Why the Movie Version of Your Favorite SciFi Book Stinks, Part I
I spent last weekend at the Oasis 21 science fiction convention in Orlando and had a wonderful time speaking on panels and chatting with the various convention goers. During a little bit of downtime between panels, I talked to one attendee about science fiction books that had been made into movies. After recounting one particularly (in her opinion) bad book-to-film translation she looked at me and asked: "Why does Hollywood do such a bad job turning science fiction books into movies?"
To which I said, "Because it doesn't matter if they do a bad job or not."
Now, this wasn't the answer she wanted, and I can sympathize. But the fact is, if you're hoping that a movie made from an SF book will be much like it, particularly a major studio movie, you will almost always be disappointed. Here are three reasons why. Note: These are not the only three reasons, just the ones we'll look at today.
1. Ninety percent of the text (or more) is going out the window.
When Jurassic Park came out in '93, I interviewed author Michael Crichton, and he said something that's on point here. It was (and I'm paraphrasing, because it was 15 years ago), "Look, when you have a novel, it's 400 pages long. When you have a script, it's the equivalent of 40 of those pages. No matter what, you're going to lose a lot." Bear in mind he was saying this about Jurassic Park, which, as books go, was about as movie-ready as they come. When you're talking about books that aren't intentionally written with one eye toward the screenplay adaptation, the challenge is even greater.
Now, Crichton's hand was on the scale a bit since much of what takes a lot of words to describe -- action scenes, scenery, character emotional responses and so on -- can be shown visually with great economy: The old "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words" phenomenon. But at the end of the day he's correct. A lot gets thrown out, including sub-plots, asides, character development moments and (if the screenwriter is careless) key moments that fans of the book will miss and howl over.
2. The definition of "hit" is vastly different for books than films.
A science fiction or fantasy book that sells 100,000 copies is, these days, a big hit. A major science fiction or fantasy movie that had 100,000 theater admissions, even just on opening weekend, would be a miserable failure; that would be the equivalent of a $700,000 box office gross. Not to keep harping on poor Speed Racer, but its $18.5 million opening weekend means about 2.64 million people actually shelled out $7 to see it ($7 being roughly the same cost as a paperback book). If one of my books sold 2.64 million copies -- ever, forget just in its opening week -- publishers would drag themselves across iodine-saturated glass shards to have me be in their book lines. And I, for one, would love to see that.
The reason the definitions of success are different are pretty simple: The number of people required to produce and distribute a book, and the cost of production and distribution therein, is several orders of magnitude smaller than either number of people required to produce and distribute major films, or the cost to do so. This means that books can afford not to take into consideration the lowest common audience member. Whereas if you're making a film -- especially one with lots of expensive effects, as science fiction films so often have -- you have to try to get as many people as possible into the theater from the word go. What that means for your favorite book is that all the parts that really speak to a core fandom are likely (to mix metaphors here) to get flattened out and homogenized and made as blandly acceptable as possible. Because ultimately, millions and millions of dollars are on the line. Art and textual fidelity are nice, but having big fat hits that spawn sequels and keep Hollywood afloat are nicer, from the film company point of view.
3. Textual fidelity doesn't have much of a track record in science fiction film.
Here, courtesy of Box Office Mojo, is a list of the most successful science fiction films based on books since 1980
(fantasy is not represented). What do we learn? First, we learn it
helps to have Steven Spielberg direct, since he's in the top three
spots. Second, we learn that fidelity to the book text has almost no correlation to the success of the film. Jurassic Park and The Lost World are somewhat related to their books, but War of the Worlds
is a largely complete re-imagining, and if you want to see science
fiction literature fans get truly foamy, ask them their opinions about
the adaptations of I, Robot and Starship Troopers (remember to hold up a tarp to shield yourself from the spittle).
Basically, you can't make the argument to a film studio that it matters if the film is only tangentially related to the book, because the ultimate argument -- that messing with the story messes with the box office -- isn't there. Perhaps as art it might make a difference, but on that score it's worth remembering that since 1980, the most artistically influential SF film adapted from a book was Blade Runner, which is in fact not very much like its source material, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at all -- and which was a bit of a financial failure when it first came out.
What do we learn? That when a book and film share the same title, it doesn't mean they share much of anything else. Nor is that really likely to change.
Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, John Scalzi is the author of The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies as well as the novels Old Man's War and the upcoming Zoe's Tale. His column appears every Thursday.
