There are A LOT of comments here so I responded to as many of them as I could in the Patrick Replies video over on the second channel ruclips.net/video/XaPNUsBWVao/видео.html
I think the feeling of Fun is the most important thing about Mario. So a Movie about Mario should be fun. thats the feeling a Mario property Is at it's soul.. and whatever you say about the 2 mario movies they are fun in their own ways. fun bad or nonstop rolercoaster kinda fun. so it their own way they are both good adaptastions for mario
I'd like to hear your thoughts about Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood (2009). I think the latter is better overall (it's a way more faithful adaptation of the source manga, but still cut out various scenes), but the first one (which took the plot to a different conclusion!) is still worth watching IMO, and it's a shame that it's completely overshadowed by the other one.
As someone who has spent twenty years trying to get an adaptation of his work made (all the while watching people spend tens of millions of dollars to not succeed--fun times) I've often had to ask myself the very question you pose here. Why? I think there's an answer you didn't cover, but which helps prove your point. Films reach a different, and larger, audience--so one of my goals in adaptation is to provide a way for people who don't generally read epic fantasy to experience my stories. I've had this experience with DUNE--a novel which can be difficult for some readers. The excellent adaptations let so many of us share with friends and family something we love. They now GET it, having seen these films. This is because while a novel and a film are very different, they are often seeking similar emotional responses. Being in awe of the grand vistas of Arakis--or feeling the heartbreak of Sam and Frodo's journey--works in both mediums. But for video games...this isn't the case. My children, who love Mario games, were thrilled to take their mother (who does not enjoy gaming) to the film so she could see what they love. Except, there's no way for the film to give her their same emotional attachment they have--as the beauty of the gameplay is a fundamentally interactive experience. Anyway, another excellent video. --Brandon
Since you're here, Mistborn is an awesome series. You took many narrative risks with the storyline. I just loved, loved, loved Hero of Age's ending. It is sad, but Sazed was my favorite character in the trilogy. So, it's nice to see things work out for him.
Another point about Akira: the movie was made while the manga was still in production, and the ending of the movie informed a lot of how the author wanted to shape the manga. It's an adaptation that shaped it's source material.
That's interesting - I didn't know that. It does make me think of 2001 where the novel & film were written & produced in parallel and the book actually came out after the movie opened. They also diverged a bit as Clarke & Kubric had differences in opinion, and also there were limits to what could be done on film at the time.
The same can be said of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The Manga and the film veer in different directions, but the Manga also was finished 10 years after the movie. Of course it was gonna be different, it had more time to tell its story!
Great video Patrick and team. I was the designer / creator of Fruit Ninja, which obviously had absolutely ZERO story or character development. After the huge success of the game, (and as I was leaving the project), a push started to get film and TV adaptions made. For some at the studio, getting an adaptation made the whole thing more legitimate, like the property had "made it". Games were still struggling to be taken seriously despite being such a huge global business, but film and TV didn't have that problem. But given how narratively thin the source material was, new characters and story started getting added into the game specifically to support those future jumps to film and TV (and merch I guess). This was very... divisive. It was like having to adapt a film into an existing game... except the film didn't exist yet. It was a time.
Some random thoughts your comment inspired: 1. I played your games a lot as a child, so like. Thank you? I think? 2. It always bothers me how quickly properties go from one medium to another, with seemingly no thought put into them. I feel like Fruit Ninja worked BECAUSE of its simplicity and lack of story, not despite it. And trying to add a plot feels strange, like the game's existence isn't "enough". Of course, then you have the opposite problem of people making these intense, convoluted stories and trying to shove them into a game (Hello Neighbor is the best example I can think of right now), which just dilutes everything to the point that it might as well not have a story. 3. Lmao what if they made a cookie clicker movie
@@completeregret3513I’ve been thinking for a while we really ought to divide video games into multiple mediums, it really doesn’t make sense to talk about Fruit Ninja as though it were the same type of thing as The Last of Us
Hey that’s my voice and video at 2:12! Thanks for the inclusion in your great video. Just discovered your channel because someone told me about you using the clip. All the best man
@@Calvin_Coolage they were also victims of circumstance when all their pre-production work was overthrown by a script rewrite commissioned by Disney to bring in a bigger budget. even the actors complained about that, but most would say the directors were too inexperienced and in over their heads to adapt to that.
@@Charles12Secret Galaxy has a good vi about the entire production. ruclips.net/video/x9eYbQrxlXA/видео.html WAY too many rewrites, they were writing lines on the fly while filming.
one thing that is worth mentioning is that Detective Pikachu chose an obscure narrative driven game to adapt, if they had taken the same path with Mario it would have been one of the RPG games, or perhaps Luigi's Mansion (which I think would be a better narrative, Luigi has the character/humanity/flaws that Mario lacks)
Between the anime and Pokemon Adventures manga, there's plenty of narrative to mine out of the core RPGs. Like, RPGs tend to be narratively rich. The main games just aren't suited to a movie because those narratives are episodic. You can see this with the animated pokemon films, they're all just long episodes of the TV show and the best ones are just really good episodes.
Hi Patrick. As one of those vicious academics in adaptation studies I happily welcome this venture into our field. One of my frustrations with the field is that most of the core literature is written by literature experts that wanted to do something with film, and it often shows a severe deficiency in filmmaking language, so it's nice to see it approached by someone with a more film focused background.
I love both films and books, but everyone saying that adaptation can't make something better? They have NOT both read (B-) AND watched (A+) Fight Club.
My favorite experience watching an adaptation was Jupiter Ascending - which is not an adaptation. But I was so confident in the theater that it had to be someone trying to capture the immense scope and all their favorite moments from a decade long comic book, and that all these grandiose nothing scenes had been iconic parts of another work. And, then, it was none of those things.
Co-signed. I was personally sure it had to be some kind of YA adaptation. I mean the werewolf-angel-spacecop-rollerskater boyfriend character? The weird family drama and wealth that the protagonist is thrust into? Archetypical.
That's the other thing that made me think it. It just had more plot than most movies. Like, you see where the ends each comic issue or book chapter should have been.@@TacticusPrime
While I understand your reasoning, I do think there is a fundamental appeal - and actual merit in creating a Mario movie. As you noted, people love the iconography of the Mario games. Ideally, a movie adaptation would exchange one element served better through games (interactivity) to enhance the element largely absent from the games - an engaging narrative. You correctly noted that the Mario characters and storyline are generally paper thin, but that's exactly why games like Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi, and Mario RPG resonated so deeply - because they flesh out the world of Mario & friends and craft a more engaging narrative. Admittedly, even the RPG Mario games only go so far, but the fact that these games are so enduringly popular tells us that players want something more which the platformers aren't providing. A movie series could serve the same function on an even greater level. It doesn't need to be a commentary on the act of playing Mario to prove worthwhile. While you have a valid point regarding film adaptations of games which already endeavor to provide a more 'cinematic' experience such as Uncharted, the Mario games don't now and almost certainly never will fit into that category. Nintendo began as a toy company and its priority will always be on gameplay first, even in more lore rich series like The Legend of Zelda. Case in point, the basic premise or storyline of the Mario games doesn't even exist within the game itself, but instead is relegated to flavor text in the game's manual. The video games use 'narrative' as a mere pretense to establish a premise on which they can craft an addictive gameplay loop. The appeal in seeing a game like Mario adapted to film is simply the potential in transforming an 'icon' into a full fledged character. I think it's actually fairly similar to the appeal of comic book adaptations. Where comics are static images on a page which audiences desire to see 'move', the Mario characters may similarly be viewed as 'static' representations - icons with personality, but little else. Where film adaptations of comics interpolate the imagery between panels, an adaptation of a series like Mario the primary appeal is animating the character. Where comics have dynamic characters and static images, video games like Mario have dynamic images, but static characters. In that sense, both mediums can benefit from film adaptations. While something akin to Gerwig's Barbie, which comments on the relationship between the IP and the audience in some way is certainly a valid approach, I don't think it's the only worthwhile way to adapt a series as sparse in story as Mario. Simply creating a narrative and expanding static icons into fully realized characters has as much benefit in my opinion as does animating the static panels of a comic book. Also worth noting - I haven't actually seen the Mario movie yet. I'm commenting on the creation of a Mario movie on a conceptual level as per the subject of the video.
Yeah, I felt this video was kind of a waste of time. Patrick seems to miss the whole point of adapting a game to a movie format - there ARE people who can't/won't play games but will enjoy that same property in another format. I'd wager those people are actually the crushing majority. Patrick goes too far insisting the movie loses something and has no soul and is just a series of corporate-approved celebrations, and never for a single second it occurs to him that the movie captures the *fun* of a Mario game in story-telling format for people who won't play the game to feel the same fun through gameplay.
Think about it the other way around too. Even if i wasn't that interested in the star wars movies, being able to fight people with lightsabers is awesome and the videogame adaptations generally execute that very well. People like (generally) faithful adaptations because seeing a franchise travel from it's home medium with it's mechanics intact is inherently interesting, regardless of whether the final product is interesting in of itself.
@@DichotomousRex nah you're wrong. People don't know what they want to watch until it's served to them. You can't possibly think the Mario movie was that huge because EVERYONE who watched it is "playing the games".
17:14 Pretty funny how you confirm the point you make right after this. Spider-Man is traditionally college-age or older. He only spent a very small amount of time in high school in the comics, they moved on very quickly. But because so many adaptions of Spider-Man have him as a teenager, you’re right, people clapped for what they recognised.
Also his personality in the high school comics is nothing like Tom Holland, he's more like an introverted teenage Tony Stark. Tom Holland is most similar to Ultimate(comic) and Spectacular
Akira the movie didn't cut out the end of the manga, it just predated that ending. Otomo was making both at once, like Miyazaki did with Nausicaä, and both manga versions kept coming out after the movies were released.
@@thomasffrench3639 He basically didn't make the manga during that period. From 82-86 he did a chapter every two weeks, for one volume every 8 months. The first four volumes in three years. The fifth volume took from 86-89, three years while the movie was being made with zero chapters for a year and a half. Then the final volume he resumed the original pace and took about a year to do 23 chapters.
The Nausicaa example is even wilder too, since the manga essentially started as a storyboard pitch that Miyazaki made as a proof of concept for investors in order to make the movie, since he was an animator before he was a mangaka but had gone independent after completing his work on the Heidi animated series, but once the movie was made he found it too limiting to the many ideas he had for the story and thus kept going with the manga until it reached a conclusion he was more satisfied with. It proved to be a good decision in the end, since Nausicaa's success is what got Studio Ghibli off the ground, but for a while there in the 80's I'm guessing Miyazaki must've been the most overworked animator in Japan keeping up with all of the films he was making AND writing and drawing a manga, and that's a pretty high bar to clear.
surprised the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy didn’t get a mention given its various adaptations (from the original radio series to books, to TV, and film, etc) but each time with the involvement of the original author tweaking parts to suit it to a different medium
H2G2 is one of my go-to examples when I argue that the movie should be less faithful to the book. Adams wanting to change some things for the hell of it but knowing he needed to change other things for the different medium (also, why not take advantage of what the new medium gives you that previous ones didn't?) was an artifact of his having worked in the business and knowing what does well, as well as his genuine interest in the well-being of his stories. He wanted them to do well so he let them grow, and they feel more alive because of it. The first Harry Potter book being pretty much exactly copied into a film has always felt pointless to me by comparison, and apparently I should feel that way about Watchmen even more, but I never read the novel so I have nothing to compare the movie to.
I think it's interesting how anime exists as an artform run on adaptation. To be clear, there is a lot of very important and popular original TV anime, but the biggest stuff is usually a manga adaptation (sometimes a light novel or a video game, but mostly manga). As you mentioned, comics lend themselves to film based on their visual nature. A lot of manga is actively cinematic in its panel layouts and effects like action lines in shonen or sparkles in shojo. But it also shares the quality of a book in the fact that the reader sets the pace, and it gives the mangaka room to add in more details and drag out important story and character moments (or to tell really unique jokes). Not to mention the inner dialogue that can bounce between multiple character POVs. As you mentioned, there's an obvious connection between comics and film, and I think those same elements are why manga and anime are so interconnected. That being said, SO many manga readers complain when their favorite show gets adapted because it's almost never as good as the manga, and despite usually being a TV adaptation with multiple episodes, is usually lambasted for excluding detail or cutting things for time. I think it just goes to show, even in a medium that thrives on adaptation, there is a disconnect between what the two art forms have to offer, but there is also something new created that draws people to that adaptation.
The main issue with anime adaptations of manga and light novels is that they're always made in the middle of the manga's run. Stuff gets made up and it can completely fudge up the storyline and characters. One of the biggest examples is Fruits Basket, which got elements so badly incorrect that they canned the anime and waited a decade until the manga finished and rebooted it properly. Same thing happened with Kyo Kara Maoh, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, and many more. Sadly no reboot so far for them
@@KyleRDent They've stopped doing that long ago. Last time they made up stuff because they caught up is Blue Exorcist as far as I know, and that was 12 years ago.
And then their are cases where the studio follows up an excelent faithful first season with a terrible second that vears wildly off the source. (cough) The Promised Neverland (cough).
And that is one of my biggest gripes with anime. It shows that anime as a medium hasn’t matured past adaptations. I find that most mediums go through a period where they start to move away from adaptations as the primary way of creating stories and come up with their own medium specific environment, which for a decade or two anime was really moving that direction, but unfortunately due to the economic bubble bursting relying on adaptations was a reliable way to be safe and make money with only a couple of original series every year
@@thomasffrench3639 The catalogue of Ghibli, Disney, and Dreamworks are mostly adaptations, does that mean Feature length animation is also not a mature artform?
To me, there's one crucial aspect of screen adaptations that you get even if every single beat from the book is translated exactly with no creative changes or "take" on the material: the Music. Even if I can perfectly picture the settings, characters, and events of a book in my head, there's no way my brain can come up with something as beautiful as Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings score to accompany it.
Don't forget Hans Zimmer's work for Dune, it helped that Hans is also a fan of the Dune novel, his Dune soundtrack will be always remembered for years to come
The 1993 Mario film tells us not to open a film 14 days before Jurassic Park and featuring dinosaurs if you don't have dinosaurs to match Jurassic Park.
Personally, I've watched the 1993 Mario movie more times than I've watched the 2023 Mario movie. They took some risks and the movie was goofy AF, but it was kind of fun. It's a shame that they removed the scene that actually explains the whole thing. The 2023 movie was fun,but the only reason that I'd ever want to watch it again is to look for the various Easter eggs. It's nice that this video isn't taking it on faith that the 2023 movie is better than the 1993 one. I personally kind of liked the 1993 movie, but I also liked Buckaroo Bonzai, Tank Girl, Waterworld, Hackers and Johnny Mnemonic.
All right I'm making a faithful video game movie. 50% action scenes, 10% story and 40% managing inventory or backtracking. Unsure how to work the random item descriptions in without making it too expositiony. Audiences are sure to enjoy the alternate endings.
Jordan-Vogt Roberts’ Metal Gear movie has yet to be made because he’s too busy figuring out how to write a screenplay where 75% of it is exposition and 25% of it is backtracking back to the place you were two hours ago before all that exposition began.
@@TwoPairSA Speed running. No dialogue, no explanation just a hyper-manic protagonist charging through a cartoonish action movie with clairvoyant accuracy and almost no dialogue (and a voiceover during the unskippable cut scenes of pure exposition repeating "come on, come on...." I'm thinking Elijah Wood.
Very recently, Denis Villeneuve said that adaptation is “an inherently violent process,” which really captured this issue perfectly to me. It’s so easy as fans to be so angry about bits of “unfaithfulness”, but going to a different medium means a whole new set of strengths and weaknesses. Truly faithful adaptions usually suck.
Well I whether a faithful adaptation can work or not completely depends on the source material. Godfather movies being faithful works where something like Catcher in the Rye would not
Speaking as someone who admires the novel much more than I like it (the very last beat was always a big "erk?" to me and I'm very glad Villeneuve and Spaights made the change they did), it's been great to get films which give me the core of the book in ways I enjoy more, but also fascinating to hear Villeneuve talk about the process. It's also been rather amusing to see Villeneuve, maker of cerebral and critically acclaimed films, discussed by the book purists as if he's McG.
@@thomasffrench3639 Even the Godfather movies cut out HUGE chunks of the book. A lot of the material in the second film was a result of being left out the first time, and there's a bunch of subplots that didn't make it to either film.
@@robbybevard8034 I would argue that being a faithful adaptation is less about things being cut or moved around to better suit the medium and more about sticking to the core asthetics of the source material. An adaptation is inherently tied to it's source material for better or worse and if you make an adaptation completely alien to the source material fans of the original aren't going to enjoy it witch of course begs the question as to why you don't just make a new story instead of hitching your story to something already established. I think the recent one peice adaptation is the ideal adaptation. It hits all the same plot beats, it's true to the core asthetic of the original. But it's definitely not a shot for shot re telling of the story but there is an effort to adhere to the core identity of the source material as best as you can within the medium.
