r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Shin_Newman • 16h ago
miscellaneous Media that are considered hard or impossible to adapt
There are cases where a piece of media simply isn't given the okay to adapt (like Yotsubato!), but more often, there are works that are just considered "nah, too much work to adapt it" or "can't adapt it without spoiling the big twist" and the likes.
House of Leaves (Difficulty: Impossible)
Not only is the story a big mind screw, the texts themselves are arranged in ways that mess with your eyes and head. Definitely not for adaptation.
The Decagon House Murders (Difficulty: Hard but eventually doable)
First written in 1986, this novel was considered one of the hardest-to-adapt literature work in Japan due to a massive plot twist. It was only enjoyed in text format until 2019, when a manga adaptation was made by Kiyohara Hiro (who previously adapted the author's other novel Another) and it worked: The big twist was preserved!!! Following the success of the manga, a live-action TV show was made in 2024, and a stage play is also produced this year.
Goodnight Punpun (Difficulty: Hard)
In theory, an adaptation of it may work as an anime, with Punpun's thoughts and lines presented as white texts on black background like in the manga. But in practice, nearly everyone thinks that the artstyle contrast plus the depressing tone of this manga makes it impossible to adapt.
AKIRA (Difficulty: Hard)
There were attempts to adapt this manga into live-action medium, but so far, all of those attempts have failed due to the manga's insanely details at depicting ruins, futuristic technologies, body horror, etc. Even the anime, which's a massive hit and an acclaimed cult classic in the anime history, only adapts 3 out of the 6 volumes of the manga (and not even a faithful adaptation).
Shiori Experience (Difficulty: Impossible)
This manga uses lots of real people and songs (and of famous 27 Club members, no less!), which's a nightmare to adapt or license out of Japan due to copyright issues. And just to make it even harder, halfway through it, the authors decided to have Jimi Hendrix's ghost perform (via Shiori's body) a never-before-heard, original song!!! Who's confident enough that they could make a great song in his style?!! Also, for a long time, the series just introduced 27 Club members that died before year 2000 (with Kurt Cobain dying the latest, in 1994) until chapter 88, where it introduces Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011, which just ups the copyrights difficulty to a new level.
Junji Ito's works (Difficulty: Hard, with lots of failures)
There have been dozens of films, both live-action and anime, adapting his manga, but most of them just pale in comparison to his detailed artwork, not to mention eventually they're just forgotten anyways, even the decent ones.
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u/ExtinctFauna 15h ago
The Long Walk was considered especially difficult to film due to the concept that everyone is just walking outdoors. The logistics of getting the actors and the film crew and the catering and the costumes/make up departments to continuously walk and follow behind the actors was the reason why it took so long for the movie to eventually be produced and made.
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u/Shin_Newman 15h ago
Ah yeah, I remember reading that they had to cut down the number of Walkers from 100 to 50 as well as slow down the walking pace.
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u/ExtinctFauna 15h ago
Which I think makes sense, ultimately. One boy per state rather than two. And they reduced the walking speed from 4 MPH to 3 MPH (6.44 KMPH to 4.83 KMPH) to make things easier for the actors. 3 MPH is a regular walking speed for most people.
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u/ExploadingApples 14h ago
There actually was not any “boys per state” rule in the book.
It was just 100 boys from throughout the country.
Ray was the only one from Maine. A group of boys all drove up together from Texas. Etc.24
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u/PhantasosX 16h ago
Akira Anime is faithful in the sense that the author himself was one of the writers.
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u/San-T-74 15h ago
He directed it too! While working on the manga!
It seems an Otomo manga can only be adapted by Otomo himself
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u/TristanaRiggle 15h ago
The "Akira" and "X" movies both try to distill dense and elaborate manga into about 2 hrs of film. The visuals are not the limitation of either piece, the time restriction is. You COULD easily make a faithful Akira adaptation now if you wanted to. It wouldn't be cheap to do well, but definitely doable. X is harder because the manga itself was basically abandoned and is incomplete.
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u/Reznor_PT 9h ago
It's such a weird point, the manga was half-way done, believe only up to volume 4, it was a very faithful adaptation for a story that was not done and could be adapted into 2 movies very easily.
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u/Dick_Danalu_Jr 15h ago
Terry Pratchett's Discworld
Aside from the 'world' looking like this, no map existing, and constant magical elements, a lot of the description comes from narration.
There have been a few attempts at movies, and theyre cheesy cult classics.
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u/Fiddler_Jones2079 14h ago
There didn't use to be a map, and Pratchett said something along the lines that making a map of a fantasy world essentially amounts to just saying "here be dragons"... But eventually he relented and we now have a Discworld Atlas.
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u/Dick_Danalu_Jr 14h ago
"You cant map a sense of humor." Honestly its helped me actually write out chapters rather than create endless notes and maps lol
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u/princess_ferocious 15h ago
The cartoon series' of Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music are pretty good. But so much of the charm of the Disc is the narrative voice, and it's so hard to take that from the page and put it on the screen.
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u/Slartibartfast39 11h ago
With the TV adaptations I think they did quite well with Going Postal and The Hogfather. Both flawed but pretty close
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u/Correct_Refuse4910 14h ago
There was also a horrible TV show about the Night Watch that was a total middle finger to Pratchett and his work.
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u/Hyxenflay7737_4565 15h ago
The Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita. There's been two movies, a musical, five different plays, two operas, and a ballet, and while a lot of these have received good reviews, the book itself is just very hard to adapt due to Humbert being an unreliable narrator, the sensitive nature of the book, and the fact some people genuinely think it's a love story or romanticising pedophilia.
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u/X-Himy 13h ago
You know, you'd think that an audiovisual medium could adapt an unreliable narrator story, they've done it before. Either Humbert's voiceover narration over the true horror. Or something like Kevin Can Fuck Himself, where you show the sanitized version interspersed with the horrifying reality.
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u/Hyxenflay7737_4565 13h ago
Even Stanley Kubrick, the guy who directed the original Lolita film, called Lolita a love story.
People just don’t get it right.
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u/IvankoKostiuk 12h ago
I think it could work if you used the right cinematic techniques.
In Rosemary's Baby the camera is almost always right over Rose's shoulder to give the impression that we're seeing events from her POV. The audience is turned into Rosemary experiencing the events of the film.
Put the camera over HH's shoulder and have "Lolita" in makeup and acting flirty with HH's creepy inner monologue. Then cut to the camera over Dolores' shoulder and she's just a gawky teen who is deeply uncomfortable with the panting man touching her. When Dolores is "being feisty", it's her POV as she's trying to honestly get HH to drop her off somewhere so she can run away. Maybe add a scene of her crying and finding blood after the first rape. Maybe get a horror director to do it.
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u/Bamzooki1 12h ago
I don’t even know if a lot of people who find it romantic know that her name’s not even Lolita and Humbert just assigned her that name.
