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View Full Version : Why pay creators to adapt their stories then completely change them?


Bored at 3:00AM
10-26-2008, 09:38 AM
So, I just watched Wanted, which I didn't really have high expectations for, but I figured might be worth a few laughs given how funny the comic was.

I knew going in they'd dumped the whole super-villains take over the world angle, but I didn't fully appreciate how little of the original comic they'd ignored in favor of creating an almost entirely different story featuring characters similar to their comic counterparts in name only. Calling this movie "Wanted" is like calling a movie about a dog who solves crime "King Kong".

Which leads me to wonder why Hollywood didn't just save themselves some money and created their own action franchise about an ancient secret society of assassins instead? It's not like anybody outside of the comics industry had even heard of Wanted prior to the movie so it's not like there was a built-in fanbase or anything.

The funny thing is, some of the most prominent people involved with the film didn't seem to realize this. I even heard Angelina Jolie wanted to talk to Mark Millar about her character. Why? The Fox in Millar's comic isn't even vaguely like the one Angelina Jolie plays in the movie. Aside from them both being women who shoot guns, that's about it.

I know fanboys tend to go balistic when Hollywood changes even the slightest thing, but this seems like an exceptional case. Wanted, like it or not, is quite obviously the story about a villain's coming of age. If you don't want to do that, why bother making an adaption of it?

DonC
10-26-2008, 10:14 AM
Sometimes I think Hollywood just wants the name and the ability to tie it in to a comic. Take the Brian Michael Bendis/Marc Andreyko book Torso. Paramount Pictures probably paid millions of dollars for the rights to the book even though it's based on a true story. All Bendis and Andreyko did was read a couple of the dozens of books based on the killings and adapt them into comic book form. And they won an Eisner award for it.

All Paramount had to do was have a screen writer read the same books, or different ones if they wanted, and adapt them into a movie. Boom! You just saved a couple million dollars.

I don't get why they didn't do that.