"Hey, kids, this is a heads-up about the movie you're about to watch. It's not an exact version of the Mario games; it's a blend of several Nintendo properties related to Mario and his gaming history." Sure, let's pretend that the intended audience of younger children would have given a damn about that fact. Indeed, adults can make it out, so why bother "being upfront" about it? Perhaps YOU needed to be aware of the audience because Nintendo sure was.
@@notsyzagts7967 so, maybe you've willfully misinterpreted my statement, but I'll make it clearer for you anyway: I am talking about movies in general terms, not specifically the Mario movie, as this video is about adaptation in general and happens to use the Mario movies, including the old live action one, as a lens to examine this through. Know your audience: recognise who your audience is and what they want when adapting your story from one medium to another, this INCLUDES understanding what your audience would "give a damn" about and what ages and generations they are likely to be, and what the story or characters might mean to them, etc. so, for example, the new Mario movie for instance, Illumination gave their audience more or less what they expected to get from a Mario movie, whereas the old live action movie did not. Be upfront: MARKET the movie according to what it is, e.g. a movie with a different take on existing characters could be advertised as "a bold reimagining", or a movie that deviates from the story it's based on could be credited as "inspired by" rather than "based on", etc. I am not talking about a literal pre-movie disclaimer. So, for example, the original Mario movie with Bob Hoskins might have been better received if it was advertised differently. I hope this is clearer, and that you will consider greater context when replying to people's comments in the future.
Yes I thought of that movie immediately too. But was it intentional irony on Patrick’s part, not mentioning it? Because the joke actually works either way
It's weird that you used Edge of Tomorrow for the movie-video game discussion since it is technically an adaptation of the manga "All You Need is Kill" and while it did stick to some of the material by the mid-point it deviates quite a bit. I guess the point I have is as long as it reaches the middle ground where you have recognizable material but still new enough to not be a rehash it can be good...or bad I don't know I'm just yelling at the void.
The movie and the manga are both adaptations of a novel. The movie actually premiered in London the day before the final chapter of the manga was published. It's adaptations all the way down.
He could also use Groundhog Day as an example of a video gamey film where the point of the movie is the protagonist trying something again and again while the world stays in stasis until he becomes good at it, like a video game. Which is kind of ironic, because nowadays there are a lot of video games whose premise is based exactly on Groundhog Day.
@@blakchristianbale It's just a weird coincidence that he chose something that IS an adaptation as an example of something that's not. No, not of a video game, but it's an adaptation nonetheless.
@@OtakuUnitedStudio it’s not weird at all. He’s using it as an example of something that isn’t adapting a video game, not something that isn’t an adaptation. It being based on a book has nothing to do with his point
The AKIRA argument could’ve gone a lot deeper to make another interesting point since it is a weird case of adaptation kind of like 2001 having the book and film created at the same time. If I remember correctly from researching it before the second half of the movie is different from the manga, because the first half of the manga was released, then they made the movie which was completed before the second half of the manga was completed. The manga was only completed after the film. (I could definitely stand corrected on this and for sure some hardcore Akira fans will come through and let me know)
That reminded me of Hayao Miyazaki 's Nausicaa. The film was an adaptation of his own manga that wasn't finished until almost a decade after the film was released
Yeah, I call these "Gecko Tail Adaptations." Because the adaptation that gets made by the original author while they're still working on the longer original work ends up like a gecko's tail that's been cut off. It gets frozen in time at a particular moment of the work's creation while the original work lives on, and grows a new tale different from the original.
In regards to Patrick's point about adapting Mario into a non-interactive medium, I feel like it can be done and has already been done. In the 90's, there was a short comic series, Super Mario Adventures, based primarily on Super Mario World. It's similar to the Mario RPG's since it's mostly faithful to the source material but also took some liberties unlike the recent movie. Around the same time, there were comics adaptations of other games (ie Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Star Fox) that I heard were pretty good as well. In regards to more cinematic media, while the first couple of animated shows from the 80s/90s aren't great, I feel that they were better at doing their own thing than the recent movie while still feeling decently faithful. In regards to Patrick's point about the simple plot, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing if it acts as more of a framework or framing device than a significant part of the media. I believe that a lot of the personality/tone of the games and its characters can come less from elements like dialogue or story and more from elements such as aesthetics/art direction, level/world + character design, animation, sound effects, and music. I believe that game(s) like that can coexist well with other games like God of War and The Last of Us. I disagree that a good Mario movie can't be created. A few years ago when the Mario movie cast got announced, Captain Midnight made a video explaining that a movie focused on something like smart physical comedy could be a really effective way of adapting Mario. Aside from that, Nintendo already has some experience with creating short-form cinematic content like with their Pikmin shorts. It's possible that something like Mario is more conducive to something like shorts a la Merrie Melodies than something like a full-length movie. I also disagree with Patrick's point near the end regarding the visuals. While the recent Mario games like Mario Wonder look great, game animators need to prioritize player input and functionality to ensure the game is fun and works well, thereby limiting the amount of animation and visual variety to some extent. Since movies are a passive medium instead of an interactive one, film animators have a greater amount of freedom with how to represent the visuals and action compared to game animators. I apologize if any of this comes across as really defensive. Mario and his games have been really important to me for the past 20+ years. As a result, I want to acknowledge and explain some of the potential in terms of adaptations.
"It's possible that something like Mario is more conducive to something like shorts a la Merrie Melodies than something like a full-length movie." Mario in a rubberhose style would be really cool IMO.
I feel like the “limitations” of visual effects back in the days before CGI had that element of using your imagination to fill in the gaps like it has to in a stage play.
even with CGI. for a very long time it just did not look well. Even with the very big budgets they can use now. the very thin line in believable CGI and world breaking. is very real. Like certain adaptation from games to a movie might work. If you start with a movie that is not portrait as live action. It might work much better as a animated, stopmotion or maybe very much theater looking movie. Like for example the Monty Python movie The Holly grail. It is very loosely a story about Arthur. but it does not try to be accurate and is much more a theater show in a movie. (I do know that in this case it was not intended to be accurate that's why it did work)
My problem with the first film was never its faithfulness to the “material”, it was that it didn’t use its own premise or ideas well. I have a serious problem with the way the public at large discusses adaptations. The proclamation of 100% fidelity is nonsense and is often a well meaning audience members way of saying something wasn’t satisfying. The other phrase that is repeated ad naseum is that some media just “cant” be adapted, and I have always recoiled at that. Some of the greatest most beloved adaptations of all time were called “UNADAPTABLE”. Nothing is “unadaptable” in my opinion and like with any narrative film idea it doesn’t matter how wild, difficult or bare the idea or source is provided a talented filmmaker has something to say and can do it well, period.
Despite some points about what you dislike about adaptations being misunderstood and how nothing is unadaptable; you never said what an adaptation means to you personally. Could you elaborate on that? What is an adaptation to you and what makes it a good one?
@@notsyzagts7967 For me a good adaptation manages to either capture the essence of the original material or create a new dynamic out of the original material. It’s almost like having a conversation with the original material? A recent example for me that I was surprised to really like was the Mean Girls musical. I think it actually managed to keep pace with the original but expand on it in ways that enhance the original story. As unfashionable as it is to admit right now some of my favorite adaptations as a comic book fan have come from the MCU. The insane level of quality adaptation they have managed to deliver is actually surprisingly satisfying. I never in a million years expected to see some characters in live action let alone in their own films?! Black Panther was a transcendent experience for me as a fan that spent my youth dreaming of such a thing. They are also great examples of capturing the essence of the original while also charting its own course, without needing to be “faithfully accurate”.
I think it's safe to say there's a Spectrum of Adaptability Ease at the very least. Like, with the new (and older, for that matter) Dune adaptations, after reading the novels I'm kind of blown away that they work even a little bit because SO much of the books is just internal monologue and soliloquy. Had I read those books before seeing any of the adaptations I would have thought them practically unadaptable just due to complete difference in methodology they'd require in translation and the complete destruction of internal character narrative that it would entail. Obviously the first book in that series HAS been adapted to film (3 times now, even) so it's obviously possible, but none of those adaptations has ever really captured a lot of the importance lost in losing that heavy focus on internal monologue. Particularly the tragic sense of inevitability that Paul Atreides carries with him in all of the books because he's hyper aware of how his actions will lead to terrible consequences, which is easy to depict with such internal monologues in the books, but which all the adaptations excise or truncate to the point that this aspect feels secondary or inconsequential in them, when it's *extremely* important to the themes and point of the books.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe I think you are definitely on the money. It’s not easy to do in the slightest but I’ve seen adaptations of things I was eternally told COULDNT be done, period. Granted the quality of the adaptation and how well it resonates with people is a completely different topic.
I'm a Dune Fan, and every adaptation is an odd drinking game of figuring out what was cut from the novel in order to streamline the narrative to make it work in film.
And I love that. No film can ever possibly come close to the "faithful" end of the spectrum, while every adaptation gets to spotlight the parts of the book that most compels them.
@@dreammachine1492 not a lot. Because it had so much time to play with It's probably the most faithful adaptation. Many of its changes were down to budgetary constraints and areas where the novel's descriptions were not specific, leaving room for individual interpretation.
This is part of why the "Final Fantasy 7" remakes are so interesting to me. A series of video games that adapt a video game, a medium change within its own medium. There are people experienced with the original material, people only aware of a rosebud level spoiler, and people who are completely unaware of the original all experiencing it. This familiarity, or lack thereof, even informs the narrative, and feels like the sort of thing film scholars would be absolutely devouring on a meta level if it were in their own medium.
They’re not really adaptations. They’re more so sequels to the original game. So much like the Mortal Kombat reboots, they’re not really reboots or remakes of Final Fantasy VII.
I do find it a little funny that Patrick says that newer Mario movie is if anything too loyal to it's source material when for years the joke has been that the plot of every Mario game is "Princess Peach gets kidnapped and Mario goes on an adventure to rescue her" and that literally doesn't happen in the movie.
Yeah, but it's pretty clear that his point isn't that the newer movie is too faithful, but rather that it's not unfaithful enough. And I think his point is solid and important: that being faithful may be a strength for the newer film, but the older film's being almost completely divorced from the source is actually more of a strength than people tend to realize. Like the thumbnail says, adaptations can afford to be weirder just by being an adaptation; it's not the source material, so it doesn't _have_ to be the source material, and the audience expects and can cope with that fact to a greater extent than some realize.
Course not, they'd be crucified for that these days. Peach has to be strong and in charge and have zero flaws (except her hideous, hideous face with full nostril detail) Nevermind they have Daisy to be the tomboy, it's unacceptable to have ANY female characters being rescued. At least according to the people who wrested creative control from the rest of us. One vision, one standard, no whammys.
@@KairuHakubi Did we watch the same movie? She DOES get rescued. Sure she has her little breakout scene but her attempt fails and then Mario and DK come in to save the day. Plus it's the mario bros, not Peach, who get the star and stop Bowser from destroying everything in the climax.
@@MalzraAirwynn Well of course I didn't watch it, I'm going by what I was told. In group settings. With nobody contradicting the person who said it. So it's safe to assume that was accurate. The only one getting rescued is Luigi, Peach is in total control the entire time. That's what I was told, and there are more people confirming that than rejecting it at this point.
You would have to change the graph and make a third line that goes upward for something like Starship Troopers. It adapts the literal events of the book while using the cinematic medium to completely change the thematic meaning of the story. It changes the context completely by messing with the tone. Super interesting case study in adaptation.
I'm actually quite upset with the "fidelity" take on this. Instead, it should be about "respect" as an axis. Starship Troopers as a "counter" disrespects the original work but also expects viewers to agree with the disrespect. If seen through that lens, maybe Patrick would have mentioned the Raimi movies (loved comics, adapted Spiderman really well, not "faithful" but "respectful"). He could have talked about Dune (3 adaptations, 2 completed) or Edgerunners. He'd probably have a different take on LotR. Or perhaps even the Wes. Fucking. Anderson. Roald. Dahl. Adaptations. Which. He. Recommended. He's even covered some disrespectful but they wanted money movies, like I Robot. PW sometimes misses a corner when covering an issue, and I really trust his stuff, but here I think he's pretty fundamentally missed the mark. I really think that whatever the execs think, the Audience just wants someone who wants to adapt the thing they're adapting.
I have to admit I never finished the book because it was so boring. Robert A Heinlein's work though is a perfect example if the limits of movies over books. There was no way on Earth any studio would green light something like Stranger in the Strangeland or To Sail Beyond the Sunset were the lead marries both her favorite son and her father. You also have writers like Philip K Dick were more or less they just take the bare minum of the book or story and make into a movie because his books have no real action and are often depressing or and confusing.
@@therealsunnyk solid points. But I didn’t bring this up to criticize Patrick tho. I just thought it was an interesting thought. I felt like Patrick’s video was focused and concise. I wouldn’t necessarily say he cut corners or anything. Sometimes for the sake of clarity and brevity you focus on specific aspects of a topic. You can’t always hit everything. The “ fidelity” angle was the one discussed in all of the studies Patrick referenced. So I’m assuming he was discussing that more than anything. Don’t know why you gotta be mad at Patrick bro. Be mad at the academics or something.
So maybe Starship Troopers could be described as the opposite of Watchmen as an adaptation: whereas Watchmen missed the point of the original, taking something which was originally an ironic criticism and making it a straight-up celebration, Starship Troopers understands its source but disagrees, changing it from a direct promotion of its subject to an ironic commentary.
@@timjackson4387 Not mad at Patrick, to be clear. Like I say he always does a good job of understanding and explaining the issue. It's more the dramatic irony of being able to see something on this side of the screen that isn't visible from the other side. I still think it's a great channel.
I love the discussion of this video. It's definitely really interesting. But it exists in parallel to the title. What's the point of a faithful Mario adaptation? Well, personally, it was to give my 4 year old son an ideal first theatrical film experience. Seeing a movie in a theater can be really overwhelming, especially if you're a kid who gets really into movies and spends a lot of time sitting on the basement stairs (our family version of hiding behind the couch) when anything remotely suspenseful of emotionally intense happens. But the Mario movie was a known quantity. My son knows that Bowser is a little scary, but also silly and always gets defeated. He's not scared of Bowser, even though he can still experience suspense in certain sequences. So he stayed in his seat the whole movie and had a magical experience. I'm not saying its a movie just for babies, but that it's good to have movies that have lower, more understandable stakes as well as dramas for adults. Basically, The Mario movie was my son's Fast and Furious installment, a mostly silly, highly entertaining, cinematic experience. And that's ok. We can go see more challenging movies later, when he's older. My showing at the Mario movie was full of kids, delighting in the theatrical experience, they and their parents coming away satisfied. And I thought perserving the cinematic experience was something you cared about. Anyway, it was a fun popcorn movie with understandable stakes that helped usually nervous younger viewers feel comfortable with the cinematic experience. 🤷♀️ Anyway, I'm going to think more about adaptations now.
I mean, this is a very good point. Is the 90's SMB movie a good movie? No. Fun? Yes! Is it for the kids who played SMB? Oh heck no. Not even slightly. They made it for the wrong audience, basically. Much like the original live action MK movie wasn't even a tenth as gory as the games, because they didn't want to make it X-rated and thus shut out of a huge majority of cinemas. You gotta make the movies for the kids who like the games, not (just) the nostalgic adults who want to see a "grown-up" version. We got Brightburn, it sucked. Snyder's Superman, meh. Superman & Lois? Yay!
@snorpenbass4196 Right! And as good as Barbie was, it isn't actually for the kids who are playing with Barbies right now. It's for the teenagers and adults who grew up with Barbie...actually, it's for the middle aged moms most of all. It's great, but not the audience or kind of movie Mario should have aimed for. Mario has always been a franchise for kids that teenagers and adults love too. It's rated E for everyone. The movie had to be the same thing. What we got isn't high art, but it also isn't garbage either. It's a pizza of a movie. Not a culinary risk or masterpiece, but a simple pleasure.
@@lydia1634 I agree. In fact, that's kind of why I didn't like Barbie, to be honest. I actually preferred something that was a little more light hearted and for a younger demographic. Not everything has to be edgy and compelling to be great.
@@lydia1634 It's fun but mostly forgettable. I'm not saying everything has to "high art" but just chalking up every mediocre blockbuster as "dumb, popcorn flicks" is beginning to be a tired argument.
Kind of a random example, but this whole topic reminds me of the tv show adaptation of the manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. As the show has gone on, its increasingly gotten more very literally faithful to the source material, to the point where recent seasons are regularly adapting panels 1 for 1 from the manga. However, I started to notice that things have begun to feel a little more by-the-numbers as they've done the direct panel adaptations more. Earlier seasons often took more liberties with the exact minutia of how scenes play out. Because of this, it's started to feel like, instead of something new, you're left with essentially worse looking versions of the excellent manga illustrations. When you try too hard to directly compete with the source material, you run the risk of just making an all-around inferior version.