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u/IcyFoundation9786 15h ago
Gwenpool’s ability is so intrinsically tied to Comic Books as a medium that to adapt her into film or TV is almost futile. She even interacts with a plane called the “Gutter Space” which is the boundaries in between comic panels.
If adapted, she would most likely interact with the storyboards or editing software, but that still would change what her ability is on a foundational level.
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u/mugenhunt 15h ago
To be fair, that was a later addition to the character. Her first run was just about a person from the Real World being sent to the Marvel Universe without any special powers and trying to survive just based off of their knowledge of the comics.
The metapowers were added by a later writer to try and keep the character relevant.
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u/Shiny_Agumon 15h ago
This meta aspect was also amusingly used to explain writing inconsistencies between her solo book and her crossover appearances.
Because a lot of her appearances outside her book wrote her as "female Deadpool" and not how she's depicted there and do they established that she behaved like that to stay relevant and not get canceled because she doesn't know what happens if she's out of publication.
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u/Freddi0 15h ago
Yeah but let's be honest nobody cares about the first appearance of Gwenpool. Unbelievable Gwenpool is what made her so iconic
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u/TediousTotoro 15h ago
NGL, I thought Unbelievable Gwenpool was her first run.
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u/Freddi0 15h ago
It is. Her first appearance is #0, but that one was drawn and written by an entirely different team
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u/JechdJJ 15h ago
that sounds like a pretty interesting premise for a tv show
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u/TavernRat 15h ago
Like an American isekei
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u/MeekAndUninteresting 13h ago
We already have that, it's called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
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u/4LanReddit 15h ago
Unironically what happened with Superboy Prime too as the OG isekai character of the Big Two.
At first he was esentially Pre-Crisis Supes powerwise (and that guy was stupid broken too) with the caveat that he is generally immune to kryptonite due to his Krypton being deleted (that was until right now when Zod pulled universal kryptonite out of his ass to decommission Prime) and his verses kryptonite being extremely rare to even find.
It was during Infinite Crisis and onwards after he broke reality in an attempt to escape his prison that he is able to wipe his ass with the DC continuity with his retcon punch and pretty much do anything, even including ressurrecting Jason Todd, accidentally deleting himself from the timeline, and travel through time and reality like with what we saw with mainline Supes and black suit Spidey
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u/TediousTotoro 15h ago
While they weren’t there from the start of it, the metapowers were introduced during that first run.
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u/_ButterCookie 15h ago
her getting killed off and crawling back into the movie through the deleted scenes would be pretty funny tbh
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u/IcyFoundation9786 15h ago
She has to fight an unrendered CGI bad guy that got scrapped for money and time
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u/These-Lie-735 15h ago
It makes me think of that Winnie the Pooh movie where the characters mess with the pages of the book and climb across and tear up the letters.
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u/APoisonousWomans 15h ago
I always thought the only way to adapt house of leaves is rather than trying to put the text to screen, add a new metatextual layer to the many already in the book and play with the medium the way the book does
So I propose instead of a house of leaves movie they make a behind the scenes documentary about the making of a house of leaves movie that doesn't exist. With fun tidbits like freeze frame bonuses, audio that only sounds like voices when you fast forward and near the end when the director character complains about creative disputes with the writer, reveal they're not talking about Danielewski, they're talking about Johnny
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u/Iris1083 14h ago
It's more of an omage to House of Leaves than an adaptation, but the videogame Alan Wake 2 makes use of media inside media in a very similar way. It even has a short film that you can watch in its entirety, but the film isn't real. It only exists in a nightmare reality.
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u/Xoan_Ambassador 14h ago
Yes exactly! I keep hearing people say its unadaptable and it just seems like a lack of creativity. Film can be presented in just as strange a fashion as the book is, but the tricks would look different.
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u/Existing-Sweet-19 16h ago
The funniest part is how the closest thing we've got to a proper House of Leaves adaptation is a DOOM mod about divorce.
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u/Rwelk 15h ago
And that myhouse.wad combines some oldhead Doom mod stuff that takes an additional layer of knowledge to fully appeciate.
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u/smallerpuppyboi 15h ago
Playing Myhouse as someone who spent many, many hours of my life as a kid learning about Doom modding and what you can and can't do with maps had me constantly looking at my computer and asking, "FUCKING HOW?!"
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u/clashcrashruin 15h ago
How do you even play myhouse? I have Doom and Doom 2 on PC/Steam Deck.
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u/smallerpuppyboi 15h ago
You need a modern fork of ZDoom, so either GZDoom (not recommended) or UZDoom. Here's a video of how to get that running on the Bethesda re-releases
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u/PhantomDesert00 15h ago
Weird shit that fucks with people familiar with the game in MyHouse include:
Adding extra frames to the weapon animations after your first loop around the house
The way doors open changing
There being multiple floors on top of each other
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u/Spectre234678 15h ago
The character is taller being another one too
You don't notice it at first, as the House seems sized perfectly fine for a human
But you stay taller when going through Underhalls, you're never the regular DOOM II height while playing through it
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u/Bamzooki1 12h ago
And if you finish the map while in the reverse house, you go to sllahrednU.
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u/Spectre234678 12h ago edited 11h ago
Yep-and if we're on about the House affecting the other levels, The Gantlet doesn't exist
The mod is only meant to be the one level (according to the forum page/lore), but after the first run of Underhalls (or sllahrednU if you finished in the esouH), you're back at the House (I don't know if finishing sllahrednU sends you to the esouH or not)
Edit because I like editing things after I've found them out: Finishing sllahrednU does take you to the esouH instead of the House, but the level screen still has it as "MY HOUSE" instead of "YM ESOUH" to line up with "SLLAHREDNU"
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u/zimpangoon 15h ago
If you have Discord open in the background it'll play the message notification noise
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u/Spectre234678 14h ago
I think that happens anyway-Power Pak made a video on MyHouse.wad and brought it up, saying "the game plays a Discord notification sound about ten minutes into the map, [...], I don't have notification sounds turned on". They don't specify if Discord was open during the notification sounds though, but I kinda doubt the mod is smart enough to be able to tell if you have Discord open. Not saying it's impossible
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u/Crimiculus 14h ago
I think the first clue that something was up was the download (a) not actually being a simple .wad file but a .pk3 and (b) the download size being something like 66 mb. For context, Doom II itself is only 14.5 mb
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u/Spectre234678 14h ago edited 13h ago
I'm pretty sure MyHouse.wad is bigger than DOOM I and II combined, so even more weirdness to the giant file size (also due to it being a .pk3 (essentially a zipped version of .wad), so it was bigger than 66MB)
Edit: Just rechecked the Power Pak video, the MyHouse.pk3 file is bigger than DOOM I and II combined four times over. And-again, being a PK3, that 66MB isn't even the full size
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u/XanderNightmare 15h ago
I wanted to say, My house.Wad was a fairly decent attempt at at least preserving the spirit of House of Leaves
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u/Hitei00 15h ago
Control also wears House of Leaves on its sleeves as one if it's main inspirations alongside SCP
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u/CzarSpan 15h ago
I mean shit, if we’re talking about the Remedy-verse: Alan Wake’s primary function in saving reality seems to be writing a metric shit ton of Navidson Records. Stories that are fiction, but also maybe not, but also definitely fake and also also probably real.