In general, I think novellas or even short stories translate better to film than novels (Peter Jackson notwithstanding).
Not only do novels have too much text than has to be cut to fit the standard movie length, but shorter works can often be boiled down to a central strong idea. When short stories are expanded into novels (and I've read many such, including works better known as novels, such as Postman and Enders Game), the novel often feels like a diluted experience. More atmospheric, perhaps, but film has other ways of achieving that.
Speaking of textual fidelity > box office success, the David Brin and Kevin Costner versions of The Postman is an excellent example.
As many classic stories will attest, beauty and faithfulness do not always correspond
Good points, John. It seems to me that the fans who crow about textual fidelity tend to work more from emotive and aesthetic bases, when, as you rightly point out, money is the oxygen that Hollywood breathes. "Emotionally satisfying" is a fine thing, and "aesthetically pure" is a fine thing, but if the movie makers suspect that they'll make a penny less by pursuing them, they'll cheerfully abandon them so as not to lose those pennies.
The financial mogul John Bogle has paraphrased Upton Sinclair: "It’s amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he’s paid a small fortune not to understand it." That would seem to apply to the loss of aesthetic innocence and goodness that often accompanies Hollywood's quest for all that yummy, filthy lucre.
By the way, I also like Lis Riba's point in the first comment that short stories often make for better adaptations. The example that springs to mind -- not sci-fi, but a heck of a film -- is The Shawshank Redemption.
Salient points, especially the part about sold copies vs. sold movie tickets. I never thought about it in those kind of dimensions, but you're right on. A few million sold copies would make any SF author the top dog of the genre. ("The Crichton of Science Fiction!")
Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a major studio buying the rights to "Old Man's War", and then turning it into a less-than-faithful "Starship Trooper"-esque schlockfest, complete with some steel-jawed male model as John Perry?
As a pragmatist and a lover of currency, I have to admit that I'd find a happy balance between my artistic integrity and my need to produce income. I'd probably cry a few tears on the deposit slip before sticking it into the envelope with the check, or something.
Wow, that list is....depressing. I'd hazard that the success of those films has as much to do with Steven Spielberg as text-fidelity. But then, I'm not sure where I can find text-fidelity. Jurassic Park was pretty darned faithful, except in the margins (character X dies instead of lives, character Y dies this way instead of that)...and Crichton has had plenty of adaptions and written specifically for the screen.
Excluding fantasy films, of course, removes the juggernaut that is Lord of the Rings, but that neither proves nor disproves the text-fidelity thing. I guess the real issue is that text-fidelity doesn't translate directly to success or failure, except in the mind of fans of the previous work. Which is probably the most depressing fact presented.
As usual John, you are right on. A long time ago I figured this out and when I go see a movie of a book I have read, I have NO expectation of it following the book. I go because the trailer or word of mouth or just the fact that even with changes the movie has the possibility of being good.
If the movie is entertaining then I am happy. If it follows the story of the book, so much the better.
My experience is that the less expectation you have, the less disappointed you will be.
Besides, if they did try to make the film include everything the book had, most movies would be 4-5 hours long and each seat in the theater would need a personal bathroom appliance to get rid of that gallon sized soft drink you just drank because you can't very well pause the film to go weewee can you?
Good points. It does make me wonder why they bother with opting science fiction books at all. Does the name of a novel on the marquee really make a difference to the average movie patron (who probably has never heard of it anyway)? And in most cases it's a total rewrite so it's not like they're saving money on writers by going with an existing work (and we know what a big percentage the writer's salary is). The director and the cast are the determining factors in terms of box office--not the novel the movie is purported to be based on.
In terms of making hits, Star Wars, ET, The Matrix...all would seem to show that the studios might do better to skip the evisceration of beloved, not-written-with-a-movie-mind novels and just make science fiction movies that are screenplays to begin with...
"When you have a script, it's the equivalent of 40 of those pages. No matter what, you're going to lose a lot."
Which is a damn shame where Jurassic Park is concerned, because I'd like to have seen Sam Neill getting licked by a T Rex behind a waterfall on the big screen.
Regarding how faithful an adaptation is, I know that the most well-regarded superhero adaptations are also the most faithful. Then again, Batman and Robin made a heeyouge amount of cash.
As for SF, are there many adaptations of novels on their way in the immediate future? I Am Legend is the last one I can recall.
Short Stories don't alway work either.