Hell that makes me think of anime localization in general. Back in the day, they had a lot more fun with it, especially dubbing. They were more concerned with getting the FEELING across than the literal meaning of each word. Some of them trusted the audience enough to leave honorifics and some other distinct terminology alone, which gives it more flavor and avoids awkwardly attempting to translate the untranslatable. Also, more swearing, when it was appropriate for the character and the line. All of that's gone now, it's wooden and dry, all in the name of being an accurate adaptation. Like, guys, way to miss the point. We wanted you to stop removing blood and titties, changing names and pretending it's not japan, or garbling up the order of episodes. That's the accuracy we were looking for, the authorial intent, translated so we can understand it.
As great as this video essay was, I can't believe we had an almost hour-long discussion about adaptation without even passing reference to the greatest example of how it works going from one medium to another: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Radio play, to book, to tv show, to video game, and finally to movie). And by the same author each time. Douglas Adams made a point to change it for each medium, because he understood that was needed to make it work. Each medium had different strengths and needs.
@@jarjarperaWrong. He was faithful to the core of the material but flexible with storytelling methods. A good adaptation uses sources as building blocks but is not restricted to existing assets. He honored the source material just fine but in a less conventional way.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was arguably more successful at repeatedly jumping between different media than it had been at continuing the story in any given medium.
My most vivid memory of the 1993 Super Mario brothers movie was seeing it for my classmates birthday party. As we were watching it, I pooped my pants and his very attractive and very unfriendly mother smelled it and yanked me out into the lobby and told me to clean my pants myself……. I told the story to John Leguizamo when met him.
Here's my problem with the "Leo pointing meme" criticism of the Super Mario movie: You could literally say the same thing about any faithful adaptation. "Every scene in The Lord of the Rings is made to make people sit up and do the Leo Pointing meme. Look, it's the Shire! Look, it's Bilbo Baggins! Look, it's Gandalf! Look, it's the One Ring! Look, it's Aragorn!" People recognize things because it's an adaptation.
44:10 - "Why do we believe that the ultimate form of any story is to become a movie?" I see it like a culmination of all the other creative work that goes into a project - storytelling, visual design, music, sound, choreography. Now and then maybe there's some puppetry thrown in for good measure. All the pieces, those different forms of art, come together into something that (in a good case) is a very powerful work, and at the same time very accessible. That doesn't necessarily mean the movie is always the best thing but it can be really amazing when done well.
"I see it like a culmination of all the other creative work that goes into a project - storytelling, visual design, music, sound, choreography." I haven't seen all of the video yet, but video-games have all of those things you mentioned plus one more thing that films don't - interactivity. That's why I consider video-games to be the best form of storytelling, because they're stories that you get to choose the direction of.
Excellent points all around but the “like watching somebody else play a video game” line feels a little outdated when let’s plays have been an established thing for a couple decades now.
The usual use being for ancient parchments that were scraped clean and written over at some point, but with traces of the original text remaining. These artifacts are called palimpsests.
I think we are slowly getting better at game adaptations, I think why they haven't worked for so long is because to put it simply....people don't understand what makes the respective mediums great. They don't play to the strength of the medium they are adapting to. Yes, it is a big loss to lose interactivity when adapting a game to a linear cinematic format, but there should be so much to gain as well. Btw, this part was especially interesting to me, because seeing as you are very much a film based person I was fully expecting you to bring up some of the upsides cinema can provide over video game adaptations, whereas your point of video game adaptations feeling like a downgrade and losing a key element is something very often brought up by people more focused on video games. I think you're very much correct with noticing this problem, but I believe the problem is just as much of an opportunity. Too many adaptations tried to just go in with the idea of "This is just like the game, except it's a movie now" without actually trying to make it a movie. A movie should and even needs to be different from the game, it should take the necessary elements and tell the story with them in a different suitable way.
I lost it at "I want a Dig Dug movie that's longer than Killers of the Flower Moon." With the right people, it really could work! I really like your discussion of how the Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) has the drawback of not actually being a visionary take on the source material as much as it is a corporate extension of the source material, and as you said it, it's "serving [us, the audience] the exact obvious thing that we already have." I'm a Mario fan, myself, but my experience with this movie in the theater a year ago honestly felt shallow. I already knew the basic concepts of who the characters were, but there were barely any character moments or character dynamics that enhanced the experience of the movie. It had less personality to their characters than Mario Strikers Charged, a 2007 spin-off game where the characters barely talk, but made up for that with an incredible focus on individual expression and a stupidly high attention to detail. In my opinion, the two Sonic the Hedgehog movies of this decade are better video game movie adaptations, if not the best ones of all time. They took the world and the heart of the franchise and crafted it into something that brings forth a new take to the narratives established in the games, but one that still hits all the familiar beats for fans, and works in cinematic form. In addition, they are delightful movies in their own right, with their strongest asset being the very enjoyable character dynamics that the Mario movie lacks. It appeals to both Sonic fans and non-fans because of these traits, and with the upcoming arrivals of a third movie in December AND a spin-off show focused on Knuckles later this month, it's a good time to start getting invested in this "Sonic Cinematic Universe."
I was 14 when the Super Mario Bros movie came out. My friends and I went to the premier, and then we had a sleep over fuelled by pizza, snes games, and a stack of Wizard magazines. I liked the movie. I enjoyed the weird adaptation choices they made. I probably would have liked it even more with that missing scene at the end, but even without it, I thought it was fun. The Super Mario games didn't have enough story to adapt in the first place, so I was perfectly happy with what we got. It certainly didn't murder my childhood in any way. I dunno how old the person in that "My Retro Life" clip was when they saw the movie, but I have to imagine they were super young, because that reaction is pretty absurd and dramatic :p
What I found refreshing about the new Mario movie was its joyful, goofy sincerity. Ignoring its existence as a brand extension and a few winks at the camera, the film itself is wonderfully non-cynical. The characters all wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don’t attempt to deconstruct Mario. I love that they don’t turn Mario into a grumpy jerk who constantly bickers with Peach until they both decide they actually like each other. Instead there is a real respect between those two. It’s not trying to be cool. It’s earnest. The movie is unapologetically about friendship, brotherhood and courage. That’s good enough for me.
As much as I enjoyed watching the 2023 Mario movie, it has major problems. For example, it's not a very deep movie, there's no question that Mario is going to win and there isn't really much of a challenge for him in getting there. It also spends way too much energy on building in just about every possible reference in there and it just kind of feels like it was designed specifically to ensure that people going would go for the Easter eggs and that everybody had to have at least a couple dozen they could identify, no matter what era of Nintendo games they grew up with. The 1993 movie, at least felt like somebody made an attempt at making a real movie, and while I have precisely no interest in ever watching the 2023 movie again, I have watched the 1993 one more than once and will again in the future. It's not a great movie, but it is a bit of fun.
I watched Locke because of Emma. It was so good. I watched it on my computer while my brother was playing a game in the same room and he was like "the movie was so good! I could have played the game and just listened to the story but I had to stop and watch."
I've not played the Mario games but I thought the recent Mario Bros movie was pretty fun. I knew it was adapting a lot of stuff, but as someone mostly unfamiliar, it felt pretty gonzo and silly and enjoyable.
I think we need more movies that goes all the way left on the spectrum of adaptability chart honestly. The 90's Mario Movie is unironically one of my favorite movies of all time because it is such a wild ride, and to me it seems like a good way to sneak weird and wild concepts into mainstream movies that otherwise wouldn't be allowed to see the light of day.
I remember Overly Sarcastic Productions talking more about continuity reboots and treating the original continuity as the Ship of Theseus and how the continuity being changed always irked some people because they removed/altered an important element that determined it was the Ship of Theseus. Adaptations fall into that, people felt the identity of the work was defined by that plank and that crew member Tom Bombadil and if you remove it then it's no longer the Ship of Theseus.
I think games like Legend of Zelda and Metroid Prime could actually make for interesting “faithful” adaptations. While Link isn’t a super multidimensional character or anything, Mario’s faithful adaptation relied on it keeping the simplicity of the Mario games, LoZ and Metroid games have deep lore, a level of grounded-ness, and characters whose roles can be fleshed out interestingly without deviating to a point that I think Nintendo would say is “too much.”
otoh, I don't think you could actually adapt Samus to another medium without turning it into Other M. Cinema doesn't have the same exploration and revisitation vibe the Metroid games do, and can't. You'd have to do some bit of timeline specifically not covered by the games.
@@caffetielYou could definitely adapt Metroid, it would just be an action adventure movie. The issue is that it would have relatively little dialogue and character work, but there are movies like that out there, such as Prey.
@@caffetiel Alien already shows the template for how to do Metroid. Just mood and atmosphere and some horror with moments of big bombastic action. It could VERY easily work in the right hands with just the one character stuck alone and trying to move along on her mission. Very little dialogue, mostly visuals and vibes. Same with Shadow of Colossus. That won't be what they do, it'll be full of quips and snark and no horror at all probably, but the in-theory baseline already exists.
I think they’re going to adapt BOTW because when you think about it it’s perfect for an adaptation : link has no memory so you make him a personality and he discovers Hyrule with the audience Also the game is a sandbox where you make your own narrative, so they can invent one
@@robbybevard8034 Alien is a bunch of schmucks dying one by one at the hands of an implacable monster. Metroid is about an implacable killing machine single-handedly obliterating entire species from world after world. How do you make an orgy of blood and artifacts last 90min+?
I kind of love the poetry of the two countries who were the last to fight major naval battles against each other teaming up decades later to fight a common enemy.
I just jave to point out that the SNES game "Super Mario World" does have a bunch of dinosaurs and takes place in Dinosaur Land. So the dinosaur thing wasn't completely left field. I've heard a few people express how random it seemed in the movie when it was most likely inspired by the game.
I think you forgot to mention that movie adaptations can be a source of advertisement. For the release of the movie, they released a special version of the console that includes a Mario game, basically saying “As seen in the movie”. I feel like PlayStation is following the same strategy with the movies Uncharted and Grand Turismo. Nintendo’s case is special because they said that they wanted to venture into more forms of entertainment; the movie is also an advertisement of the new theme park in Universal Studios. That being said, I think that for a Mario movie to be good in itself, it has to adapted like the “Blank canvas” approach, as seen in Super Mario RPG. That game engages with the source material but adds new elements to the existing lore: New characters, new environments and locations, and a narrative that deviates from the original games, giving it an unique motive not present in other Mario games. Anyway, good video Patrick! Hope this comment makes it to the Patrick Replies video 🫣
I maintain that there is a purely aesthetic value in adaptations of games like Mario with thin narratives... if the adaptations commit to being as aesthetically different from the source games as possible. Not in a design sense, but in a textural sense. IE: if it's a game with 2D animation, you could use live action or 3D animation. If it's a game with 3D animation, you could use live action or 2D animation. And furthermore, if you go for live action, one ought to make as much of the sets, costumes, creatures, etc. practical as physically possible. I've often thought about this in the context of Metroid. Sure, you could easily make a Metroid movie with CG animation and it could still be compelling as long as you go for something with little to no dialogue and commit to the atmospheric, visual storytelling endemic to Metroid, but it would still feel more like watching someone else play the game. However, if you make a practical suit for Samus, big puppets and animatronics for all the aliens and big elaborate sets for the world of Zebes, then I think you've really got something. Also DOA: Dead or Alive is the best video game movie don't @ me.
If beale street could talk is my favorite adaptation. The plot is pure fidelity, but the narratives are told completely differently. The novella focuses heavily on the interiority of various characters, which lends tremendously to the written form. On the other hand, the film is purely external, with no internal monologue, and completely takes advantage of the visual communication innate to cinema. Ultimately, each ends up being a fire representation of their respective mediums
There are things worth adapting from Super Mario to moviers, mainly its sense of humor. About the characters, some of them have more depth that you realize, Bowser's relationship with his family it's pretty unique, the way in which Luigi looks up to Mario it's also hearthwhelming. The crazy world building of Super Mario Bros could also be worked out to tell other compelling stories. I'm not sure how much to agree with the claim that Mario is a plain character, there are tons of ways of seeing his story that he may be worked out into very different characters. Some examples: He is constantly going on killing rampages to rescue Peach with little to no reward (he may enjoy it or may not, and in both circumstances there is a lot to say), he was chased by Bowser even when he was just a baby, he also was a common worker that miraged to a very different place and become the equivalent of a national hero, he was friendzoned by Peach in Super Mario Odyssey after he risked his life saving her. Any of those aspects of Mario could be a seed of a compelling narrative.
My belief is that the reason was after decades of video game adaptations that weren’t being close to the source material Out of fear of them not feeling general audience friendly doing a faithful Mario movie was the safest bet, both financial and general audience wise.
Closest those early adaptations got was the original Mortal Kombat, and even then it just had to reverse-engineer Enter the Dragon with fantasy elements. Of course they botched it with Annihlation and even the new films feel like retreads of the 1995 adaptation.
@@benwasserman8223 But that makes sense, since every early fighting game was just a video game adaptation of Enter the Dragon, just like all the early beat-'em-ups are video game adaptations of Game of Death or The Warriors. The adaptation cycle has always gone both ways.
According to this thread, everything is fan art unless you were a cro magnon man painting antelope in a cave. Even then I'm guessing the next guy will say that was fan art . . . of antelope!
It's strange that out of a the two big video game movie franchises right now (Mario and Sonic, obv) Mario, the one with _less_ of a real story, is the one choosing to be more faithful with its source, while Sonic, whose franchise is filled to the brim (arguably too much) with lore/story, is the one that's been deviating more (a la Mario '93) by putting him in our world and giving him a weird surrogate dad in James Marsden. It's a strange dichotomy.
One of the reasons I loved the sonic movies is I actually don't like the way a lot of the sonic games play, but I grew up loving the blue hedgehog and his friends so getting actual stories I don't have to slog through feels good actually.
I have a degree in multimedia storytelling! :D Honestly, video games actually have the potential to produce better art than most mediums due to their interactivity. But obviously the communities and content most media focuses on when it comes to video games, it makes critics take them FAR less seriously.
Multimedia storytelling is fascinating. One thing that I like about Star Wars is how it excels in many different mediums such as games, animation, television, comics and obviously film. Now I’m only hesitant to say novels just for how rich of a history that novels have and it’s hard to call those the peak of the medium, at leas in the case of Star Wars
@@thomasffrench3639 Star Wars is a great example of successful adaptation! For example, I think the KOTOR games are on par with the Original Trilogy. To be completely honest, I think I may like KOTOR more when it comes to certain things.
@@dymoureKOTOR is actually what got me back into video games as a medium. As far as film goes, I actually hold the original Star Wars trilogy in quite high esteem and for KOTOR to match it in terms of storytelling in a lot of different ways made me realize the power of game storytelling. It also made me remember that games are just fun to play, which is mostly what I’ve been doing as I’m mostly playing retro games with a few RPGs in between that tell some good stories with fun customization mechanics. It’s just a pleasure to realize how many different mediums have their own strengths when it comes to storytelling. Comics have a lot of freedom of pacing, film uses sensory overload to tell stories, and video games have a lot more room for smaller moments with dialogue and worldbuiling that doesn’t need to progress the plot and interactivity. Also love that each medium has different ways to approach the imagination of the audience/player/reader.
A variety of thoughts. There was a Mario Video Game about the two brothers being plumbers. It's 'Mario Bros' (no Super) for the Atari 2600. It's a platformer where the two brothers venture into the sewers in order to battle various monsters coming out through the pipes. To me, the ideal Mario Brothers movie exists midway between the two along the spectrum. It's a fantasy adventure (what the kids today are calling an Isekai) where heroes from our world travel through a portal (or in this case, a sewer pipe) into a surreal fantasy world with strange new rules and dangers. The major selling point being that, instead of a bold, impetuous young warrior, it's a pair of working class Italian plumbers from Brooklyn. And instead of the standard D-grade Tolkien knock-off or D&D-a-like setting, it's all koopas and yoshis and toadstools and magic bricks. On the idea of fidelity as the defining characteristic of quality, I'd have to consider Robert Rodriguez' 'Sin City' which was so close to its source material that it felt hollow to me. I'd already HAD this experience reading the comic and seeing the film felt like sitting there while someone read the comic to me again. Meanwhile, one of the greatest adaptations is 'Blade Runner' which bears almost no resemblance to 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (or 'Speed Racer', which tosses so much of the original manga and anime out the window while maintaining and actively enhancing the heart of the original source material - the bonds of familial love - while introducing a secondary theme about the heartlessness of capitalism which is almost completely absent from the comics or tv cartoon).
your ideal mario movie was the very first draft of the ‘93 film. it’s getting a comic adaptation by a fan though, so maybe check it out (it’s called super mario bros: fantasy)
Between The Last of Us' award wins and Castlevania/Arcane's Netflix success, I honestly think TV is a better medium for modern video game adaptations. But modern games have a high story focus alongside game mechanics and Mario story is.... well whatever new scheme Bowser has for kidnapping/marrying Peach. Still, if they get Rosalina for a sequel, we could make an emotionally charged story out of it (don't act like you didn't cry reading her Super Mario Galaxy backstory.. we all did).
I can't speak for Last of Us or Castlevania, but I wouldn't even call Arcane an adaptation. It's a spinoff. It's not trying to adapt the experience of fighting in Summoner's Rift, it's taking the lore and character backstories and using that as the basis of its adaptation. That said I do think TV has an advantage purely because game stories are a lot longer than movies so a straight adaptation benefits from having more runtime to work with.