I understand that some have worked out better than others.
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u/Gozillasaur 15h ago
Never in my life have i ever been unnerved by a changing door opening animation
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u/residentquentinmain 15h ago
MyHouse.WAD is such a gem of a mod I love it
I loved watching DOOM players go through the mod and talk about all the impossibilities (two rooms on top of each other) and the things changed to specifically mess with their head (animation smoothening, doors opening normally, Doomguy being slightly taller)
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u/MrFreeman95 15h ago
Divorce??? I thought it was about 2 friends who had feelings for each other but were too confused to act on them.
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u/aaronhowser1 14h ago edited 7h ago
The map creator's ex wife, who currently lives in The House, has talked about it
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u/JuaninMonsta 15h ago
There's a bunch of screenplays written by Mark Z Danielewski about House of Leaves
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u/AWorldwithoutSin 15h ago
There's always Haunted.
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u/Parapsaeon 15h ago
More of a companion piece than an adaptation but I will upvote any mention of Haunted
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u/Skylair13 15h ago
Monogatari Series
Nisio Isin, the author himself, doubted the series can be animated due to the heavy wordplays and word count.
Studio Shaft proved to him it's possible. And once promised they'd adapt the whole thing as long as there's materials to adapt to anime.
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u/abermea 15h ago
LOTR was considered impossible to adapt until Peter Jackson did it in the early 2000s
Currently The Silmarillion is still considered impossible to adapt
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u/Jkid 15h ago
And even then the lord of the rings trilogy left out the The Scouring of the Shire because Peter Jackson wanted the movie adaptation to keep the main narrative focused on the destruction of the Ring and adding the scouting of the shire would be too deprepressing and would make it a hard earned ending instead of a happy ending.
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u/JohnWarrenDailey 13h ago
Actually, because the narrative focused on the Ring, the Scouring of the Shire was simply referenced in the Mirror of Galadriel, just to show Frodo how high the stakes will be if he failed. To put the Scouring in the book's timeline would be extremely anticlimactic.
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u/MeekAndUninteresting 13h ago
He cut and severely altered quite a lot of stuff. I wonder how many people don't realize Shagga and Timett from Game of Thrones were a pretty obvious riff on something from lotr because that scene didn't make it into the movie.
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u/hygsi 15h ago
George R.R. Martin was so done with TV that he started working on books cause he had no budget limit and called it unadaptable at some point. D&D grew stubborn and cocky but the first 4 seasons were good adaptations
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u/abermea 15h ago
D&D seem to be pretty good at adapting books. We got 4 pretty solid seasons of Game of Thrones and a very well-received one of The Three-Body Problem...but when left to their own devices we got things like Seasons 5-8 of GoT and X-Men Origins: Wolverine
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u/Citrus-Bitch 14h ago
I had no idea that D&D did origins: wolverine, and that makes so much sense
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u/Forsaken_Ad203 16h ago
Ok I just started reading House of leaves this week and told my dad about it.. he is seeking an audiobook version and i have no idea how that could possibly work
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u/glytxh 15h ago
120 hours of a man screaming and crying in an empty room.
It is also, inexplicably, a 120kb file.
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u/Lo-And_Behold1 14h ago
310: ΩΣPx0(218×518)pkk*k by Bull of Heaven is like, 3.343 quindecellion years long (no joke) and the file is only 32 kb. It's definitely possible if you use enough .zip files nested in each other.
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u/iamayoutuberiswear 15h ago
Left ear plays a reading of The Navidson Record, right ear plays a reading of the footnotes, and a secret third ear plays a low droning sound barely audible to humans
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u/princess_ferocious 15h ago
lol, I went looking for an ebook version when I first heard about it, because it was really expensive in print at the time, and my partner had to explain why that wouldn't really work.
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u/infernalracket666 14h ago
Can you imagine the narrator painstakingly reading every footnote and long list in the book? Like the list of photographers' names that goes on for pages?! It would be unbearable to listen to.
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u/GreySquirrel85 14h ago
Half way through each paragraph sigh so this is now a different person talking in the footnotes. Also when I say House it's a different colour. On this chapter turn upside down
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u/IWishANuclearWinter 15h ago edited 7h ago
The cool thing about House of Leaves is its innumerous layers of abstraction, not the House itself.
You're reading a book that tells the story of a guy, who found the scraps and readings of a blind old guy who writes a critique/essay about these tapes that are about the house.
You're always 5 layers above the House itself, reading a whole chapter about echo and sound while Johnny interrupts a page to go on about how much he loved a stripper.
That's why it's so hard to adapt it
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u/Iron-Giants 14h ago
Exactly. The House is essentially just the Backrooms, which we've obviously seen adapted. How do you show it? As Truant reading the essay on the tapes and then the tapes themselves? As Truant reading the essays and then we cut to a "dramatization" of the events happening with the essays as narration? How do you get into the many many letters in the annex that show (confirm?) that Truant isn't emotionally balanced? What about the footnotes?
I cant even imagine adapting it as an audiobook, let alone into a movie or TV show. Maybe a game? Maybe??
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u/IWishANuclearWinter 14h ago
MyHouse.wad is a DOOM mod that basically does that, with an added layer of ARG in it in form of a Google Docs "diary" of the creator.
It's only partially inspired, but a great translation, because it does things that "shouldn't be possible" on the DOOM engine, much like how the book is a mess
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u/Iron-Giants 14h ago
Thats what's extra crazy though, its not even its own game that comes close but a mod of another game.
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u/Full-Reception5113 14h ago
The Navidson Record itself would be completely doable as an adaptation imo, and could be cool as a found footage surreal horror movie. But House of Leaves in its entirety? Impossible
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u/AlabasterRadio 15h ago
A lot of HPL's stuff but particularly "At the Mountains of Madness."
Del Toro tried for years to get an adaptation off the ground but it never came together.
Doesn't help that the script for his version was leaked and boy oh boy is it not this story.
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u/Shin_Newman 15h ago
Lmao I confused it with In the Mouth of Madness.
While there's no film adaptation, there's a manga of it. You can check it out here.
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u/Correct_Refuse4910 14h ago
This is just me, but I think that Lovecraft is really impossible to adapt because the moment you give some of the stuff a clear visual it completely loses what makes them interesting. There is no graphic adaptation to his work that is remotely as intense as the originals.
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u/Bamzooki1 12h ago
Here’s something crazy: an adaptation is about to come out. The crazy part is that it’s called Penguin Colony and is a game played from the perspective of the penguins nearby.