Cristopher Walken
Willem DeFoe
Asia Argento
(and Yoshitaka Amano, just for extra juice!)
All together on a movie from a short story by William Gibson. How could it fail? It sounds like it's made of fractal roses on day with the particle effects check-box clicked to off.
But New Rose Hotel was incredibly heinous. Of course, the short story in question was like, 5 pages, instead of the 40 that Crichton calls for...
Err, Marko...
They'd need a steel-jawed male model to play John Perry. That's what he looks like.
Great article, Mr. Scalzi. :-) Movies and Books are very different media, with different audiences. Personally, I love books. Movies, I can take or leave. So I'm always going to love the book more than the movie. And I imagine the same is true for movie lovers. They probably don't have the same affinity to books, but love the movies.
In point of fact, I used to be one of the foamy mouthed cretins who hated the way books were disemboweled in their movie treatments, but I have since realized that we're comparing apples and orange-flavored kool-aid.
My question is, with book readership so far below movie-viewer numbers, why do they continue to use the name? I can understand the big names--Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc.
But "I, Robot?" Why didn't they just call it "Will Smith and his happy time advertise-enture (Now with more robots!)"? It's not like there are hoards of untapped Asimov fans with scads of disposable income roving around, looking for a place to dump their cash.
As a rule, I try not to put too much hope into a sci-fi movie based on a book. I just let myself be entertained (or not - Battlefield Earth anyone?).
That said, why not a 24 episode adaptation? Take a book (better if there is a series) and break it into 24, 42 minute pieces. The longer length gives a chance to get more into the subplots and everything else that is going on in a book, and in the end, there will be no more special effects. From a commercial point of view, it might make more sense than attempting to hit the jackpot of a hit.
I was going to mention The Shawshank Redemption but Tim Walker beat me to the punch. It has to be one of the most faithful adaptations ever.
On the flip side, another Stephen King novella-turned-movie was The Running Man -- which bore so little resemblance to the original they should have just used a different title.
As an aside, I think whoever put that list together needs to do some editing. I was trying to figure out why 2001 wasn't on the list since 2010 was. Then I remembered that it was for movies since 1980.
But then why is Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1978 on the list?
Don't forget that those movies are made for movie goers, not science fiction fans.
I think that the comment above about books and film being totally different mediums are right on. When you think about it, a film is approximately two hours long, and shouldn't be treated as the place to put every single last detail ever of a book adaptation--because then it would bloviate into Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (more than four hours long). Just due to length, I think that short stories and novellae translate more gracefully than great big books. Shawshank Redemption, Brokeback Mountain, comic books, any pulp fiction detective novels--they're not long and the dialogue is crisp and direct. Ernest Hemingway is great in translation just for this reason.
As a sci-fi fan and a theater and film director who loves books of all kinds (we, or at least I, exist), what I'd love to see is if someone got wise to that idea and adapted one of Connie Willis' short stories or read back-issues of Analogue.
On the topic of text fidelity, though not sci-fi, the Bourne series does a wonderful adaptation from the books. I read the original books and when the first movie came out I was expecting the usual book-to-film trash experience. The direction the film went, though completely different than the books, was just as well done in their own way that I felt they still captured the essence of the concept in the movies. I enjoy both versions immensely.
It happens rarely, but one book that always pops to the front of my mind that turned out better in film was Ray Bradbury's 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'. That book was boring, but the only reason I read it was because when I watched the movie Jonathan Price's character, Mr. Dark, was probably the most interesting villian I had ever witnessed (back in the early nineties when I watched it). I wanted to know more about the character so I read the book. Disappointed would be an understatement.
As mentioned above, Shawshank Redemption was another better-in-film rendition, as with the King's other short story, Apt Pupil. My standards with movie going have dramatically decreased over the years simply because it's par for the course that the conversion process to film is essentially shyte, but at least maybe I can enjoy the movie on its own without the comparisons.
I think the question of why sci-fi movies based on books suck so hard is somewhat red herring-ish. I think the real question to ask is why sci-fi in general sucks so hard. And personally, I think it's a simple combination of directorial and screenwriter disdain for the genre, and the current obsession for FX in place of story and characters.
Because sci-fi has so many roots in the pulp and b-movies of the 50s, it's understandable that we get a lot of schlock. And there's nothing wrong with that. Schlock is fun. But so many film makers and screenwriters seem to feel that, even when dealing with complex source materials, what's important to the sci-fi geeks of the world is robots and laser blasts. And we don't do ourselves any favors by arguing the relative power of a Star Destroyer vs. the Next Gen Enterprise. But how often are sci-fi flicks anything but summer blockbusters? How many times do you see real plot or character development?