@@nathanl8622I’d still call Arcane somewhat an adaptation or based on the League of Legends universe with its own story you can’t find in the game. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners also does this so well. That had nothing to do with V or Johnny Silverhand but everything looks and sounds exactly like the game you played in. There are even certain locations you can actually go to in the 2077 game map like visit Lucy’s apartment or find Rebecca’s shotgun at the same area Adam Smasher killed her in. There’s a sense of connection and faithfulness to the game while still standing on its own. I thought that was all so freaking cool.
It can be easier to adapt a story-based game, since the story is already there and it's basically just an editing process, but I think you can make good adaptations of "pure gameplay" games too, the secret is just to "yes, and" them. Don't contradict anything from the source material, don't try to negate it, just build out around it, add detail to the characters, add context to the action scenes. It's almost like the Marvel Method of film making, where they put together action set pieces and then build a plot around that. In this case, you take action set pieces from the game, and then build out good reasons for _why_ those scenes are happening.
Most videogames with any substantial narrative sort of already tend towards an episodic structure, simply because they're too long to be experienced in one setting. They're inherently something that are picked up and put down multiple times and lots of them factor that into the pacing and design.
@@timogulI think that a lot of “pure gameplay” games generally have story and a lot of environmental storytelling like Castlevania and Mega Man. So a lot of those games feel like they have a lot of potential in adaptations
I think the most interesting thing about videogame adaptations is looking at what they choose. Many of the ones I can think of off the top of my head are typically games from the period where most were light on story but heavy on gameplay. If you were to make them 100% faithful, It would be an exposition dump at the beginning, a conversation pushing you toward the next area every 20 or so minutes of film time, and a lot of watching a character solving puzzles or just mowing down antagonistic elements. When so much of the source material is playing the game, I don't think film can capture that kind of feeling. Its hard to make 30 minutes of running back and forth to get the weird puzzle pieces in order to open a door in a police station a la Resident Evil 2 feel right on film. I'm just hopeful that this next wave of videogame adaptations will continue in the footsteps of The Last of Us or Arcane. It's nice to have something I can point at and say "See, videogames aren't just pac-man and Fortnite." Sure, they may never play Oxenfree or Nier Replicant/Automata, but at least they might be more interested in the stories videogames can tell than just writing them off as silly timewasters for kids.
That said, I feel like we used to get movies about that kind of thing, we just thought of them as "travel movies" or "escape movies" or just.. you know, like Milo and Otis, just characters trying to get through hazards and dangers. If it was the right kind of game, i THINK you could adapt that. but it would be weird, and it would need really, really good writing and characterizations to keep us caring about who these people are and why they're solving all these puzzles.
Hey Patrick, the part about source material fidelity and mentions of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” makes me wonder if you’d do a video about it. It’s such an interesting case in the fidelity conversation as it’s a satire of something the adapter never read, using some of the same sets as an adaptation that went to the level of filming scenes on the exact dates listed in the book.
I will say that Legend of Zelda makes a much better foundation for storytelling than Mario. Although the timeline has been retconned to hell, there's a lot more meaning in the elements of the Zelda world and characters. Plus each major release is only vaguely connected to the others in the series, so there's plenty of room for artistic expression without upsetting hardcore fans.
Yeah but... there's so much working against it, I have to think no matter what your taste is, you'll find a reason to think this will be garbage it's being made in america, it's being made in current day, it's being made I assume by Illumination, or a peer of theirs. It's going to be really ugly because that's how most CGI likes to do faces. lot of jowl lines, nostrils, and general gross expressions. Also, while there is a story, it's usually a story with kind of an even pace to it? Like Link's status a third of the way through the game is pretty similar to two thirds of the way through, he just has a few more dungeons under his belt. There's no "Act 1 does this, act 2 does that, act 3 changes things up" until the very end. and I don't think you can change that without ruining it. How would you even fit more than one dungeon exploration into a movie? Two, at most, but then you couldn't possibly have much time for the rest of it.
I'm glad you brought up 'The Shining' because you asked the question "Is it a faithful adaptation, and would it be better if it was?" The answer is the TV miniseries later made of 'The Shining' in the '90s, with King himself writing the screenplay. Arguably the miniseries is more faithful, though it still deviates from the novel - but it's considerably less memorable than Kubrick's film. For my money, 'The Shining' has not been faithfully adapted to film yet, but Kubrick's film is the better movie by a considerable margin. Also, Mike Flanagan's 'Doctor Sleep' had to thread the needle between King's original work and the Kubrick film, and stands as an outstanding example of adaptation, both faithful to the original(s) and responsive to what works in different mediums. I wonder where 'Doctor Sleep' would fit on the Super Mario super spectrum.
Honestly I feel that Mario being used as the example for an adaptation spectrum is really a mistake when you have the ENTIRETY of the chaos that is Stephen King adaptations just sitting there. With Mario Adaptations and faithfulness versus "doing its own thing"-ness you have exactly two data points for comparison. For the vast array of films that are Stephen King adaptations, you have probably about a hundred different data points by now, especially once you add in the stuff adapted for television (where a lot of his short stories ended up on anthology series like Tales of the Darkside or the Outer Limits, and then there are the many mini-series to consider). You also have a lot of variation when it comes to authorial intent, as King himself has had a lot of variation when it comes to involvement with any particular adaptation and there are now several works that have been adapted multiple times by different creators. In the original Shining, King had little involvement, but a lot more in its second adaptation. In the original adaptation of The Stand, he wrote the screenplays for the mini-series, but in the 2nd adaptation he didn't . . . but he DID write a whole new epilogue episode that extends the story past its original end point. With stuff like Creepshow, he produced the film, starred in a segment and adapted some prior stories while writing whole new stories just for the movie, while in Creepshow 2, he produced it and an older story of his was adapted to the screen, but other writers did the other segments. Then there's stuff like Maximum Overdrive, where he actually directed the adaptation of one of his weirder stories while higher than a kite, or Storm of the Century where he wrote an original teleplay for the screen based on no prior work other than an unpublished draft he never finished for a novel or short story. Then there's the Darabont movies, which offer different ranges when it comes to success and faithfulness to their source material, with King even declaring that he prefers some of the changes in these adaptations to his original works (particularly in the case of The Mist). Like, King's stuff just offers a pretty vast array for comparison when it comes to the concept of analyzing adaptations on so many different aspects of faithfulness, quality of the end product, audience agreement with either his book version or the film version . . . the whole thing is practically a genre unto itself!
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe Its not a mistake because you'd need a whole dedicated podcast series on Steven King adaptations for precisely that reason. You can make a two point scale out of the Mario movies. Philip K Dick would be more managable than King but still need more than 50 minutes padded with jokes. As Patrick says in the first quarter its just an introduction to Adaptation studies. You could get a masters and a PHD out of looking at King (and I'm sure people have).
"Edge of Tomorrow" is a fantastic point of reference because it feels like its take on the "die and try again" gameplay experience could have been applied to great effect in the "Assassin's Creed" movie instead of the weird whiplash arm thing they did with the Animus. It could also form the basis of any theoretical SoulsBourne movie version....
Throughout the whole essay, I kept thinking about Laal Singh Chaddha, which is technically a remake of 1994s Forrest Gump, but feels more like an adaptation to me. Not from one medium to another, but from one historic background (America) to another one (India). What is really interesting about this "adaptation" is that some scenes are recreated shot by shot, while others are scenes are completely different and some narrative elements are altered strongly as well. Knowing that each of this was a deliberate choice by the film makers, it increased the impact of each decision and elevated them way past what they could have been as a "stand alone movie". I feel like this is true for the conventional adaptations as well. While many creative decissions originate of necessary changes when adapting to a different medium, knowing the source material and the differences between it and the movie can highten the impact of the creative decissions by the film makers. PS: Very dissapointed that there was not a single mention of the movie Adaptation.
46:13 not everyone plays games but most people watch movies so it’s a way to broaden the audience Nintendo has said they want their brands in every home whether they play games or not
For Patrick Replies. While I almost entirely agree with you on the games having little to no story, you do only talk about the early games. Granted, the later games are also very light on story, yet they do contain some more narrative depth. Mario Sunshine being the most notable example.
Adding to what you're saying, Mario Galaxy had the storybook outlining Rosalina's backstory. Mario Odyssey (even if it's light on direct story) contains a lot of great worldbuilding with a lot of its real-world cultural inspirations and flavor text outlining major landmarks and facets.
That’s fair. Speaking as someone who enjoys it as a so bad its good, cheesy fun time, that is its greatest flaw in my eyes. Same with the Shining. As good as the movie is i cant help but think about how much the cast and crew hated making it while im watching it
The thing with Mario is that it's a particularly "gamey" game series. Pretty much all of its strength is in things that are fundamental to video games as a medium, like it's tight and responsive controls, rewarding mechanics, and clever level design, while it's extremely light on plot and characterisation. The movie wasn't really that "faithful" in those things, it was more just faithful in the aesthetics of adapting the games. The plot and characters were thin but a lot more fleshed out than the games, but since those were never that essential, fans didn't care that they were different. Tbh I think that while having more depth would have arguably made it a better film, it would have made a worse adaptation, because it's supposed to just have a very simplistic story and characters. I think it's fun as basically a 90 minute Easter egg fest for fans, and as a passable animated movie for kids otherwise. I also think interest will wane a bit for sequels because most of the value was just in the novelty of all this beloved game stuff appearing in a mainstream Hollywood film.
To me a good adaptation is a good movie. Making a movie better by fleshing things out does not make it a worse adaptation. Besides they could easily adapt something like TTYD there's tons of story there
I really like the concept of this video of what makes a film adaptation. I think no matter if your a faithful adaptation of a book, TV show, Video Game ETC or not you need to be a good movie
I think the worst movie reviews are the ones that start off by admitting that they haven't even watched the movie. It happens more often than you'd think.
Yep, on the whole I think that's an unfair criticism. There are a few times when that is a legitimate issue. A couple Kubrick examples were the endings to The Shining and 2001. Changing The Shining with that ending did completely change the story and I don't think that it was as strong of a story as the original source material. With 2001, I don't believe that it was even possible to film the ending in a way that would make any sort of visual sense.
Sure but this wasn't meant to be a comprehensive overview of video game adaptations; just a handful of examples to form a basis for the starkness between the 2 Mario movies. Unlike the Mario movies, the Sonic movies didn't suffer the same disconnect that caused so much divisiveness. Yes, they are solid and well-made but they were generally non-controversial. That's probably the reason.
The history of the first movie is so fascinating! The 90's Mario movie is my guilty pleasure! I used to rent it all the time from this little non-blockbuster video store ..ugh...thinking back to that moment is hitting me hard in the feels and it's more about being little again and enjoying life for a very brief moment!
It's interesting that Cyberpunk Edgerunners and Arcane weren't really brought up here, even if they aren't movies. I honestly think these are one of the most furtile directions for game adaptations. They aren't aiming to adapt game mechanics, but instead trying to expand the world you're playing in a way that the source game can't do as well. This is also largely why the Pokemon anime and TF2 short films were so successful. The pitch isn't "Let's make Video Game: The Movie" but instead "This is a very cool setting, what's an interesting new story we can make a movie out of here?"
Arcane manages to somehow remain faithful to its source material while also adding so much depth and passion to the work itself that it manages to be popular with people who utterly despise said source material.
I once took a literary class in college all about adaption. It was a fun class. But it was a little soured by the professor looking down on me when she found out I listen to audiobooks more than read physical books. It's not my fault my ADHD makes listening to books easier than reading text. The Linda Hutcheon quote at 15:26 is why when an adaptation is made of something I don't already know, I don't seek out the source material until after I experience the new adaptation. Sjo I can go in with fresh eyes.
Sonic's films are better as Sonic basically is a more developed character. It also helps that they took more risks with the character than the 2023 Mario film while not being as far devolved as the 1993 adaptation...despite them nearly going that far. Tv shows are the same, post 2000, there's not been a bad one.
I disagree with that. Both of the Mario Movies aren’t exactly my favorite, but it at least they’re about the Super Mario Bros compared to the Sonic movies, as the first one was all about James Marsden while the second film decides to make Tom’s sister in law the main character for a big chunk of the 2nd act. And this coming from a guy who used to prefer Sonic over Mario.
i'd completely take 2023 over 1993 as being weird doesn't automatically make it better as a lot of it was just pure even for that time bad compared to being a great reimagining of the 1st game(compared to in sonic where it wouldn't work shoving everything in/at that point just ask for nekotoons to make a tv series it works for mario as the 1st game didn't have a plot to fully stick by the book to.) . with what we know of the series now added in(there are times when asking for it to "stay true" is more whining about headcanon's that were never solid to begin with than actual criticisms/more flaws of film standards with length thinking everything needs to be 2 hours when it really doesn't at all.). and done in a well handled way to give it's own exploration of it's world in a sequel now that it has room to fully go there without worrying of being safe for newcomers.(where with pokemon it banked on the idea of "what if they were in our world"as compared to it detective pikachu is standard in areas but like them has enjoyable protagonist to carry it.)
nobody asked but here's some of my favorite movies that are adaptations: Arrival, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Steve Jobs, Dune, The Social Network, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Sharp Objects
![Chris Langan - The Interview THEY Didn't Want You To See - CTMU [Full Version; Timestamps]](/img/1.gif)
There are A LOT of comments here so I responded to as many of them as I could in the Patrick Replies video over on the second channel ruclips.net/video/XaPNUsBWVao/видео.html
I think the feeling of Fun is the most important thing about Mario. So a Movie about Mario should be fun. thats the feeling a Mario property Is at it's soul.. and whatever you say about the 2 mario movies they are fun in their own ways. fun bad or nonstop rolercoaster kinda fun. so it their own way they are both good adaptastions for mario
Hi. How did you make an hour video on this subject and never mentioned Arcane? Seriously, watch it, if you haven't already.
I think the Postal movie is more or less the most faithful movie adaptation that I've ever seen of a video game.
I'd like to hear your thoughts about Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood (2009).
I think the latter is better overall (it's a way more faithful adaptation of the source manga, but still cut out various scenes), but the first one (which took the plot to a different conclusion!) is still worth watching IMO, and it's a shame that it's completely overshadowed by the other one.
@patrickhwillems i must ask, at 47:47 you do a really good impression of Snake from mgs or is it actually David Hayter😅?
As someone who has spent twenty years trying to get an adaptation of his work made (all the while watching people spend tens of millions of dollars to not succeed--fun times) I've often had to ask myself the very question you pose here. Why? I think there's an answer you didn't cover, but which helps prove your point. Films reach a different, and larger, audience--so one of my goals in adaptation is to provide a way for people who don't generally read epic fantasy to experience my stories. I've had this experience with DUNE--a novel which can be difficult for some readers. The excellent adaptations let so many of us share with friends and family something we love. They now GET it, having seen these films. This is because while a novel and a film are very different, they are often seeking similar emotional responses. Being in awe of the grand vistas of Arakis--or feeling the heartbreak of Sam and Frodo's journey--works in both mediums. But for video games...this isn't the case. My children, who love Mario games, were thrilled to take their mother (who does not enjoy gaming) to the film so she could see what they love. Except, there's no way for the film to give her their same emotional attachment they have--as the beauty of the gameplay is a fundamentally interactive experience. Anyway, another excellent video. --Brandon
Since you're here, Mistborn is an awesome series. You took many narrative risks with the storyline. I just loved, loved, loved Hero of Age's ending. It is sad, but Sazed was my favorite character in the trilogy. So, it's nice to see things work out for him.
Oh, hello Brandon!
Love your books.
@@samcyphers2902Why is it sad that Sazed is your favorite character? He’s mine too!
@@lukedelrosario5881 they’re saying the ending is sad, not that Sazed being their favorite character is sad
Really need to get back to reading Well of Ascension, but I don't have all the time in the world these days. A pity since I loved the first book.
Another point about Akira: the movie was made while the manga was still in production, and the ending of the movie informed a lot of how the author wanted to shape the manga. It's an adaptation that shaped it's source material.
That's interesting - I didn't know that. It does make me think of 2001 where the novel & film were written & produced in parallel and the book actually came out after the movie opened. They also diverged a bit as Clarke & Kubric had differences in opinion, and also there were limits to what could be done on film at the time.
@@WhiskyCanuck yeah. I think Super Eyepatch Wolf covered the Akira thing in his video about Akira
The same can be said of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The Manga and the film veer in different directions, but the Manga also was finished 10 years after the movie. Of course it was gonna be different, it had more time to tell its story!
Same with Scott Pilgrim. It's really hard to tell where the movie and book influenced each other since the last volumes were made concurrently.
Just like Scott Pilgrim The movie vs the manga
Great video Patrick and team. I was the designer / creator of Fruit Ninja, which obviously had absolutely ZERO story or character development. After the huge success of the game, (and as I was leaving the project), a push started to get film and TV adaptions made. For some at the studio, getting an adaptation made the whole thing more legitimate, like the property had "made it". Games were still struggling to be taken seriously despite being such a huge global business, but film and TV didn't have that problem.