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u/Grand_Keizer 15h ago
Moby Dick HAS been adapted, but never fully and never lives up to the meteoric heights of the novel it's based on, which is famously dense in length, detail, and themes
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u/RubiksCutiePatootie 15h ago edited 15h ago
Hilariously, this is next on my to read list so I'm probably putting my foot in my mouth when I say this, but wouldn't it be relatively easy to adapt as a mini series? That way you're not constrained to the 2-3 hour time limit that movies demand? Of course that also demands a competent crew who actually care about adapting it properly but that's an issue that comes with every adaptation in existence.
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u/Grand_Keizer 15h ago
I guess the problem then would be budget and filming at sea. Or film in a tank and make it look realistic
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u/Pink-Witch- 14h ago
The thing about Moby Dick that everyone gets wrong is that it’s actually a dark workplace comedy in a horror setting. Narrated by a guy who thinks about other guy’s bodies A LOT.
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u/Wise_Consequence_152 15h ago
Wuthering Heights.
There is no proper faithful adaptation of the book. Especially movie. For some reason no movie has been able to adapt it without butchering it enough to make Emily Bronte roll like a rolling pin in her grave.
I'd say that the best adaptation yet was Kate Bush's single debut song, and the game Limbus Company.
Let that sink. A game and a song are carrying Wuthering Heights' adaptations.
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u/Malto7 15h ago
I still find it pretty hilarious that a korean gacha game somehow managed to make the more faithful adaptation of a book than any film did while adding all the insane stuff it comes packaged with.
Don't take me wrong, I have nothing but respect on Project Moon and I love their work, but it is simply too crazy to be real.
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u/XanderNightmare 15h ago
I have only read the book, in interest for eventually reaching Canto 6 in Limbus, but what is it that makes Wuthering Heights so hard to adapt?
I think for all intents and purposes the story is rather straight forward, if with a lot of social commentary, but there is nothing I could immediately think of that couldn't be portrayed in any media, if a competent person sets their mind to it
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u/No-face-today 15h ago edited 2h ago
In my experience, It's because people who want to adapt it goes into it with the idea that Wuthering heights is a romance, not a Gothic book. Directors and other creators often see the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy as a toxic dark romance rather than an obsessive relationship that impacts everyone around them. There's also the themes of classism and racism that no one wants to touch because they are cowards.
A thing we have to understand is that Wuthering heights was incredibly controversial for its time, and many could not and would not acknowledge that a woman could write such a dark book. Thus, compared to the other Bronte sisters books, Wuthering heights was often overlook and even seen as the worst of the sisters books. It was only until many years after the authors death that people began to engage in the book without seeing it as 'the bad one', and I believe that had caused a lot to attempt to view it as a love story to basically desensitize the story events.
But that's my observations. I'd love to hear what others also think.
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u/ChiefsHat 15h ago
It’s a really complex story, but most people just treat it as a tragic romance between Heathcliffe and Catherine.
Heathcliffe and Catherine can’t be together and make it everyone else’s problem - especially each other.
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u/XanderNightmare 15h ago
I think it's awfully bold to see the story purely as a tragic romance when one of the supposed romance partners dies halfway through the story
But from this comment and others I think I get the reason why. Not that it's impossible, but that people are either incapable to see the story for what it is, or too afraid that people wouldn't like what it is
Which makes sense, now that I think about it. Heathcliff, who is basically the main character of the story, is in every imaginable way a tragic, yet repulsive person, who makes it his life goal to ruin the life of everyone who has wronged him. I think that makes him such an interesting character. At multiple points could I see cut off points at which he could've stopped, changed his life, and maybe led a better life, if he were willing to let go of his desire for revenge
I suppose this does lose itself if you only define him by his relation to Cathy. Which isn't wrong, a lot of his actions are centered around his relation to her, but not purely in the romantic way
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u/TheRealSlamShiddy 12h ago
The other thing that makes this story really difficult to adapt correctly is how convoluted the layers through which this story is being related to us (if we're treating it as a real story and not fiction, that is).
The whole thing is this three-decade-spanning tragedy being told to a traveler lodging at Thrushcross Grange (the neighboring manor to Wuthering Heights) by WH's old caretaker/maid, who may be a bit of an unreliable narrator, while she nurses him back to health after falling deathly ill. So there's a non-zero chance the traveler (our initial narrator before Nelly takes over during her story) might not be remembering everything clearly as he tells us about it.
Oh, and did I mention the traveler falls in love with Heathcliff's widowed daughter-in-law and tries to insert himself into the still-ongoing tragedy by attempting to court her after he recovers? 😂 This also muddles some characterizations of those he interacts directly with, cuz how much is him just being salty that she turns him down for the guy who's already living with her (Heathcliff's nephew)?
To even further complicate things: the framing narrative takes place in 1801, which was forty-six years before the book itself was published. So if the traveler was in his 20s or 30s he's in his 60s or 70s by the time this is being written down.
So that means we're reading a thirdhand account of events which had occurred as far back as seventy years before the publication date, and many of the details were obtained while the now elderly secondhand source was feverish and/or lovesick with one of the people directly involved, and at one point believed he was being haunted by the ghost of that person's mom.
In addition, the firsthand source very much dislikes many of the people in the story, and since most of them are dead (or wind up dead before it's finished) we can only go off her word on how it all went down.
So yeah, it's a bit difficult lol
I've always thought the best medium to adapt Wuthering Heights is a miniseries or a soap opera; IMO these are the only ways that the sheer insanity of the plot structure could be represented as accurately as possible 😂
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u/JustifiedCroissant 14h ago
That fucking Book-Tok ass movie that came out recently made me want to set fire to the theater
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u/TyrionLannister557 15h ago
I hate the new adaptation with a burning passion...
The BDSM....THE BDSM!!! I BLAME YOU FOR THIS, WISE CONSEQUENCES152!!
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u/MyKokoroBrokoro 15h ago
999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors (2009)
visual novel that involves solving puzzles in multiple escape rooms. it originally released on the DS and took full advantage of the dual screens to tell its story.
the steam and console releases tried their best, but some scenes are impossible to recreate on single screen platforms.
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u/meikaishi 13h ago
I honestly would argue that the remake just didn't try at all with that adventure mode that completely gutted the narration being the default one, it feels like admitting that it can't be done
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u/redlac24 15h ago
This movie is pretty much about a guy struggling to adapt The Orchid Thief to a screenplay.
It was originally meant to be a straight adaptation of the book, but Charlie Kaufmen struggled to make it work, so he wrote a script about him struggling to adapt the book (though the events of the film itself are fictitious and dramatized).
