Right now, Hollywood seems to be obsessed with remakes/reboots and adaptations. Throw zombies in there as well. Basically the cog is less concerned with original material and more concerned on winning the popularity contest. This isn’t high school and no one is running for prom queen.
Let’s bring it back to the adaptations. They’ve been going on for years, but Vulture posed an interesting question to their readers in response to the reactions that ONE DAY has been receiving. Here’s what the site offered up:
“On paper, One Day should have worked: It was based on a best-selling book, adapted into a screenplay by that book’s author, and directed by a woman who’d scored a Best Picture nomination for her last movie, An Education. And yet, critics were rough on the romantic drama, which pulled in a meager $5.3 million in its opening weekend. Why did One Day falter while the adaptation of another popular novel, The Help, has turned into a late-August hit? Can the imprimatur of a best-selling book only get you so far at the box office? Or are there some novels that simply lose their magic when they’re adapted for the screen?”
If you’re like me, there’s a book out there that you love from cover to cover. Same feeling comes with an album. Every note from beginning to end is simply divine. You feel like you know it better than your best friend or a sibling. Imagine you hear that your favorite book is getting the adaptation treatment, how do you react? Do you wait to see who gets attached? Or do you immediately wonder what they are going to leave out or screw up? My favorite book, “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski could never be made into a movie. If you’ve read it, you might agree. You’ve got two stories that interweave and parallel, then you have text that serves its reader best on the page, and lists and other things that you end up have to scour the internet for. If any of it is even supposed to make sense.
Bottom line is the question already posed: “Are there some novels that simply lose their magic when they’re adapted for the screen?”
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