But given how narratively thin the source material was, new characters and story started getting added into the game specifically to support those future jumps to film and TV (and merch I guess). This was very... divisive. It was like having to adapt a film into an existing game... except the film didn't exist yet. It was a time.
Some random thoughts your comment inspired:
1. I played your games a lot as a child, so like. Thank you? I think?
2. It always bothers me how quickly properties go from one medium to another, with seemingly no thought put into them. I feel like Fruit Ninja worked BECAUSE of its simplicity and lack of story, not despite it. And trying to add a plot feels strange, like the game's existence isn't "enough". Of course, then you have the opposite problem of people making these intense, convoluted stories and trying to shove them into a game (Hello Neighbor is the best example I can think of right now), which just dilutes everything to the point that it might as well not have a story.
3. Lmao what if they made a cookie clicker movie
Amazing. I guess if Angry Birds can have movies...
@@completeregret3513I’ve been thinking for a while we really ought to divide video games into multiple mediums, it really doesn’t make sense to talk about Fruit Ninja as though it were the same type of thing as The Last of Us
It was🎉
@@blakchristianbalethere are genres
Hey that’s my voice and video at 2:12! Thanks for the inclusion in your great video. Just discovered your channel because someone told me about you using the clip. All the best man
Learning the Max Headroom people directed the 90s Mario Movie explains so much, honestly.
Shame they were both absolute assholes to the cast and crew.
@@Calvin_Coolage they were also victims of circumstance when all their pre-production work was overthrown by a script rewrite commissioned by Disney to bring in a bigger budget. even the actors complained about that, but most would say the directors were too inexperienced and in over their heads to adapt to that.
@@Charles12 That's fair. I always forget Disney had their hands in the kitchen for that movie.
@@Calvin_Coolage not surprised you forgot, they wouldn't want their brand on how much they f'd up such a lucrative IP
@@Charles12Secret Galaxy has a good vi about the entire production.
ruclips.net/video/x9eYbQrxlXA/видео.html
WAY too many rewrites, they were writing lines on the fly while filming.
one thing that is worth mentioning is that Detective Pikachu chose an obscure narrative driven game to adapt, if they had taken the same path with Mario it would have been one of the RPG games, or perhaps Luigi's Mansion (which I think would be a better narrative, Luigi has the character/humanity/flaws that Mario lacks)
Ah, another BDG fan, I see...
Between the anime and Pokemon Adventures manga, there's plenty of narrative to mine out of the core RPGs. Like, RPGs tend to be narratively rich. The main games just aren't suited to a movie because those narratives are episodic. You can see this with the animated pokemon films, they're all just long episodes of the TV show and the best ones are just really good episodes.
Plus, even though the game wasn't as polished, the novelty of making a movie was there.
>"obscure"
>Pokemon
stop
@@turbochargedfilmsthey mean that detective pikachu is relatively obscure for a pokemon game
Hi Patrick. As one of those vicious academics in adaptation studies I happily welcome this venture into our field. One of my frustrations with the field is that most of the core literature is written by literature experts that wanted to do something with film, and it often shows a severe deficiency in filmmaking language, so it's nice to see it approached by someone with a more film focused background.
OMG! THANK YOU! I was just about to post something similar! Not from the perspective of an academic but from a film student that was once an academic.
Please academically prove that the 2014 Need For Speed movie starring Aaron Paul is one of the greatest video game adaptations because it really is
Anyone seen the 2002 Great Gatsby film adaptation “G”? I feel like that should be ripe for study
@@turbochargedfilms Better than Takashi Miike's "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney"? Colour me intrigued...
I love both films and books, but everyone saying that adaptation can't make something better? They have NOT both read (B-) AND watched (A+) Fight Club.
My favorite experience watching an adaptation was Jupiter Ascending - which is not an adaptation. But I was so confident in the theater that it had to be someone trying to capture the immense scope and all their favorite moments from a decade long comic book, and that all these grandiose nothing scenes had been iconic parts of another work. And, then, it was none of those things.
Jupiter Ascending straight fucks though
Co-signed. I was personally sure it had to be some kind of YA adaptation. I mean the werewolf-angel-spacecop-rollerskater boyfriend character? The weird family drama and wealth that the protagonist is thrust into? Archetypical.
So having the Wachowski names attached to it wasnt explanation enough for you?
I mean, the three prior Wachowski movies were adaptations (if I remember correctly). Cloud Atlas, Speed Racer, V for Vendetta@@turbochargedfilms
That's the other thing that made me think it. It just had more plot than most movies. Like, you see where the ends each comic issue or book chapter should have been.@@TacticusPrime
While I understand your reasoning, I do think there is a fundamental appeal - and actual merit in creating a Mario movie. As you noted, people love the iconography of the Mario games. Ideally, a movie adaptation would exchange one element served better through games (interactivity) to enhance the element largely absent from the games - an engaging narrative.
You correctly noted that the Mario characters and storyline are generally paper thin, but that's exactly why games like Paper Mario, Mario & Luigi, and Mario RPG resonated so deeply - because they flesh out the world of Mario & friends and craft a more engaging narrative. Admittedly, even the RPG Mario games only go so far, but the fact that these games are so enduringly popular tells us that players want something more which the platformers aren't providing. A movie series could serve the same function on an even greater level. It doesn't need to be a commentary on the act of playing Mario to prove worthwhile.
While you have a valid point regarding film adaptations of games which already endeavor to provide a more 'cinematic' experience such as Uncharted, the Mario games don't now and almost certainly never will fit into that category. Nintendo began as a toy company and its priority will always be on gameplay first, even in more lore rich series like The Legend of Zelda. Case in point, the basic premise or storyline of the Mario games doesn't even exist within the game itself, but instead is relegated to flavor text in the game's manual. The video games use 'narrative' as a mere pretense to establish a premise on which they can craft an addictive gameplay loop.
The appeal in seeing a game like Mario adapted to film is simply the potential in transforming an 'icon' into a full fledged character. I think it's actually fairly similar to the appeal of comic book adaptations. Where comics are static images on a page which audiences desire to see 'move', the Mario characters may similarly be viewed as 'static' representations - icons with personality, but little else. Where film adaptations of comics interpolate the imagery between panels, an adaptation of a series like Mario the primary appeal is animating the character. Where comics have dynamic characters and static images, video games like Mario have dynamic images, but static characters.
In that sense, both mediums can benefit from film adaptations. While something akin to Gerwig's Barbie, which comments on the relationship between the IP and the audience in some way is certainly a valid approach, I don't think it's the only worthwhile way to adapt a series as sparse in story as Mario. Simply creating a narrative and expanding static icons into fully realized characters has as much benefit in my opinion as does animating the static panels of a comic book.
Also worth noting - I haven't actually seen the Mario movie yet. I'm commenting on the creation of a Mario movie on a conceptual level as per the subject of the video.
Yeah, I felt this video was kind of a waste of time. Patrick seems to miss the whole point of adapting a game to a movie format - there ARE people who can't/won't play games but will enjoy that same property in another format. I'd wager those people are actually the crushing majority.
Patrick goes too far insisting the movie loses something and has no soul and is just a series of corporate-approved celebrations, and never for a single second it occurs to him that the movie captures the *fun* of a Mario game in story-telling format for people who won't play the game to feel the same fun through gameplay.
You would lose that wager tho. And that's the point. People who don't play the games DON'T want Mario as a character. They just... watch other stuff.
Think about it the other way around too. Even if i wasn't that interested in the star wars movies, being able to fight people with lightsabers is awesome and the videogame adaptations generally execute that very well. People like (generally) faithful adaptations because seeing a franchise travel from it's home medium with it's mechanics intact is inherently interesting, regardless of whether the final product is interesting in of itself.
@@DichotomousRex nah you're wrong. People don't know what they want to watch until it's served to them. You can't possibly think the Mario movie was that huge because EVERYONE who watched it is "playing the games".
@@numberpi5473 There are many reasons why someone would go watch a movie outside the movie itself. Especially a family movie.
17:14 Pretty funny how you confirm the point you make right after this. Spider-Man is traditionally college-age or older. He only spent a very small amount of time in high school in the comics, they moved on very quickly. But because so many adaptions of Spider-Man have him as a teenager, you’re right, people clapped for what they recognised.
Also his personality in the high school comics is nothing like Tom Holland, he's more like an introverted teenage Tony Stark. Tom Holland is most similar to Ultimate(comic) and Spectacular
@@tvsonicserbia5140Yeah, he started out as a dick because Steve Ditko was a dick.
@@tvsonicserbia5140 Tom isn’t similar to Ultimate or Spectacular because he isn’t as aggressive as they are or as pro active
Akira the movie didn't cut out the end of the manga, it just predated that ending. Otomo was making both at once, like Miyazaki did with Nausicaä, and both manga versions kept coming out after the movies were released.
My question is how did he handle both directing a film with some of the best animation while also writing one of the best regarded manga of all time?
@@thomasffrench3639 He basically didn't make the manga during that period. From 82-86 he did a chapter every two weeks, for one volume every 8 months. The first four volumes in three years.
The fifth volume took from 86-89, three years while the movie was being made with zero chapters for a year and a half.
Then the final volume he resumed the original pace and took about a year to do 23 chapters.
@@robbybevard8034 Oh Okay. Still pretty impressive, but that sounds significantly easier to handle.
The Nausicaa example is even wilder too, since the manga essentially started as a storyboard pitch that Miyazaki made as a proof of concept for investors in order to make the movie, since he was an animator before he was a mangaka but had gone independent after completing his work on the Heidi animated series, but once the movie was made he found it too limiting to the many ideas he had for the story and thus kept going with the manga until it reached a conclusion he was more satisfied with.
It proved to be a good decision in the end, since Nausicaa's success is what got Studio Ghibli off the ground, but for a while there in the 80's I'm guessing Miyazaki must've been the most overworked animator in Japan keeping up with all of the films he was making AND writing and drawing a manga, and that's a pretty high bar to clear.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe I don't know if overworked is the correct term. More like Workaholic.
surprised the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy didn’t get a mention given its various adaptations (from the original radio series to books, to TV, and film, etc) but each time with the involvement of the original author tweaking parts to suit it to a different medium
I'd argue that's what makes the various versions so successful (I'm a fan of the 2000's era film).
He also just changed stuff for the heck of it as well.
My favorite version (other than the book) was the radio drama.
The author even programmed and completely designed the text adventure video game adaptation at the time because he was a hobbyist programmer!
H2G2 is one of my go-to examples when I argue that the movie should be less faithful to the book. Adams wanting to change some things for the hell of it but knowing he needed to change other things for the different medium (also, why not take advantage of what the new medium gives you that previous ones didn't?) was an artifact of his having worked in the business and knowing what does well, as well as his genuine interest in the well-being of his stories. He wanted them to do well so he let them grow, and they feel more alive because of it.
The first Harry Potter book being pretty much exactly copied into a film has always felt pointless to me by comparison, and apparently I should feel that way about Watchmen even more, but I never read the novel so I have nothing to compare the movie to.
I think it's interesting how anime exists as an artform run on adaptation. To be clear, there is a lot of very important and popular original TV anime, but the biggest stuff is usually a manga adaptation (sometimes a light novel or a video game, but mostly manga). As you mentioned, comics lend themselves to film based on their visual nature. A lot of manga is actively cinematic in its panel layouts and effects like action lines in shonen or sparkles in shojo. But it also shares the quality of a book in the fact that the reader sets the pace, and it gives the mangaka room to add in more details and drag out important story and character moments (or to tell really unique jokes). Not to mention the inner dialogue that can bounce between multiple character POVs. As you mentioned, there's an obvious connection between comics and film, and I think those same elements are why manga and anime are so interconnected. That being said, SO many manga readers complain when their favorite show gets adapted because it's almost never as good as the manga, and despite usually being a TV adaptation with multiple episodes, is usually lambasted for excluding detail or cutting things for time. I think it just goes to show, even in a medium that thrives on adaptation, there is a disconnect between what the two art forms have to offer, but there is also something new created that draws people to that adaptation.
The main issue with anime adaptations of manga and light novels is that they're always made in the middle of the manga's run. Stuff gets made up and it can completely fudge up the storyline and characters. One of the biggest examples is Fruits Basket, which got elements so badly incorrect that they canned the anime and waited a decade until the manga finished and rebooted it properly. Same thing happened with Kyo Kara Maoh, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, and many more. Sadly no reboot so far for them
@@KyleRDent They've stopped doing that long ago. Last time they made up stuff because they caught up is Blue Exorcist as far as I know, and that was 12 years ago.
And then their are cases where the studio follows up an excelent faithful first season with a terrible second that vears wildly off the source. (cough) The Promised Neverland (cough).
And that is one of my biggest gripes with anime. It shows that anime as a medium hasn’t matured past adaptations. I find that most mediums go through a period where they start to move away from adaptations as the primary way of creating stories and come up with their own medium specific environment, which for a decade or two anime was really moving that direction, but unfortunately due to the economic bubble bursting relying on adaptations was a reliable way to be safe and make money with only a couple of original series every year
@@thomasffrench3639 The catalogue of Ghibli, Disney, and Dreamworks are mostly adaptations, does that mean Feature length animation is also not a mature artform?
To me, there's one crucial aspect of screen adaptations that you get even if every single beat from the book is translated exactly with no creative changes or "take" on the material: the Music.
Even if I can perfectly picture the settings, characters, and events of a book in my head, there's no way my brain can come up with something as beautiful as Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings score to accompany it.
Don't forget Hans Zimmer's work for Dune, it helped that Hans is also a fan of the Dune novel, his Dune soundtrack will be always remembered for years to come
The 1993 Mario film tells us not to open a film 14 days before Jurassic Park and featuring dinosaurs if you don't have dinosaurs to match Jurassic Park.
Personally, I've watched the 1993 Mario movie more times than I've watched the 2023 Mario movie. They took some risks and the movie was goofy AF, but it was kind of fun. It's a shame that they removed the scene that actually explains the whole thing. The 2023 movie was fun,but the only reason that I'd ever want to watch it again is to look for the various Easter eggs.
It's nice that this video isn't taking it on faith that the 2023 movie is better than the 1993 one. I personally kind of liked the 1993 movie, but I also liked Buckaroo Bonzai, Tank Girl, Waterworld, Hackers and Johnny Mnemonic.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeyeah, the 2023 movie was so safe and kind of bland.
I think it tells us not to make an unhinged weird and bad take on super mario
@@SmallSpoonBrigade The 1993 movie is camp, it’s camp fun at its finest.
Excellent and interesting video, but I especially liked when you said "Bing Bing Wahoo."
He really went and got those coins and reach the flag at the end, it was great.
Good to know this video has the Melpert Seal of Approval.
please do not presume
All right I'm making a faithful video game movie. 50% action scenes, 10% story and 40% managing inventory or backtracking. Unsure how to work the random item descriptions in without making it too expositiony. Audiences are sure to enjoy the alternate endings.
Isn't that Clue?
Jordan-Vogt Roberts’ Metal Gear movie has yet to be made because he’s too busy figuring out how to write a screenplay where 75% of it is exposition and 25% of it is backtracking back to the place you were two hours ago before all that exposition began.
Personally I'm going for a dramatic take on a completionist run where someone keeps going back to quicksaves.
@@TwoPairSA Speed running. No dialogue, no explanation just a hyper-manic protagonist charging through a cartoonish action movie with clairvoyant accuracy and almost no dialogue (and a voiceover during the unskippable cut scenes of pure exposition repeating "come on, come on...." I'm thinking Elijah Wood.
@@michaelleoanrd194 I'd watch that. Make it 3 hours long.
Very recently, Denis Villeneuve said that adaptation is “an inherently violent process,” which really captured this issue perfectly to me. It’s so easy as fans to be so angry about bits of “unfaithfulness”, but going to a different medium means a whole new set of strengths and weaknesses. Truly faithful adaptions usually suck.
Well I whether a faithful adaptation can work or not completely depends on the source material. Godfather movies being faithful works where something like Catcher in the Rye would not
Speaking as someone who admires the novel much more than I like it (the very last beat was always a big "erk?" to me and I'm very glad Villeneuve and Spaights made the change they did), it's been great to get films which give me the core of the book in ways I enjoy more, but also fascinating to hear Villeneuve talk about the process.
It's also been rather amusing to see Villeneuve, maker of cerebral and critically acclaimed films, discussed by the book purists as if he's McG.
better than how Jodorowsky phrased it...
@@thomasffrench3639 Even the Godfather movies cut out HUGE chunks of the book. A lot of the material in the second film was a result of being left out the first time, and there's a bunch of subplots that didn't make it to either film.
@@robbybevard8034 I would argue that being a faithful adaptation is less about things being cut or moved around to better suit the medium and more about sticking to the core asthetics of the source material. An adaptation is inherently tied to it's source material for better or worse and if you make an adaptation completely alien to the source material fans of the original aren't going to enjoy it witch of course begs the question as to why you don't just make a new story instead of hitching your story to something already established. I think the recent one peice adaptation is the ideal adaptation. It hits all the same plot beats, it's true to the core asthetic of the original. But it's definitely not a shot for shot re telling of the story but there is an effort to adhere to the core identity of the source material as best as you can within the medium.