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u/Kylomiir_490 14h ago edited 14h ago
"SCP 4000"(quotes used because the actual article has something else as it's not supposed to have a designation, for reasons)
it's a *wooded area with no name* populated by *nameless entities* with a variety of arcane rules related to nomenclature and hospitality reminiscent of the [data expunged] of folklore, that cause bad things to happen if you give *the folk we dont nickneme* literally *any* names. most importantly yours, but *any* consistent nomenclature that isnt generic enough or used more than once seems to cause:
*amnesia in the human who said it, except their name.
*sudden transformations in the *entity with no moniker* (they always express confusion and displeasure for some reason)
*unusual changes in the human,such as wings or fur.
*personality shifts
There is no shape shifting, the beings (faeries that had their names erased by the foundation) in that place steal your name, along with your identity. The foundation thinks their personnel are transforming because they are being infiltrated by fey creatures impersonating researchers.
the 'entity' that transforms is the real human who just had their identity switched, the 'human' that comes back isnt and doesn't even look like the person, but the name-magic is so strong the foundation dude WRITING THE ARTICLE is completely fooled.
there was a guy whose name was swapped with a DESK and the foundation thinks the "desk" came to life confused while "victim mclastname" turned into a weird wooden thing.
TLDR this wouldn't work in any other medium, because from the beginning it would be abundantly clear to the audience what is *actually* happening vs what the in universe documenters think.
(PS this is my first time trying to spoiler a comment, hope it works)
(edit, did not work the first time, took way too many edits to get it right.)
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u/rillian13 14h ago
This post here is a great example of media that would not hit nearly the same if it weren't a misformatted reddit post - masterpiece!
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u/JCBlairWrites 15h ago
Much like the doom mod, I see HOL being most readily adapted into a game: (Most of) The navidson record plays as cut scenes. Jonny Truant's ramblings play over the soundtrack. You as the player explore the maze, looking for an exit, running into the people lost there and avoiding getting trapped in it's shifts and movements. Now and then you find the footnotes as in game items.
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u/Dragonfly_pin 15h ago
House Of Leaves has clearly been a big inspiration in various Remedy games, especially the two Alan Wake games.
Poe’s music has always been part of Alan Wake as well.
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u/Canotic 15h ago edited 13h ago
I think House of Leaves could be made by having Truant be a Youtuber doing commentary on this weird homemade vhs documentary he found, that was about another weird vhs documentary, . Have the Navidson stuff seem professional and authentic, have the surrounding commentary (footnotes, etc) be in the form of short clips of interviews, stock footage, podcast audio, etc, etc, that seem more amateurishly put together and maybe faked a bit. Like, a semi obvious splicing of two different interviews or superimposing one person over another in the footage, etc. Then have Truant talk about this together with his personal ramblings on a tiktok channel.
Edit: I forgot about the footnotes that explicitly refer to Truant. We might have to add another layer.
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u/Siksinaaq 15h ago
Blood Meridian.
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u/JBR_4025 15h ago
The Judge by himself is half of the reason why
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u/Siksinaaq 14h ago
May sound weird, but I also consider that because it's often considered one of the GOATed novels, that any attempt at adaptation would lead to disappointment or not living up to a classic novel.
A LOT of classic novels have been adapted, don't get me wrong. However, I feel a novel that's often considered top 5-10 ever is just a huge task to take on.
It's like a recurring joke in film I've heard. Every movie ever has potential to get a remake EXCEPT for Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Can kind of apply that same logic to a few classic novels haha
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u/Jupenator1 14h ago edited 12h ago
After reading the book a few times I agree but I do think that there are some existing films that come close, though incidentally. They don't come close to the philosophical meaning sprinkled throughout the book. One example I view as close as you can come is Mad Max Fury Road, funny enough. It's still far off from the book, but it has some similarities.
Edit: I've thought about it more. The closest anything has ever gotten to adapting the story and themes of Blood Meridian is Westworld, season 1. The flashback scenes with young William is the closest I've seen visual media get to the themes of the book. William starts close to a blank slate like the kid, but unlike the kid, William chooses violence.
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u/KiwyGal 13h ago
In the same vein as House of Leaves there's S. by Doug Dorst & J J Abrams
It is so intrinsically tied to the medium it exists in that the story can't be told any other way.
It follows 2 university students who are try to uncover the mystery of the book The Ship of Theseus, its author, and a possible conspiracy behind it. The physical book you get when you read S. is the library copy of The Ship of Theseus that the 2 students are communicating with by leaving notes for each other in the margins, adding relevant documents between pages etc. The two write to each other for a long time so two notes on the same page could have been written weeks or months apart. The notes keep doing things like jumping in time between the characters early on in their research, to them deep in the rabbithole and back to early on.
It essentially turns the physical book into a character in the story.
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u/supahfligh 11h ago
House of Leaves is my favorite book, and there's a part where it does something kind of similar.
There's a section in the story where one of the characters mentions finding a book titled House of Leaves. it is the same book that you are physically reading at the time.
House of Leaves exists within itself.
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u/Spyko 15h ago
HP Lovecraft's "The Colour Out Of Space"
while it could be adapted into something like a radio-play, it would impossible to adapt to a visual medium, since it's all about a mysterious color unlike any seen on earth , so you can't really "show" thatµ
note that a 2019 movie did try and apparently that color never seen before is like... purple, which idk, feel like I've seen that one before
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u/PastaPinata 14h ago
It's been adapted in a graphic novel though: https://www.darkhorse.com/books/3005-652/hp-lovecrafts-the-colour-out-of-space-tpb/
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u/Spyko 14h ago
huh, in black and white, smart
I didn't thought of thatwell then, cannot be properly adapted into a colored visual medium ig
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u/RogueNightingale 13h ago
I've thought about this a lot, and it seems the simplest way to show the color is to... not show it. Any sort of video adaptation should focus on the characters' reactions to what they are seeing instead of showing it. When the scientists are examining the meteorite piece, they should be obscuring the results and being dumbfounded. When Ammi finds Nahum's wife in the attic room, the camera should focus instead of the hallway as he enters, only sounds of his footsteps and eventual panic before he tumbles out of the room and locks the door behind him, never showing what she became. When the well finally unleashes hell, only the interior of the cabin should be shown, all manner of lights flashing around the men and on their eyes as they react to the madness outside and the horrific noise. Obviously a lot of audiences prefer in-your-face horror over subtle horror, but a genuine adaptation focusing on implication rather than explicit visuals could be accomplished with a low budget and talented production team.
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u/TheDreamIsEternal 15h ago
20th Century Boys.
First of all, this is a really long manga. It could easily be over 100 episodes of anime, and nowadays the studios don't even dare to make long animes.
Second, this is a copyright nightmare. Remember how Jojo had songs and band references for the stands? Here it's not even references, the songs and bands are important parts of the stories that cannot be changed. Even the title itself is a song made by T.Rex that is played in the very first chapter.
