AdaptationFilm_Studies_in_Literature

Arts - Special Issue: The Art of Adaptation in Film and Video Games https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/art_adaptation

Video Game to Movie Adaptations: The Role of Narratives https://scholarsarchive.jwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1054&context=student_scholarship

Polygon - The YA dystopia craze died because it didn’t evolve https://www.polygon.com/22449675/ya-dystopia-fad-ended

How the Era of Dystopian YA Movies Came and Went https://collider.com/dystopian-ya-movies-divergent-hunger-games/

The Impact of The Hunger Games and Other YA Film Adaptations 10 Years Later https://www.statepress.com/article/2022/04/young-adult-film-adaptations-hunger-games-10-years-later