"No one knows what to do with that giant interdimensional turtle." FINALLY! Someone finally gets to the heart of the matter!
Almost makes me want to read the book to see what Stephen King does with the giant interdimensional turtle. Almost.
A lot of it boils down to 1) knowing your audience, and 2) being upfront about it being a reimagining rather than a direct adaptation.
"Hey, kids, this is a heads-up about the movie you're about to watch. It's not an exact version of the Mario games; it's a blend of several Nintendo properties related to Mario and his gaming history."
Sure, let's pretend that the intended audience of younger children would have given a damn about that fact. Indeed, adults can make it out, so why bother "being upfront" about it?
Perhaps YOU needed to be aware of the audience because Nintendo sure was.
@@notsyzagts7967 so, maybe you've willfully misinterpreted my statement, but I'll make it clearer for you anyway:
I am talking about movies in general terms, not specifically the Mario movie, as this video is about adaptation in general and happens to use the Mario movies, including the old live action one, as a lens to examine this through.
Know your audience: recognise who your audience is and what they want when adapting your story from one medium to another, this INCLUDES understanding what your audience would "give a damn" about and what ages and generations they are likely to be, and what the story or characters might mean to them, etc. so, for example, the new Mario movie for instance, Illumination gave their audience more or less what they expected to get from a Mario movie, whereas the old live action movie did not.
Be upfront: MARKET the movie according to what it is, e.g. a movie with a different take on existing characters could be advertised as "a bold reimagining", or a movie that deviates from the story it's based on could be credited as "inspired by" rather than "based on", etc. I am not talking about a literal pre-movie disclaimer.
So, for example, the original Mario movie with Bob Hoskins might have been better received if it was advertised differently.
I hope this is clearer, and that you will consider greater context when replying to people's comments in the future.
"There are many books based on the subject, but strangely no movies based on those books "
Nicholas Cage's 2002 Adaptation is sitting right there.
Was thinking the same thing lol
That's the joke
Yes I thought of that movie immediately too. But was it intentional irony on Patrick’s part, not mentioning it? Because the joke actually works either way
i was about to say lmao!!
What movie?
It's weird that you used Edge of Tomorrow for the movie-video game discussion since it is technically an adaptation of the manga "All You Need is Kill" and while it did stick to some of the material by the mid-point it deviates quite a bit. I guess the point I have is as long as it reaches the middle ground where you have recognizable material but still new enough to not be a rehash it can be good...or bad I don't know I'm just yelling at the void.
The movie and the manga are both adaptations of a novel. The movie actually premiered in London the day before the final chapter of the manga was published. It's adaptations all the way down.
It’s not really weird, his point about Edge of Tomorrow has nothing to do with whether or not it was a good adaptation
He could also use Groundhog Day as an example of a video gamey film where the point of the movie is the protagonist trying something again and again while the world stays in stasis until he becomes good at it, like a video game. Which is kind of ironic, because nowadays there are a lot of video games whose premise is based exactly on Groundhog Day.
@@blakchristianbale It's just a weird coincidence that he chose something that IS an adaptation as an example of something that's not. No, not of a video game, but it's an adaptation nonetheless.
@@OtakuUnitedStudio it’s not weird at all. He’s using it as an example of something that isn’t adapting a video game, not something that isn’t an adaptation. It being based on a book has nothing to do with his point
The AKIRA argument could’ve gone a lot deeper to make another interesting point since it is a weird case of adaptation kind of like 2001 having the book and film created at the same time. If I remember correctly from researching it before the second half of the movie is different from the manga, because the first half of the manga was released, then they made the movie which was completed before the second half of the manga was completed. The manga was only completed after the film. (I could definitely stand corrected on this and for sure some hardcore Akira fans will come through and let me know)
This is correct. The Akira manga was then influenced by the movie
That reminded me of Hayao Miyazaki 's Nausicaa. The film was an adaptation of his own manga that wasn't finished until almost a decade after the film was released
Nausicaa's the closest similarity but it also reminds me of FMA and FMA Brotherhood (and GoT if that ever gets finished)
The same thing happened with the 2010 Scott Pilgrim movie
Yeah, I call these "Gecko Tail Adaptations." Because the adaptation that gets made by the original author while they're still working on the longer original work ends up like a gecko's tail that's been cut off. It gets frozen in time at a particular moment of the work's creation while the original work lives on, and grows a new tale different from the original.
Every time I reload RUclips this video has a new thumbnail and title
He keeps making it stupider until I click on it.
In regards to Patrick's point about adapting Mario into a non-interactive medium, I feel like it can be done and has already been done. In the 90's, there was a short comic series, Super Mario Adventures, based primarily on Super Mario World. It's similar to the Mario RPG's since it's mostly faithful to the source material but also took some liberties unlike the recent movie. Around the same time, there were comics adaptations of other games (ie Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Star Fox) that I heard were pretty good as well. In regards to more cinematic media, while the first couple of animated shows from the 80s/90s aren't great, I feel that they were better at doing their own thing than the recent movie while still feeling decently faithful.
In regards to Patrick's point about the simple plot, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing if it acts as more of a framework or framing device than a significant part of the media. I believe that a lot of the personality/tone of the games and its characters can come less from elements like dialogue or story and more from elements such as aesthetics/art direction, level/world + character design, animation, sound effects, and music. I believe that game(s) like that can coexist well with other games like God of War and The Last of Us.
I disagree that a good Mario movie can't be created. A few years ago when the Mario movie cast got announced, Captain Midnight made a video explaining that a movie focused on something like smart physical comedy could be a really effective way of adapting Mario. Aside from that, Nintendo already has some experience with creating short-form cinematic content like with their Pikmin shorts. It's possible that something like Mario is more conducive to something like shorts a la Merrie Melodies than something like a full-length movie.
I also disagree with Patrick's point near the end regarding the visuals. While the recent Mario games like Mario Wonder look great, game animators need to prioritize player input and functionality to ensure the game is fun and works well, thereby limiting the amount of animation and visual variety to some extent. Since movies are a passive medium instead of an interactive one, film animators have a greater amount of freedom with how to represent the visuals and action compared to game animators.
I apologize if any of this comes across as really defensive. Mario and his games have been really important to me for the past 20+ years. As a result, I want to acknowledge and explain some of the potential in terms of adaptations.
I agree 100%. I don't watch Mr. Bean for the story.
"It's possible that something like Mario is more conducive to something like shorts a la Merrie Melodies than something like a full-length movie." Mario in a rubberhose style would be really cool IMO.
@@ExtremeWreck Wasn't that sort of like the Mario TV shows?
@@SmallSpoonBrigade No, not really. DiC's Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog was far more rubberhose influenced.
I feel like the “limitations” of visual effects back in the days before CGI had that element of using your imagination to fill in the gaps like it has to in a stage play.
even with CGI. for a very long time it just did not look well. Even with the very big budgets they can use now. the very thin line in believable CGI and world breaking. is very real.
Like certain adaptation from games to a movie might work. If you start with a movie that is not portrait as live action. It might work much better as a animated, stopmotion or maybe very much theater looking movie.
Like for example the Monty Python movie The Holly grail. It is very loosely a story about Arthur. but it does not try to be accurate and is much more a theater show in a movie. (I do know that in this case it was not intended to be accurate that's why it did work)
My problem with the first film was never its faithfulness to the “material”, it was that it didn’t use its own premise or ideas well. I have a serious problem with the way the public at large discusses adaptations. The proclamation of 100% fidelity is nonsense and is often a well meaning audience members way of saying something wasn’t satisfying. The other phrase that is repeated ad naseum is that some media just “cant” be adapted, and I have always recoiled at that. Some of the greatest most beloved adaptations of all time were called “UNADAPTABLE”. Nothing is “unadaptable” in my opinion and like with any narrative film idea it doesn’t matter how wild, difficult or bare the idea or source is provided a talented filmmaker has something to say and can do it well, period.
Despite some points about what you dislike about adaptations being misunderstood and how nothing is unadaptable; you never said what an adaptation means to you personally.
Could you elaborate on that?
What is an adaptation to you and what makes it a good one?
Facts
@@notsyzagts7967 For me a good adaptation manages to either capture the essence of the original material or create a new dynamic out of the original material. It’s almost like having a conversation with the original material? A recent example for me that I was surprised to really like was the Mean Girls musical. I think it actually managed to keep pace with the original but expand on it in ways that enhance the original story. As unfashionable as it is to admit right now some of my favorite adaptations as a comic book fan have come from the MCU. The insane level of quality adaptation they have managed to deliver is actually surprisingly satisfying. I never in a million years expected to see some characters in live action let alone in their own films?! Black Panther was a transcendent experience for me as a fan that spent my youth dreaming of such a thing. They are also great examples of capturing the essence of the original while also charting its own course, without needing to be “faithfully accurate”.
I think it's safe to say there's a Spectrum of Adaptability Ease at the very least.
Like, with the new (and older, for that matter) Dune adaptations, after reading the novels I'm kind of blown away that they work even a little bit because SO much of the books is just internal monologue and soliloquy. Had I read those books before seeing any of the adaptations I would have thought them practically unadaptable just due to complete difference in methodology they'd require in translation and the complete destruction of internal character narrative that it would entail.
Obviously the first book in that series HAS been adapted to film (3 times now, even) so it's obviously possible, but none of those adaptations has ever really captured a lot of the importance lost in losing that heavy focus on internal monologue. Particularly the tragic sense of inevitability that Paul Atreides carries with him in all of the books because he's hyper aware of how his actions will lead to terrible consequences, which is easy to depict with such internal monologues in the books, but which all the adaptations excise or truncate to the point that this aspect feels secondary or inconsequential in them, when it's *extremely* important to the themes and point of the books.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe I think you are definitely on the money. It’s not easy to do in the slightest but I’ve seen adaptations of things I was eternally told COULDNT be done, period. Granted the quality of the adaptation and how well it resonates with people is a completely different topic.
I'm a Dune Fan, and every adaptation is an odd drinking game of figuring out what was cut from the novel in order to streamline the narrative to make it work in film.
And I love that. No film can ever possibly come close to the "faithful" end of the spectrum, while every adaptation gets to spotlight the parts of the book that most compels them.
Genuinely wondering did the Scyfy series cut a lot less compared to the film adaptations?
@@dreammachine1492 not a lot. Because it had so much time to play with It's probably the most faithful adaptation. Many of its changes were down to budgetary constraints and areas where the novel's descriptions were not specific, leaving room for individual interpretation.
How does that work take a drink whenever something doesn’t appear?
@@LOCKEYJ or when something diverges from the book. I don't know. I'm weird.
This is part of why the "Final Fantasy 7" remakes are so interesting to me. A series of video games that adapt a video game, a medium change within its own medium. There are people experienced with the original material, people only aware of a rosebud level spoiler, and people who are completely unaware of the original all experiencing it. This familiarity, or lack thereof, even informs the narrative, and feels like the sort of thing film scholars would be absolutely devouring on a meta level if it were in their own medium.
They’re not really adaptations. They’re more so sequels to the original game. So much like the Mortal Kombat reboots, they’re not really reboots or remakes of Final Fantasy VII.
I do find it a little funny that Patrick says that newer Mario movie is if anything too loyal to it's source material when for years the joke has been that the plot of every Mario game is "Princess Peach gets kidnapped and Mario goes on an adventure to rescue her" and that literally doesn't happen in the movie.
Patrick: hey look my foot! wanna see me shooting it for an hour?
Yeah, but it's pretty clear that his point isn't that the newer movie is too faithful, but rather that it's not unfaithful enough. And I think his point is solid and important: that being faithful may be a strength for the newer film, but the older film's being almost completely divorced from the source is actually more of a strength than people tend to realize. Like the thumbnail says, adaptations can afford to be weirder just by being an adaptation; it's not the source material, so it doesn't _have_ to be the source material, and the audience expects and can cope with that fact to a greater extent than some realize.
Course not, they'd be crucified for that these days. Peach has to be strong and in charge and have zero flaws (except her hideous, hideous face with full nostril detail)
Nevermind they have Daisy to be the tomboy, it's unacceptable to have ANY female characters being rescued. At least according to the people who wrested creative control from the rest of us. One vision, one standard, no whammys.
@@KairuHakubi Did we watch the same movie? She DOES get rescued. Sure she has her little breakout scene but her attempt fails and then Mario and DK come in to save the day. Plus it's the mario bros, not Peach, who get the star and stop Bowser from destroying everything in the climax.
@@MalzraAirwynn Well of course I didn't watch it, I'm going by what I was told.
In group settings.
With nobody contradicting the person who said it. So it's safe to assume that was accurate.
The only one getting rescued is Luigi, Peach is in total control the entire time. That's what I was told, and there are more people confirming that than rejecting it at this point.
You would have to change the graph and make a third line that goes upward for something like Starship Troopers. It adapts the literal events of the book while using the cinematic medium to completely change the thematic meaning of the story. It changes the context completely by messing with the tone. Super interesting case study in adaptation.
I'm actually quite upset with the "fidelity" take on this. Instead, it should be about "respect" as an axis. Starship Troopers as a "counter" disrespects the original work but also expects viewers to agree with the disrespect. If seen through that lens, maybe Patrick would have mentioned the Raimi movies (loved comics, adapted Spiderman really well, not "faithful" but "respectful"). He could have talked about Dune (3 adaptations, 2 completed) or Edgerunners. He'd probably have a different take on LotR. Or perhaps even the Wes. Fucking. Anderson. Roald. Dahl. Adaptations. Which. He. Recommended.
He's even covered some disrespectful but they wanted money movies, like I Robot.
PW sometimes misses a corner when covering an issue, and I really trust his stuff, but here I think he's pretty fundamentally missed the mark. I really think that whatever the execs think, the Audience just wants someone who wants to adapt the thing they're adapting.
I have to admit I never finished the book because it was so boring.
Robert A Heinlein's work though is a perfect example if the limits of movies over books. There was no way on Earth any studio would green light something like Stranger in the Strangeland or To Sail Beyond the Sunset were the lead marries both her favorite son and her father.
You also have writers like Philip K Dick were more or less they just take the bare minum of the book or story and make into a movie because his books have no real action and are often depressing or and confusing.
@@therealsunnyk solid points. But I didn’t bring this up to criticize Patrick tho. I just thought it was an interesting thought. I felt like Patrick’s video was focused and concise. I wouldn’t necessarily say he cut corners or anything. Sometimes for the sake of clarity and brevity you focus on specific aspects of a topic. You can’t always hit everything. The “ fidelity” angle was the one discussed in all of the studies Patrick referenced. So I’m assuming he was discussing that more than anything. Don’t know why you gotta be mad at Patrick bro. Be mad at the academics or something.
So maybe Starship Troopers could be described as the opposite of Watchmen as an adaptation: whereas Watchmen missed the point of the original, taking something which was originally an ironic criticism and making it a straight-up celebration, Starship Troopers understands its source but disagrees, changing it from a direct promotion of its subject to an ironic commentary.
@@timjackson4387 Not mad at Patrick, to be clear. Like I say he always does a good job of understanding and explaining the issue. It's more the dramatic irony of being able to see something on this side of the screen that isn't visible from the other side. I still think it's a great channel.
Bro got the shiniest head
upsettingly shiny
And it seems to be intentional
"I will SHOW YOU the PRIDE of a Key Grip!" *GLEEEAAAM*
Patrick always uses that 70s soft edge bloom lighting in his videos but it was a tad aggressive in this video
serving young Charles Xavier
I love the discussion of this video. It's definitely really interesting. But it exists in parallel to the title.
What's the point of a faithful Mario adaptation? Well, personally, it was to give my 4 year old son an ideal first theatrical film experience. Seeing a movie in a theater can be really overwhelming, especially if you're a kid who gets really into movies and spends a lot of time sitting on the basement stairs (our family version of hiding behind the couch) when anything remotely suspenseful of emotionally intense happens. But the Mario movie was a known quantity. My son knows that Bowser is a little scary, but also silly and always gets defeated. He's not scared of Bowser, even though he can still experience suspense in certain sequences. So he stayed in his seat the whole movie and had a magical experience.
I'm not saying its a movie just for babies, but that it's good to have movies that have lower, more understandable stakes as well as dramas for adults. Basically, The Mario movie was my son's Fast and Furious installment, a mostly silly, highly entertaining, cinematic experience. And that's ok. We can go see more challenging movies later, when he's older. My showing at the Mario movie was full of kids, delighting in the theatrical experience, they and their parents coming away satisfied. And I thought perserving the cinematic experience was something you cared about.
Anyway, it was a fun popcorn movie with understandable stakes that helped usually nervous younger viewers feel comfortable with the cinematic experience. 🤷♀️
Anyway, I'm going to think more about adaptations now.