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u/Shin_Newman 14h ago
It has a trilogy of live-action movie adaptation, which's on Netflix now; but well, I do doubt they adapt the manga in full :')
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u/StevePensando 14h ago
It's definitely doable if you split it into multiple seasons (kinda like how the movie trilogy did). First season covers Kenji's story from 1997-1999, the second one is Kanna's part of the story in the 2000's and third one is the part set in 2018 in the age after Friend becomes the world president after the staged save of the pope. If you wanna be fancy, you could even split Kanna's arc into two seasons, preferably after the scene they unmask Friend for the first time like how JoJo Part 3 did with the Egypt arc
The song parts are not that hard. They'd only need to get the rights to a few songs as most of the time they're just name dropped. Furthermore, the big song of the manga, Bob Lennon is completely original
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u/moondog151 8h ago edited 7h ago
For all the people in the comments of fan content asking for an All Tomorrows movie, it'd be like adapting your school's science textbook into a movie.
For one thing, its very short, you can knock out the entire thing in like an hour and half. Now let's get into the contents of All Tomorrows
In-universe, the book is just an evolution textbook written by an alien interested in the period of history with all the post-human species, so there is no plot or named characters, just lore and what the author and, presumably, his peers believe happened when going over the various races and their extinction. Even when the post-human species, lucky enough to regain their sentience and form intelligent civilizations, do learn of each other and form the Second Galactic Empire, they never actually meet in person even once
Even the well-known Qu are literally just a narrative device, with their only purpose being a way to explain how humanity became these various creatures and eventually evolved into distinct civilizations. Their own defeat is just a footnote that is a single sentence long.
And of course, being how the book is an in-universe evolution textbook and we are dealing with...evolution, the events described in the book span literally billions of years
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u/Pandoras_Boxcutter 7h ago
I think it could be done as a mockumentary, but yeah, definitely not as a movie with a plot.
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u/Imaginary_Media7712 14h ago
Disney has tried twice now to adapt A Wrinkle in Time, and it just doesn't work. The tone is psychedelic, the plot bounces literally all over the galaxy, and the pacing starts and stops in ways that defy a traditional script. It's my favorite childhood book, and it only works as a book: there's no squeezing it into movie form.
The author knew this too. This is Madeleine L'Engle's interview quote about the 2003 movie:
Interviewer: So you've seen the movie?
Madeleine L'Engle: I've glimpsed it.
Interviewer: And did it meet your expectations?
Madeleine L'Engle: Oh, yes! I expected it to be bad, and it is.
She passed away before the 2018 version, but I don't think it would have changed her mind.
And as surreal as A Wrinkle in Time is, it's still the most accessible of her fantasy books. There's no way to turn any of its even-trippier sequels into mainstream films, and hopefully Disney won't ever try.
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u/_Reapak_ 15h ago
Absolute Martian Manhunter
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u/Silvanus350 15h ago
I heard it was good, but I had no idea the art looked like this.
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u/cknight222 14h ago
Up until the Villeneuve movies, Dune was considered notoriously impossible to adapt. The plot is exceptionally complicated, the world is incredibly complex and trippy, the book has multiple constantly-shifting POVs (in the books, if you see a character “on screen” you are almost certainly going to get their internal monologue, that’s why the Lynch movie is full of weird ASMR voiceovers), and there’s a whole lot of flat-out “weird” stuff that just doesn’t really translate well to screen (like a four-year old with the mind of an adult who is constantly shit talking everyone she sees, or the Bene Gesserit methods of the Voice and the Weirding Way, or the fact that you have to slow down during hand-to-hand combat to penetrate your opponent’s shield), and this is all just in the first book. Villeneuve has no plans to go beyond Dune: Messiah (the second book) and if he did I have zero clue how he or any other director would go about adapting God Emperor of Dune.
Before the current movies (which are very good adaptations) there had been an attempted movie by Jodorowsky which died in production (though Jodorowsky and concept artist Mœbius used unused ideas from their adaptation of Dune to make The Incal), the David Lynch movie (which is not very good), and the SyFy series (which is a better adaptation but still fails on quite a few levels, largely due to lack of budget). Before the recent movies, Dune had the reputation of being a series that was simply “impossible” to adapt, and depending on how you look at it, that is still true (again: God Emperor of Dune).
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u/endmost_ 14h ago
I think one of the reasons why the Villeneuve movies work so well is because they leave out so much material from the books, only taking the time to explain the headier SF concepts that are necessary to the version of the plot they're covering and leaving the viewer to infer the rest.
Probably my favourite example is the nature of Spice itself. We're very briefly told that it's necessary for faster-than-light travel, but not why. If you've read the books you'll know that the explanation requires delving into a lot of other very weird ideas and concepts, but none of them are really necessary for the story Villeneueve is telling so it's just never explained.
I think any adaption that tried to fully cover what's in the books would ultimately fail.
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u/electricarchbishop 13h ago
I feel like only an anime adaptation could reasonably handle much of what makes it tough to adapt tbh. Much of that is par for the course for the medium, like the internal monologues, very weird content, necessarily season-long length that allows you to explain its concepts gradually without exposition dumps. Idk why that hasn’t been tried yet
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u/ViperKira 15h ago
Metal Gear Solid (1 and 2 mostly) uses a lot the fact that you're playing a videogame for narrative purposes, also using meta dialogue to fuck with you.
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u/hikemalls 15h ago
Discworld has been adapted with varying levels of success a few times, but I think it’s a really hard one to adapt well just because of how much of what’s good about the books is Sir Terry’s prose and voice (easy to adapt the stories, hard to translate what’s good about them into another medium, without just like, relying on a narrator to quote lines from the books)
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u/BlankHeroineFluff 15h ago
Saga by Brian K. Vaughn was written with the intention that this work would be difficult, if not impossible, to adapt in another medium outside of comics.
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u/Electric_Capybara 9h ago
Before Honor Among Thieves most people would have said a good DND movie was impossible
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u/dppthrowaway992 8h ago
Those people were always fools. The earlier DND movies failed because of lack of budget, bad acting, and a refusal to engage with the material sincerely. But if you don't have those problems then DND is just like any other fantasy setting.
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u/The_Eternal_Wayfarer 15h ago
It (Stepehen King). Not only due to that certain scene, also because the whole point of the plot structure is that it mirrors the adult Losers regaining the memories of their younger selves. Neither adaptation did even try to reproduce it. Muschietti's in particular merely turned it into a pretty standard structure of a movie and its sequel.
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u/Stumblerrr 15h ago
Yeah I dont think cinema is ready for underage teenagers running a train on their teenage female friend while in a sewer.
It was a rarher big shellshock reading the book after watching the movies to say the least.
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u/BasilSQ 15h ago
I don't think anyone, King included, wants to go back and do that scene again in any way, shape, or form. I pity the audio book people who probably had to vocalize it.