This isn't a phenomenon limited to plots sourced from books. This is endemic to most sci-fi.
I wonder what would ever move us toward a 2.64 million copy-selling novel. We know that that many people don't happen by accident to go see Speed Racer. There is the nostalgia factor from the kid's show that is a built-in promotion, and the cred. of the directors helped, but so much of what leads that big of an audience into a movie as 'eh' as Speed Racer is a massive marketing campaign and promotional budget. If a science fiction or fantasy book that was poised to sell 100,000 copies received the same level of marketing campaign as Speed Racer did, what would be the result?
If you had a book and it's author advertised continually on television, making the rounds on talk show, plastered in magazine ads and articles, promoted in visual previews before movies, and in other ways more appropriate to fiction, what would be the result?
You would undoubtedly sell more books, but how many? If a publisher ever attempted to promote a book to the same degree as a movie, would it even be possible to sell that many books in a short time?
"I wonder what would ever move us toward a 2.64 million copy-selling novel."
Well, you could ask JK Rowling.
I'm almost done with The Androids Dream and I'm suprised it hasn't sold that many yet. I can't wait for the film version so I can complain about how much they left out or changed. I agree, I don't see this changing anytime soon. I guess I just have to accept the movies the way they come out and just judge them for what they are, Movies not books, despite the same titles.
Not SF but an example of reasonably faithful to the book producing a decent movie would be The Hunt For Red October. They did it by lifting one chunk of the book and filming just that part. Not possible with most books.
Francis Ford Coppola said that one of the reasons he started the _Zoetrope: All-Story_ magazine was because he thought a short fiction piece was the perfect basis for a movie. Interesting.
Random note: The referred list at Box Office Mojo missed a couple I could think of off the top of my head ("Jumper", "Children of Men") so I emailed them the info.
- yeff
Speaking of "Jumper", one thing that Steven Gould (author of the book) said at Viable Paradise about the process of adaptation of his book into a movie is "The movie is not the book. Repeat after me. The movie is not the book."
I think that in many senses, the movie and the book really are almost two different entities drawing from the same proto-source material.
- yeff
I would really like to read that interview with Michael Crichton... he's one of my favorite "hard science fiction" authors!!!
Was gonna mention HP, but somebody beat me to it!!! Those movies will never be as good as the books!!!
"First, we learn it helps to have Steven Spielberg direct..."
It also certainly helps to have your movie based upon a novel by Michael Crichton... if I count correctly, movies based upon Crichton novels hold 2 of the top 3, 4 of the top 15, and 5 of the top 27.
The other thing to remember that noone has commented on is that an SF work is usually the vision of one maybe two people + the editor. A movie/tv work is a collaboration of many, the actors, directors, cinematographer, set, lighting, costumes, props, producer, and the directors' significant other, and the producers' mistress, and the great-uncle of the second cousin twice removed of the girl friend of the onsite caterer's assistant's wife and the ... and so forth forever.
What will, I think provide a more faithful rendering of books to visual will be the direct to video process with the lower budgets. This will allow production of more limited audience material such s SF. With less riding on the box office results it becomes possible to do a LOTR (intent not budget) vs Starship T******s.
A lot of very good observations here, the other thing that needs to be considered, the expectations of the fan-bases for sci-fi tv/movies and sci-fi books is often very different.
Much of the sci-fi movie going audience seems to still be looking for the "Star Wars/Trek" type of experience in their movies. Whereas a lot of sci-fi books (and books in general) are much more character and idea driven. A Scanner Darkly was a particularly brave attempt at keeping the ideas and feelings from the novel intact, but the lack of any major laser shootouts or violence at all kept it very inaccessible to a majority of the movie going audience.
One positive sign for the future though..... Battlestar Galactica (ok, ok, admittedly its a series and has a much more time for plots, subplots and character development), but it does seem to indicate that with well written material, excellent plot and quality acting, science fiction can find viewers outside our typical fan-base.
I have read Jurassic Park about ten to fifteen times because its my favorite and same goes for The Lost World. The first movie was WAY closer to the book Jurassic Park then The Lost World to movie. Jurassic Park, the movie, included many lines even from the book. The lost World didn't come close. They left the plot completely out and changed basicly everything in it. Errrrrrr.......