I mean, this is a very good point. Is the 90's SMB movie a good movie? No. Fun? Yes! Is it for the kids who played SMB? Oh heck no. Not even slightly. They made it for the wrong audience, basically. Much like the original live action MK movie wasn't even a tenth as gory as the games, because they didn't want to make it X-rated and thus shut out of a huge majority of cinemas. You gotta make the movies for the kids who like the games, not (just) the nostalgic adults who want to see a "grown-up" version. We got Brightburn, it sucked. Snyder's Superman, meh. Superman & Lois? Yay!
@snorpenbass4196 Right! And as good as Barbie was, it isn't actually for the kids who are playing with Barbies right now. It's for the teenagers and adults who grew up with Barbie...actually, it's for the middle aged moms most of all. It's great, but not the audience or kind of movie Mario should have aimed for. Mario has always been a franchise for kids that teenagers and adults love too. It's rated E for everyone. The movie had to be the same thing. What we got isn't high art, but it also isn't garbage either. It's a pizza of a movie. Not a culinary risk or masterpiece, but a simple pleasure.
@@lydia1634 I agree. In fact, that's kind of why I didn't like Barbie, to be honest. I actually preferred something that was a little more light hearted and for a younger demographic. Not everything has to be edgy and compelling to be great.
@@lydia1634 It's fun but mostly forgettable. I'm not saying everything has to "high art" but just chalking up every mediocre blockbuster as "dumb, popcorn flicks" is beginning to be a tired argument.
@@snorpenbass4196 I'd suggest that sometimes being fun is sufficient to make something a good movie. Not a great movie, but a good one.
Kind of a random example, but this whole topic reminds me of the tv show adaptation of the manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. As the show has gone on, its increasingly gotten more very literally faithful to the source material, to the point where recent seasons are regularly adapting panels 1 for 1 from the manga. However, I started to notice that things have begun to feel a little more by-the-numbers as they've done the direct panel adaptations more. Earlier seasons often took more liberties with the exact minutia of how scenes play out. Because of this, it's started to feel like, instead of something new, you're left with essentially worse looking versions of the excellent manga illustrations. When you try too hard to directly compete with the source material, you run the risk of just making an all-around inferior version.
Hell that makes me think of anime localization in general. Back in the day, they had a lot more fun with it, especially dubbing. They were more concerned with getting the FEELING across than the literal meaning of each word. Some of them trusted the audience enough to leave honorifics and some other distinct terminology alone, which gives it more flavor and avoids awkwardly attempting to translate the untranslatable. Also, more swearing, when it was appropriate for the character and the line. All of that's gone now, it's wooden and dry, all in the name of being an accurate adaptation. Like, guys, way to miss the point. We wanted you to stop removing blood and titties, changing names and pretending it's not japan, or garbling up the order of episodes. That's the accuracy we were looking for, the authorial intent, translated so we can understand it.
Yes. Raul Julia's M. Bison is one of the greatest movie antagonists ever to grace our village on Tuesday.
" Hey, Paisano's! It's the Willems Bros Super Show!"
"If you do drugs, you go to Hell before you die"-Mario, 1987
As great as this video essay was, I can't believe we had an almost hour-long discussion about adaptation without even passing reference to the greatest example of how it works going from one medium to another: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Radio play, to book, to tv show, to video game, and finally to movie). And by the same author each time. Douglas Adams made a point to change it for each medium, because he understood that was needed to make it work. Each medium had different strengths and needs.
Came here just to say this! Glad you put it this eloquently. Douglas made a point of NOT honoring source material!
@@jarjarperaWrong. He was faithful to the core of the material but flexible with storytelling methods. A good adaptation uses sources as building blocks but is not restricted to existing assets. He honored the source material just fine but in a less conventional way.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was arguably more successful at repeatedly jumping between different media than it had been at continuing the story in any given medium.
My most vivid memory of the 1993 Super Mario brothers movie was seeing it for my classmates birthday party. As we were watching it, I pooped my pants and his very attractive and very unfriendly mother smelled it and yanked me out into the lobby and told me to clean my pants myself……. I told the story to John Leguizamo when met him.
Wow that was wild from start to finish XD
I don't know when I saw this movie. But cool.
😂😂😂
Now you’re a plumber?
What's the second most vivid?
Here's my problem with the "Leo pointing meme" criticism of the Super Mario movie: You could literally say the same thing about any faithful adaptation. "Every scene in The Lord of the Rings is made to make people sit up and do the Leo Pointing meme. Look, it's the Shire! Look, it's Bilbo Baggins! Look, it's Gandalf! Look, it's the One Ring! Look, it's Aragorn!" People recognize things because it's an adaptation.
44:10 - "Why do we believe that the ultimate form of any story is to become a movie?"
I see it like a culmination of all the other creative work that goes into a project - storytelling, visual design, music, sound, choreography. Now and then maybe there's some puppetry thrown in for good measure. All the pieces, those different forms of art, come together into something that (in a good case) is a very powerful work, and at the same time very accessible. That doesn't necessarily mean the movie is always the best thing but it can be really amazing when done well.
"I see it like a culmination of all the other creative work that goes into a project - storytelling, visual design, music, sound, choreography."
I haven't seen all of the video yet, but video-games have all of those things you mentioned plus one more thing that films don't - interactivity. That's why I consider video-games to be the best form of storytelling, because they're stories that you get to choose the direction of.
Excellent points all around but the “like watching somebody else play a video game” line feels a little outdated when let’s plays have been an established thing for a couple decades now.
New background, new intro and music, new Emma haircut, new Patrick sweater... damn we are really in a new Patriniverse
Don't encourage him, his film making is horrible.
Palimpsestuos, from Greek ‘palin’ ‘again’ and ‘psestos’, scraped, as in scraped again, to be used for writing something else.
The usual use being for ancient parchments that were scraped clean and written over at some point, but with traces of the original text remaining. These artifacts are called palimpsests.
I think we are slowly getting better at game adaptations, I think why they haven't worked for so long is because to put it simply....people don't understand what makes the respective mediums great. They don't play to the strength of the medium they are adapting to. Yes, it is a big loss to lose interactivity when adapting a game to a linear cinematic format, but there should be so much to gain as well. Btw, this part was especially interesting to me, because seeing as you are very much a film based person I was fully expecting you to bring up some of the upsides cinema can provide over video game adaptations, whereas your point of video game adaptations feeling like a downgrade and losing a key element is something very often brought up by people more focused on video games. I think you're very much correct with noticing this problem, but I believe the problem is just as much of an opportunity.
Too many adaptations tried to just go in with the idea of "This is just like the game, except it's a movie now" without actually trying to make it a movie. A movie should and even needs to be different from the game, it should take the necessary elements and tell the story with them in a different suitable way.
I lost it at "I want a Dig Dug movie that's longer than Killers of the Flower Moon." With the right people, it really could work!
I really like your discussion of how the Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) has the drawback of not actually being a visionary take on the source material as much as it is a corporate extension of the source material, and as you said it, it's "serving [us, the audience] the exact obvious thing that we already have." I'm a Mario fan, myself, but my experience with this movie in the theater a year ago honestly felt shallow. I already knew the basic concepts of who the characters were, but there were barely any character moments or character dynamics that enhanced the experience of the movie. It had less personality to their characters than Mario Strikers Charged, a 2007 spin-off game where the characters barely talk, but made up for that with an incredible focus on individual expression and a stupidly high attention to detail.
In my opinion, the two Sonic the Hedgehog movies of this decade are better video game movie adaptations, if not the best ones of all time. They took the world and the heart of the franchise and crafted it into something that brings forth a new take to the narratives established in the games, but one that still hits all the familiar beats for fans, and works in cinematic form. In addition, they are delightful movies in their own right, with their strongest asset being the very enjoyable character dynamics that the Mario movie lacks. It appeals to both Sonic fans and non-fans because of these traits, and with the upcoming arrivals of a third movie in December AND a spin-off show focused on Knuckles later this month, it's a good time to start getting invested in this "Sonic Cinematic Universe."
Patrick has so much film on the mind his head is glowing like a projector.
I was 14 when the Super Mario Bros movie came out. My friends and I went to the premier, and then we had a sleep over fuelled by pizza, snes games, and a stack of Wizard magazines. I liked the movie. I enjoyed the weird adaptation choices they made. I probably would have liked it even more with that missing scene at the end, but even without it, I thought it was fun.
The Super Mario games didn't have enough story to adapt in the first place, so I was perfectly happy with what we got. It certainly didn't murder my childhood in any way. I dunno how old the person in that "My Retro Life" clip was when they saw the movie, but I have to imagine they were super young, because that reaction is pretty absurd and dramatic :p
my retro life is actually a pretty cool channel, the guy grew up with a whole family of gamers, and parents who recorded almost his entire childhood.
Gnobbles struck me as more a Hobbes guy than a Locke guy.
The knock on the wood desk as Patrick talks about the new season being off to a good start was excellent
What I found refreshing about the new Mario movie was its joyful, goofy sincerity. Ignoring its existence as a brand extension and a few winks at the camera, the film itself is wonderfully non-cynical. The characters all wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don’t attempt to deconstruct Mario. I love that they don’t turn Mario into a grumpy jerk who constantly bickers with Peach until they both decide they actually like each other. Instead there is a real respect between those two. It’s not trying to be cool. It’s earnest. The movie is unapologetically about friendship, brotherhood and courage. That’s good enough for me.
As much as I enjoyed watching the 2023 Mario movie, it has major problems. For example, it's not a very deep movie, there's no question that Mario is going to win and there isn't really much of a challenge for him in getting there. It also spends way too much energy on building in just about every possible reference in there and it just kind of feels like it was designed specifically to ensure that people going would go for the Easter eggs and that everybody had to have at least a couple dozen they could identify, no matter what era of Nintendo games they grew up with.
The 1993 movie, at least felt like somebody made an attempt at making a real movie, and while I have precisely no interest in ever watching the 2023 movie again, I have watched the 1993 one more than once and will again in the future. It's not a great movie, but it is a bit of fun.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade You write quite well! Your teacher will have good things to say at the next parent teacher meeting!
I watched Locke because of Emma. It was so good. I watched it on my computer while my brother was playing a game in the same room and he was like "the movie was so good! I could have played the game and just listened to the story but I had to stop and watch."
I preferred the book version, myself. I don't know what Emma is talking about.
I AM SO GLAD TO HEAR THIS
as the sole member of my friends and family who LOVES the '93 Mario- and I mean LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVES IT- this video makes me sooooo happy.
I've not played the Mario games but I thought the recent Mario Bros movie was pretty fun. I knew it was adapting a lot of stuff, but as someone mostly unfamiliar, it felt pretty gonzo and silly and enjoyable.
I think we need more movies that goes all the way left on the spectrum of adaptability chart honestly. The 90's Mario Movie is unironically one of my favorite movies of all time because it is such a wild ride, and to me it seems like a good way to sneak weird and wild concepts into mainstream movies that otherwise wouldn't be allowed to see the light of day.
I remember Overly Sarcastic Productions talking more about continuity reboots and treating the original continuity as the Ship of Theseus and how the continuity being changed always irked some people because they removed/altered an important element that determined it was the Ship of Theseus. Adaptations fall into that, people felt the identity of the work was defined by that plank and that crew member Tom Bombadil and if you remove it then it's no longer the Ship of Theseus.
I think games like Legend of Zelda and Metroid Prime could actually make for interesting “faithful” adaptations. While Link isn’t a super multidimensional character or anything, Mario’s faithful adaptation relied on it keeping the simplicity of the Mario games, LoZ and Metroid games have deep lore, a level of grounded-ness, and characters whose roles can be fleshed out interestingly without deviating to a point that I think Nintendo would say is “too much.”
otoh, I don't think you could actually adapt Samus to another medium without turning it into Other M. Cinema doesn't have the same exploration and revisitation vibe the Metroid games do, and can't. You'd have to do some bit of timeline specifically not covered by the games.
@@caffetielYou could definitely adapt Metroid, it would just be an action adventure movie. The issue is that it would have relatively little dialogue and character work, but there are movies like that out there, such as Prey.
@@caffetiel Alien already shows the template for how to do Metroid. Just mood and atmosphere and some horror with moments of big bombastic action. It could VERY easily work in the right hands with just the one character stuck alone and trying to move along on her mission. Very little dialogue, mostly visuals and vibes.
Same with Shadow of Colossus.
That won't be what they do, it'll be full of quips and snark and no horror at all probably, but the in-theory baseline already exists.
I think they’re going to adapt BOTW because when you think about it it’s perfect for an adaptation : link has no memory so you make him a personality and he discovers Hyrule with the audience
Also the game is a sandbox where you make your own narrative, so they can invent one
@@robbybevard8034 Alien is a bunch of schmucks dying one by one at the hands of an implacable monster. Metroid is about an implacable killing machine single-handedly obliterating entire species from world after world.
How do you make an orgy of blood and artifacts last 90min+?
Battleship is great. They do a handbrake turn... in a battleship!
I kind of love the poetry of the two countries who were the last to fight major naval battles against each other teaming up decades later to fight a common enemy.
Everytime he said "novels" i thought he was saying "knobbles"
The literature gobbler
Knobble And the Novels when?
I just jave to point out that the SNES game "Super Mario World" does have a bunch of dinosaurs and takes place in Dinosaur Land. So the dinosaur thing wasn't completely left field. I've heard a few people express how random it seemed in the movie when it was most likely inspired by the game.
You gotta love how Patrick keeps changing the title and thumbnail in this video in a way that doesn’t upset people.
I think you forgot to mention that movie adaptations can be a source of advertisement. For the release of the movie, they released a special version of the console that includes a Mario game, basically saying “As seen in the movie”. I feel like PlayStation is following the same strategy with the movies Uncharted and Grand Turismo. Nintendo’s case is special because they said that they wanted to venture into more forms of entertainment; the movie is also an advertisement of the new theme park in Universal Studios.
That being said, I think that for a Mario movie to be good in itself, it has to adapted like the “Blank canvas” approach, as seen in Super Mario RPG. That game engages with the source material but adds new elements to the existing lore: New characters, new environments and locations, and a narrative that deviates from the original games, giving it an unique motive not present in other Mario games.
Anyway, good video Patrick! Hope this comment makes it to the Patrick Replies video 🫣
I maintain that there is a purely aesthetic value in adaptations of games like Mario with thin narratives... if the adaptations commit to being as aesthetically different from the source games as possible. Not in a design sense, but in a textural sense. IE: if it's a game with 2D animation, you could use live action or 3D animation. If it's a game with 3D animation, you could use live action or 2D animation. And furthermore, if you go for live action, one ought to make as much of the sets, costumes, creatures, etc. practical as physically possible. I've often thought about this in the context of Metroid. Sure, you could easily make a Metroid movie with CG animation and it could still be compelling as long as you go for something with little to no dialogue and commit to the atmospheric, visual storytelling endemic to Metroid, but it would still feel more like watching someone else play the game. However, if you make a practical suit for Samus, big puppets and animatronics for all the aliens and big elaborate sets for the world of Zebes, then I think you've really got something.
Also DOA: Dead or Alive is the best video game movie don't @ me.
I can’t stop looking at Patrick’s sweater.
It was the same for me.
If beale street could talk is my favorite adaptation. The plot is pure fidelity, but the narratives are told completely differently. The novella focuses heavily on the interiority of various characters, which lends tremendously to the written form. On the other hand, the film is purely external, with no internal monologue, and completely takes advantage of the visual communication innate to cinema. Ultimately, each ends up being a fire representation of their respective mediums
There are things worth adapting from Super Mario to moviers, mainly its sense of humor. About the characters, some of them have more depth that you realize, Bowser's relationship with his family it's pretty unique, the way in which Luigi looks up to Mario it's also hearthwhelming.
The crazy world building of Super Mario Bros could also be worked out to tell other compelling stories.
I'm not sure how much to agree with the claim that Mario is a plain character, there are tons of ways of seeing his story that he may be worked out into very different characters. Some examples: He is constantly going on killing rampages to rescue Peach with little to no reward (he may enjoy it or may not, and in both circumstances there is a lot to say), he was chased by Bowser even when he was just a baby, he also was a common worker that miraged to a very different place and become the equivalent of a national hero, he was friendzoned by Peach in Super Mario Odyssey after he risked his life saving her. Any of those aspects of Mario could be a seed of a compelling narrative.
My belief is that the reason was after decades of video game adaptations that weren’t being close to the source material Out of fear of them not feeling general audience friendly doing a faithful Mario movie was the safest bet, both financial and general audience wise.
Closest those early adaptations got was the original Mortal Kombat, and even then it just had to reverse-engineer Enter the Dragon with fantasy elements. Of course they botched it with Annihlation and even the new films feel like retreads of the 1995 adaptation.
@@benwasserman8223 But that makes sense, since every early fighting game was just a video game adaptation of Enter the Dragon, just like all the early beat-'em-ups are video game adaptations of Game of Death or The Warriors. The adaptation cycle has always gone both ways.
you realize not all video games are from nintendo, right?
@@iopohable yes not sure why you had to point that out
The safest movie was the biggest risk because fans weren’t expecting it
Almost all adaptations are actually just fan art that the copyright owner approved of.
Almost all stories are actually just fan art before copyright was invented.
Almost all art was just fanart before the art was art art
According to this thread, everything is fan art unless you were a cro magnon man painting antelope in a cave.