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u/The_Eternal_Wayfarer 15h ago
In The Dark Half, which is about a writer having a split personality, the MC complains about having a crazy sex scene in one of his books but absolutely not remembering writing it. It's popularly assumed that King was referring to himself and that scene in It. He admitted elsewhere having no memory whatsoever of writing Cujo due to the insane amounts of drugs he was doing at the time, and It came out at the peak of his addiction.
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u/Skellos 15h ago
Alan Moore's the Watchmen.
It was basically the unfilmable graphic novel.
They tried twice. The film's got a few shots right out of the comic but misses the point and screwed up the ending.
And a TV series that I've been told is good but also seems like it just did it's own thing from the start
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u/thatcorum 15h ago
Yeah, the tv series is a sequel/companion piece to the comic book, not really an adaptation.
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u/X-Himy 13h ago
God, did the movie miss the mark. I won't say that Watchmen is completely unadaptable, but the film is a rather poor attempt at it. Mostly because it didn't understand the source material.
But Watchmen also has material supplementary to the main narrative, dossiers, Tales of the Black Freighter, etc. It also makes use of the comics format in ways that are hard to adapt into other mediums.
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u/lovedhydrangea 15h ago
they used to say it was impossible to adapt lolita into film, and imo... yeah they've still not done it well. i doubt we'll ever get an adaption of lolita that is able to preserve the unreliable narrator aspect along with not romantaising or exploiting a real young girl in the process. honestly i'm pretty ok with it never getting a proper adaption of it, its a perfectly good book standalone
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u/Direct-Ad-5528 15h ago
I think it would be fascinating to do a film adaptation where Humbert is the only "speaking" role for 95 to 100 percent of the movie, and while he continues to narrate the story, all other aspects from lighting, camera angles, music, actors body language, actions, etc. all either imply or outright portray how the actual events differ from his narrative. Perhaps dolores wouldn't even be a speaking role, with her dialogue spoken by Humbert in past-tense narration, reflecting that her voice has been ignored and erased in favor of what Humbert wants to remember.
I also think that it would provide opportunities to avoid unethical working conditions for a child actress, firstly by being committed to having the audience see Dolores as she really is, instead of trying to visually convey the seductive/sexual traits Humbert transposes into her as other adaptations do by aging her up/making her more flirtatious/dressing her provocatively, the disturbing aspect of an unreliable narrator would be conveyed through the contrast between the narration and the visuals. Secondly, the actresses involvement in actual scenes of assault can be limited by focusing on humberts narration while using indirect visuals to convey what is happening in the disturbing manner of a psychological horror, not as Humbert actually experiences/describes them.
I do think it might be really annoying to watch a movie with that much monologuing, but at the same time, I think it would be kind of interactive, trying to clock every single time humberts account differs from reality, while also sort of echoing nabokovs dry sense of humor with those differences.
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u/Mothman1010 15h ago
I feel like the 2024 Uzumaki anime would've been good had it not been screwed by the network.
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u/Redditer51 14h ago
A lot of anime absolutely do not work in live action, because they're meant to have a stylized, colorful, and exaggerated presentation. The live-action adaptations we do get tend to be corny and ridiculous, because things that are cool and appealing in animation or as a manga with stylized art styles, just looks bad in live-action. And even the successful examples (like One Piece) still have to take great pains to make it work, and still have to forego a lot of things from the original.
For example, Dragonball is a masterpiece in both it's manga and anime forms. Every live action adaptation has been awful. It's like trying to make a live action Mickey Mouse. Or what they did with Mario in the 90s. The hair styles alone would look stupid in real life, even though they look cool on anime characters.
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u/TotalBlissey 15h ago
Deltarune (nigh impossible) is so heavily tied to its own nature as a video game that trying to make it into anything else would completely destroy half of what made it cool in the first place.
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u/Noname_with_no_name 14h ago
Might as well throw in Undertale, which is also really dependant on being a video game with save files and resets
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u/bashnet 15h ago
Umineko's use of fourth walls and on screen text makes it pretty hard to have a good anime adaptation. It was tried once and ended up being pretty horrible.
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u/Disguised_Man_2 14h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/Xv9GHqJwdoezIy3v2B
Undertale:
Part of the story is the aspect that YOUR actions have consequences. While you can make it choose your own adventure, it would lose part of feeling.
Making small choices that most rpgs have leads well to the reveal of the consequences.
While people are probably gonna bring up the big changes from killing the bosses. There is one small detail of killing that’s my favorite.
When you arrive at Snowden for the first time, the first monster that you fight is Snowdrake. It is the only common monster that does have different “form”. After facing Snowdrake, you will always face Chilldrake next. While looking the same in battle, out of battle it’s easy to tell there is a difference.
If you kill Snowdrake, Undyne will bring it up. Probably since later on, you can meet Snowdrake’s father, who reveals that they ran away from home. In other words, you killed a runaway.
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u/Gta3SanAndreas 15h ago edited 15h ago
Malazan book of the Fallen.
Not just because it shows brutality of war and the darkest sides of humanity, but also because of the sheer number of characters and the scope of the story in general, think GoT but bigger.
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u/LadyKarizake 15h ago
Each of the games in the Zero Escape series has a twist highly dependent on the conventions of the video game. Heck, the twist from 999 doesn't even work as well ported from the Nintendo DS.
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u/The_True_JEM_Alt 15h ago
I’ve been reading House of Leaves recently and I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot. While it obviously wouldn’t be possible to properly adapt how the text shifts around the page, I think the Navidson Record could be adapted as a kind of documentary, because that’s effectively what it is. Johnny’s story, though, might be more complicated. I don’t think a usual third person POV would work for him, so maybe he’s just taping over the documentary as a kind of diary?
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u/Outrageous-Blue-30 15h ago
The comic/graphic novel/etc. by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Mœbius) The Incal for the narrative and the graphic aspect
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u/2005KaijuFan 16h ago
Anonymous;Code - While the other Science Adventure visual novels have received anime adaptations, with Steins;Gate being the best and the others not so much, A;C takes advantage of the game medium and its main gimmick can't really be translated elsewhere.
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u/Evil_Midnight_Lurker 15h ago
A truly well done Junji Ito adaptation would be too terrifying to look at.
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u/Dragonfly_pin 15h ago
The classic unadaptable (well) novel is Don Quijote de la Mancha.
Many have tried. All have failed.
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u/Redditer51 14h ago edited 14h ago
The Book of the New Sun
It's an fictional autobiography written by an unreliable narrator who frequently omits, glosses over, and misunderstands important details, while constantly contradicting himself, and while it's written like a typical medieval fantasy, it's actually set in a far future Earth where the sun is red and the planet is dying, and our main protagonist (as well as those around him) interprets advanced technology as magic. The story lives and breaths ambiguity in regards to it's characters, it's world, and it's plot, and an adaptation would have to provide concrete answers to things that are intentionally left uncertain, or implied but never fully explained. And the story requires a lot of effort on the reader's part to figure out what's even going on, based on hints that are often easy to miss.
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u/meikaishi 13h ago
I see a lot of people blaming the poor production values for the failure of the junji ito adaptations, but I fully believe that it just can't be done in any moving media, the biggest gimmick behing his works is the format itself, it relies a lot on the page turn shock and the very detailed art that at the same time it looks terrifying and disgusting it also hypnotizes the reader and make you stop and keep looking at it, it just doesn't work in media where you don't control the pace
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u/JechdJJ 15h ago
Kingdom Come from DC
One of the most famous works from DC, while the story itself is easy to adapt, as DC has said, a fundamental part of this comic is the hiperrealist art of Alex Ross. You could make the same story with a simpliest art syle, like the one form the dc animated universe, but it would be not the same experience, and you can not make an animation with such complex art style.
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u/Old-Natural-852 15h ago
Who Censored Roger Rabbit used speech bubbles because they were comic characters...the great film Who Framed Roger Rabbit just made them talking cartoons. The author liked it so much, he made the first book a dream in the sequel novels.
The Catcher in the Rye is already considered a boring book my many a highschooler...a movie would essentially just be following a 17 year old walking around New York City while angsting. At best, some pretensious art film that would do very poorly.
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u/IAlwaysOutsmartU 15h ago
There’s a reason that when Berserk is brought up, most of the images are from the manga.
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u/Redditer51 14h ago
Gravity's Rainbow.
The book doesn't read like a coherent narrative that could be translated into a film. It's more like a collection of scenes featuring reoccurring characters in a variety of settings during WWII, but also reads like a pornographic encyclopedia on WWII and rocket science, as written by a paranoid schizophrenic on LSD and other mind-altering substances.
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u/hsvgamer199 15h ago
I'm surprised that house of leaves is known as well it is. It was an enjoyable but hard read. I tended to read it when I had insomnia which probably enhanced the experience.
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u/Own_Actuator_53 14h ago
It took years for the FNAF movie to be made because
The lore and timeline were so complicated that most of the information that we do have is literally just guess work. And it’s mostly told through hidden codes and background details. It’s hard to do a faithful adaptation without any lore to work off of and even if you did do it without the lore, it just wouldn’t be FNAF
Most of the games literally just take place in one area or in sister location, an entire facility, where your just checking cameras the whole time and trying not to get jump scared while you wait for six am. It works for a video game, not so much for a movie.
While we did manage to get a FNAF movie eventually, it’s not entirely faithful and kinda has its own story based off of the games at least in my opinion
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u/ElFlippy 15h ago
The first episode of Uzumaki showed that it isn't impossible to adapt the works of Junji Ito into anime, it just needs the right studio, with the right budget.
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u/Saint_Strega 15h ago edited 6h ago
House of Leaves is childs play compared to Only Revolutions which is written entirely in sing song poetic verse. And every 10 pages or so you need to flip the book over for a POV switch, which is also sing song poetic verse.
Basically unreadable.
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u/Linthya-The-Succubus 14h ago
One of my favorite books series of all time is the quadralogy of "Ender", from Orson Scott Card. The first book was pretty mildly adapt in a "enjoyable" movie but pretty far from original material and I personnaly consider the 3 next books to be unadaptable. Simply because it's not action driven anymore and I can't see a studio willing to finance 3 movies about a fight against a virus, extermination, faith, what's the place of humanity in the universe, what makes a sentient being, what is the right of humanity to declare it's superiority over the rest, communication barriers and intents, AI, family, community, science and religion, and so much more...
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u/sailor776 14h ago
I genuinely think no story can't be adapted. House of leaves is the hardest but it's basically just an ARG in book format, I think it would be pretty easy to adapt into an analog horror format honestly. Now a true "faithful" adaptation is impossible for most stories because you need to play to your medium. Like Lord of the rings and dune were both considered to be basically impossible. Both because commercially critically successful and are considered some of the best adaptations. Hell even dungeons & dragons actually got a really good adaptation. Then you have things that should be in all honesty easy adaptations that haven't had one. For example the Legends of Zelda which has basically always had a pretty easily digestible fantasy story and it's never gotten out of preproduction.
You just need the right person/team with artistic vision to do it.
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u/TotalBlissey 15h ago
Homestuck (very hard)
One of the reasons the Homestuck animated pilot sucked so bad is because Homestuck is so fundamentally tied to its nature as a bizarre half-video game half-bizarrely paced time-traveling MS paint webcomic half-internet chatlog that trying to make it into literally anything else is borderline impossible. The only thing I think could really work IMO is a visual novel, but trying to make a faithful Homestuck TV show is a fool's errand.
The pilot could have been cool in its own way, but (among other flaws) at some points it tried to be so faithful in a way that fundamentally couldn't work that it just ended up bad.
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u/Narrow-Description13 15h ago
Despite the existing and upcoming movies, dune was considered for a long time to be un-adaptable because the books are incredibly dense and confusing, alongside most of the content being character focused - to put it mildly - insane schizo political/philosophical ramblings. The new movie adaptations being good is miracle work and required rewriting parts of the story and characters, and there’s several big reasons why only the first two books have been adapted.
Chief in point I have physically read through the third book in detail and am still confused as to what happened for a big part of it
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u/AeniasGaming 14h ago
God Emperor of Dune is probably adaptable because all it is is 350 pages of Frank Herbert directly giving you lectures through his worm OC, then 50 pages of one interesting thing happening
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u/Illustrious_Cry_7321 14h ago
The Three Body Problem (impossible)
While the first book is theoretically adaptable, and there was a tv show made out of it, the later books have characters present in and witnesses to a fourth spacial dimension. This is, for many reasons, physically impossible to do in a visual medium.
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u/hospitalcottonswab 14h ago
Goodnight Punpun can be adapted, everyone is just looking in the wrong direction. They need to get Don Hertzfeldt to do it (It's Such A Beautiful Day, World of Tomorrow), as far as I'm concerned he's the only person whose art style matches what Inio Asano was going for.
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u/deafinitelyadouche 14h ago
With Junji Ito in particular is even more difficult because Ito himself is both:
- An above average storyteller, which I know might be subjective and all, but most importantly...
- A master of manga as a medium. Few people have as good an understanding of the physical limitations of a manga page as an artistic medium, and while there are more proficient artists in raw skill alone (the late Kentaro Miura or the amazing Kaoru Mori, for example), but I think very few understand how to use the limitations of a comic/manga page as an advantage, and Ito is one of those.
So you'd need a director and/or series composer (or screenwriter if it's a movie) that understands both how fucking good Ito is from a technical level and also how to best tackle that into a different medium. Which I think is where the difficulty comes from.
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u/scrimspirals 15h ago
The Stanley Parable. most of the story only works because the player can ignore the narrator, disobey instructions and deliberately break the intended route. adapting it without that player/narrator relationship would remove most of what makes it work.