Even then I'm guessing the next guy will say that was fan art . . . of antelope!
Oh I am locked the fuck IN for this
It's strange that out of a the two big video game movie franchises right now (Mario and Sonic, obv) Mario, the one with _less_ of a real story, is the one choosing to be more faithful with its source, while Sonic, whose franchise is filled to the brim (arguably too much) with lore/story, is the one that's been deviating more (a la Mario '93) by putting him in our world and giving him a weird surrogate dad in James Marsden. It's a strange dichotomy.
One of the reasons I loved the sonic movies is I actually don't like the way a lot of the sonic games play, but I grew up loving the blue hedgehog and his friends so getting actual stories I don't have to slog through feels good actually.
I have a degree in multimedia storytelling! :D
Honestly, video games actually have the potential to produce better art than most mediums due to their interactivity. But obviously the communities and content most media focuses on when it comes to video games, it makes critics take them FAR less seriously.
Multimedia storytelling is fascinating. One thing that I like about Star Wars is how it excels in many different mediums such as games, animation, television, comics and obviously film. Now I’m only hesitant to say novels just for how rich of a history that novels have and it’s hard to call those the peak of the medium, at leas in the case of Star Wars
@@thomasffrench3639 Star Wars is a great example of successful adaptation! For example, I think the KOTOR games are on par with the Original Trilogy. To be completely honest, I think I may like KOTOR more when it comes to certain things.
@@dymoureKOTOR is actually what got me back into video games as a medium. As far as film goes, I actually hold the original Star Wars trilogy in quite high esteem and for KOTOR to match it in terms of storytelling in a lot of different ways made me realize the power of game storytelling. It also made me remember that games are just fun to play, which is mostly what I’ve been doing as I’m mostly playing retro games with a few RPGs in between that tell some good stories with fun customization mechanics.
It’s just a pleasure to realize how many different mediums have their own strengths when it comes to storytelling. Comics have a lot of freedom of pacing, film uses sensory overload to tell stories, and video games have a lot more room for smaller moments with dialogue and worldbuiling that doesn’t need to progress the plot and interactivity. Also love that each medium has different ways to approach the imagination of the audience/player/reader.
A variety of thoughts.
There was a Mario Video Game about the two brothers being plumbers. It's 'Mario Bros' (no Super) for the Atari 2600. It's a platformer where the two brothers venture into the sewers in order to battle various monsters coming out through the pipes.
To me, the ideal Mario Brothers movie exists midway between the two along the spectrum. It's a fantasy adventure (what the kids today are calling an Isekai) where heroes from our world travel through a portal (or in this case, a sewer pipe) into a surreal fantasy world with strange new rules and dangers.
The major selling point being that, instead of a bold, impetuous young warrior, it's a pair of working class Italian plumbers from Brooklyn. And instead of the standard D-grade Tolkien knock-off or D&D-a-like setting, it's all koopas and yoshis and toadstools and magic bricks.
On the idea of fidelity as the defining characteristic of quality, I'd have to consider Robert Rodriguez' 'Sin City' which was so close to its source material that it felt hollow to me. I'd already HAD this experience reading the comic and seeing the film felt like sitting there while someone read the comic to me again.
Meanwhile, one of the greatest adaptations is 'Blade Runner' which bears almost no resemblance to 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (or 'Speed Racer', which tosses so much of the original manga and anime out the window while maintaining and actively enhancing the heart of the original source material - the bonds of familial love - while introducing a secondary theme about the heartlessness of capitalism which is almost completely absent from the comics or tv cartoon).
your ideal mario movie was the very first draft of the ‘93 film. it’s getting a comic adaptation by a fan though, so maybe check it out (it’s called super mario bros: fantasy)
Between The Last of Us' award wins and Castlevania/Arcane's Netflix success, I honestly think TV is a better medium for modern video game adaptations. But modern games have a high story focus alongside game mechanics and Mario story is.... well whatever new scheme Bowser has for kidnapping/marrying Peach. Still, if they get Rosalina for a sequel, we could make an emotionally charged story out of it (don't act like you didn't cry reading her Super Mario Galaxy backstory.. we all did).
I can't speak for Last of Us or Castlevania, but I wouldn't even call Arcane an adaptation. It's a spinoff. It's not trying to adapt the experience of fighting in Summoner's Rift, it's taking the lore and character backstories and using that as the basis of its adaptation.
That said I do think TV has an advantage purely because game stories are a lot longer than movies so a straight adaptation benefits from having more runtime to work with.
@@nathanl8622I’d still call Arcane somewhat an adaptation or based on the League of Legends universe with its own story you can’t find in the game. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners also does this so well. That had nothing to do with V or Johnny Silverhand but everything looks and sounds exactly like the game you played in. There are even certain locations you can actually go to in the 2077 game map like visit Lucy’s apartment or find Rebecca’s shotgun at the same area Adam Smasher killed her in. There’s a sense of connection and faithfulness to the game while still standing on its own. I thought that was all so freaking cool.
It can be easier to adapt a story-based game, since the story is already there and it's basically just an editing process, but I think you can make good adaptations of "pure gameplay" games too, the secret is just to "yes, and" them. Don't contradict anything from the source material, don't try to negate it, just build out around it, add detail to the characters, add context to the action scenes. It's almost like the Marvel Method of film making, where they put together action set pieces and then build a plot around that. In this case, you take action set pieces from the game, and then build out good reasons for _why_ those scenes are happening.
Most videogames with any substantial narrative sort of already tend towards an episodic structure, simply because they're too long to be experienced in one setting. They're inherently something that are picked up and put down multiple times and lots of them factor that into the pacing and design.
@@timogulI think that a lot of “pure gameplay” games generally have story and a lot of environmental storytelling like Castlevania and Mega Man. So a lot of those games feel like they have a lot of potential in adaptations
I think the most interesting thing about videogame adaptations is looking at what they choose. Many of the ones I can think of off the top of my head are typically games from the period where most were light on story but heavy on gameplay. If you were to make them 100% faithful, It would be an exposition dump at the beginning, a conversation pushing you toward the next area every 20 or so minutes of film time, and a lot of watching a character solving puzzles or just mowing down antagonistic elements. When so much of the source material is playing the game, I don't think film can capture that kind of feeling. Its hard to make 30 minutes of running back and forth to get the weird puzzle pieces in order to open a door in a police station a la Resident Evil 2 feel right on film.
I'm just hopeful that this next wave of videogame adaptations will continue in the footsteps of The Last of Us or Arcane. It's nice to have something I can point at and say "See, videogames aren't just pac-man and Fortnite." Sure, they may never play Oxenfree or Nier Replicant/Automata, but at least they might be more interested in the stories videogames can tell than just writing them off as silly timewasters for kids.
That said, I feel like we used to get movies about that kind of thing, we just thought of them as "travel movies" or "escape movies" or just.. you know, like Milo and Otis, just characters trying to get through hazards and dangers. If it was the right kind of game, i THINK you could adapt that. but it would be weird, and it would need really, really good writing and characterizations to keep us caring about who these people are and why they're solving all these puzzles.
Hey Patrick, the part about source material fidelity and mentions of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” makes me wonder if you’d do a video about it. It’s such an interesting case in the fidelity conversation as it’s a satire of something the adapter never read, using some of the same sets as an adaptation that went to the level of filming scenes on the exact dates listed in the book.
I will say that Legend of Zelda makes a much better foundation for storytelling than Mario. Although the timeline has been retconned to hell, there's a lot more meaning in the elements of the Zelda world and characters. Plus each major release is only vaguely connected to the others in the series, so there's plenty of room for artistic expression without upsetting hardcore fans.
But Link better not say a word the whole movie.
@@SquirtleSquadPH give him silent subtitles 😂
Yeah but... there's so much working against it, I have to think no matter what your taste is, you'll find a reason to think this will be garbage
it's being made in america, it's being made in current day, it's being made I assume by Illumination, or a peer of theirs. It's going to be really ugly because that's how most CGI likes to do faces. lot of jowl lines, nostrils, and general gross expressions. Also, while there is a story, it's usually a story with kind of an even pace to it? Like Link's status a third of the way through the game is pretty similar to two thirds of the way through, he just has a few more dungeons under his belt. There's no "Act 1 does this, act 2 does that, act 3 changes things up" until the very end. and I don't think you can change that without ruining it. How would you even fit more than one dungeon exploration into a movie? Two, at most, but then you couldn't possibly have much time for the rest of it.
This season has been amazing.
I'm glad you brought up 'The Shining' because you asked the question "Is it a faithful adaptation, and would it be better if it was?" The answer is the TV miniseries later made of 'The Shining' in the '90s, with King himself writing the screenplay. Arguably the miniseries is more faithful, though it still deviates from the novel - but it's considerably less memorable than Kubrick's film. For my money, 'The Shining' has not been faithfully adapted to film yet, but Kubrick's film is the better movie by a considerable margin. Also, Mike Flanagan's 'Doctor Sleep' had to thread the needle between King's original work and the Kubrick film, and stands as an outstanding example of adaptation, both faithful to the original(s) and responsive to what works in different mediums. I wonder where 'Doctor Sleep' would fit on the Super Mario super spectrum.
Honestly I feel that Mario being used as the example for an adaptation spectrum is really a mistake when you have the ENTIRETY of the chaos that is Stephen King adaptations just sitting there.
With Mario Adaptations and faithfulness versus "doing its own thing"-ness you have exactly two data points for comparison. For the vast array of films that are Stephen King adaptations, you have probably about a hundred different data points by now, especially once you add in the stuff adapted for television (where a lot of his short stories ended up on anthology series like Tales of the Darkside or the Outer Limits, and then there are the many mini-series to consider).
You also have a lot of variation when it comes to authorial intent, as King himself has had a lot of variation when it comes to involvement with any particular adaptation and there are now several works that have been adapted multiple times by different creators.
In the original Shining, King had little involvement, but a lot more in its second adaptation. In the original adaptation of The Stand, he wrote the screenplays for the mini-series, but in the 2nd adaptation he didn't . . . but he DID write a whole new epilogue episode that extends the story past its original end point. With stuff like Creepshow, he produced the film, starred in a segment and adapted some prior stories while writing whole new stories just for the movie, while in Creepshow 2, he produced it and an older story of his was adapted to the screen, but other writers did the other segments. Then there's stuff like Maximum Overdrive, where he actually directed the adaptation of one of his weirder stories while higher than a kite, or Storm of the Century where he wrote an original teleplay for the screen based on no prior work other than an unpublished draft he never finished for a novel or short story. Then there's the Darabont movies, which offer different ranges when it comes to success and faithfulness to their source material, with King even declaring that he prefers some of the changes in these adaptations to his original works (particularly in the case of The Mist).
Like, King's stuff just offers a pretty vast array for comparison when it comes to the concept of analyzing adaptations on so many different aspects of faithfulness, quality of the end product, audience agreement with either his book version or the film version . . . the whole thing is practically a genre unto itself!
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe Its not a mistake because you'd need a whole dedicated podcast series on Steven King adaptations for precisely that reason. You can make a two point scale out of the Mario movies. Philip K Dick would be more managable than King but still need more than 50 minutes padded with jokes.
As Patrick says in the first quarter its just an introduction to Adaptation studies. You could get a masters and a PHD out of looking at King (and I'm sure people have).
"Edge of Tomorrow" is a fantastic point of reference because it feels like its take on the "die and try again" gameplay experience could have been applied to great effect in the "Assassin's Creed" movie instead of the weird whiplash arm thing they did with the Animus. It could also form the basis of any theoretical SoulsBourne movie version....
Throughout the whole essay, I kept thinking about Laal Singh Chaddha, which is technically a remake of 1994s Forrest Gump, but feels more like an adaptation to me. Not from one medium to another, but from one historic background (America) to another one (India). What is really interesting about this "adaptation" is that some scenes are recreated shot by shot, while others are scenes are completely different and some narrative elements are altered strongly as well. Knowing that each of this was a deliberate choice by the film makers, it increased the impact of each decision and elevated them way past what they could have been as a "stand alone movie".
I feel like this is true for the conventional adaptations as well. While many creative decissions originate of necessary changes when adapting to a different medium, knowing the source material and the differences between it and the movie can highten the impact of the creative decissions by the film makers.
PS: Very dissapointed that there was not a single mention of the movie Adaptation.
46:13 not everyone plays games but most people watch movies so it’s a way to broaden the audience
Nintendo has said they want their brands in every home whether they play games or not
He’s talking about the artistic point, not the financial one
@@blakchristianbalebranding isn’t strictly financial
For Patrick Replies.
While I almost entirely agree with you on the games having little to no story, you do only talk about the early games. Granted, the later games are also very light on story, yet they do contain some more narrative depth. Mario Sunshine being the most notable example.
Adding to what you're saying, Mario Galaxy had the storybook outlining Rosalina's backstory. Mario Odyssey (even if it's light on direct story) contains a lot of great worldbuilding with a lot of its real-world cultural inspirations and flavor text outlining major landmarks and facets.
The extent to which the directors fucked with everyone on set doesn’t quite justify the film getting made imo. It has its charm though.
That’s fair. Speaking as someone who enjoys it as a so bad its good, cheesy fun time, that is its greatest flaw in my eyes. Same with the Shining. As good as the movie is i cant help but think about how much the cast and crew hated making it while im watching it
Is the YT algorithm now saying you have to change the thumbnail and title every 24 hours?
The thing with Mario is that it's a particularly "gamey" game series. Pretty much all of its strength is in things that are fundamental to video games as a medium, like it's tight and responsive controls, rewarding mechanics, and clever level design, while it's extremely light on plot and characterisation.
The movie wasn't really that "faithful" in those things, it was more just faithful in the aesthetics of adapting the games. The plot and characters were thin but a lot more fleshed out than the games, but since those were never that essential, fans didn't care that they were different. Tbh I think that while having more depth would have arguably made it a better film, it would have made a worse adaptation, because it's supposed to just have a very simplistic story and characters.
I think it's fun as basically a 90 minute Easter egg fest for fans, and as a passable animated movie for kids otherwise. I also think interest will wane a bit for sequels because most of the value was just in the novelty of all this beloved game stuff appearing in a mainstream Hollywood film.
To me a good adaptation is a good movie. Making a movie better by fleshing things out does not make it a worse adaptation.
Besides they could easily adapt something like TTYD there's tons of story there
I'm not so sure it's passable? It felt like a discount Dreamworks movie with Mario shit bolted onto it. A cinematic Funko Pop
Paper mario and M&L series would like to have a word with you.
I really like the concept of this video of what makes a film adaptation. I think no matter if your a faithful adaptation of a book, TV show, Video Game ETC or not you need to be a good movie
The worst movie reviews are the ones where they go through the movie and say, “This is what it was like in the book, but they changed it!”
I think the worst movie reviews are the ones that start off by admitting that they haven't even watched the movie. It happens more often than you'd think.
Yep, on the whole I think that's an unfair criticism. There are a few times when that is a legitimate issue. A couple Kubrick examples were the endings to The Shining and 2001. Changing The Shining with that ending did completely change the story and I don't think that it was as strong of a story as the original source material. With 2001, I don't believe that it was even possible to film the ending in a way that would make any sort of visual sense.
This is the third title and thumbnail in 3 days
Funny that you mention Edge of Tomorrow when it’s one of the first movies based on a manga/light novel that broke that adaptation curse
I’m surprised Patrick didn’t talk about the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, like do those count as being faithful whilst also having its own vision?
Sure but this wasn't meant to be a comprehensive overview of video game adaptations; just a handful of examples to form a basis for the starkness between the 2 Mario movies. Unlike the Mario movies, the Sonic movies didn't suffer the same disconnect that caused so much divisiveness.
Yes, they are solid and well-made but they were generally non-controversial. That's probably the reason.
@@notsyzagts7967 There was the Ugly Sonic controversy tho.
@@JamesLawnerThat’s more of a design problem, not an adaptation problem.
Putting Sonic in a good damned road movie was stupid. Sonic runs, not rides a car.
And making him a stalker killed his cute rating on Facebook.
The history of the first movie is so fascinating! The 90's Mario movie is my guilty pleasure! I used to rent it all the time from this little non-blockbuster video store ..ugh...thinking back to that moment is hitting me hard in the feels and it's more about being little again and enjoying life for a very brief moment!
It's interesting that Cyberpunk Edgerunners and Arcane weren't really brought up here, even if they aren't movies. I honestly think these are one of the most furtile directions for game adaptations. They aren't aiming to adapt game mechanics, but instead trying to expand the world you're playing in a way that the source game can't do as well. This is also largely why the Pokemon anime and TF2 short films were so successful.
The pitch isn't "Let's make Video Game: The Movie" but instead "This is a very cool setting, what's an interesting new story we can make a movie out of here?"
Arcane manages to somehow remain faithful to its source material while also adding so much depth and passion to the work itself that it manages to be popular with people who utterly despise said source material.
When your source material is league of legends the bar is low but HOLY SHIT
Getting some big nostalgia to my undergraduate dissertation which cited Linda Hutcheon's theory on historiographic metafiction a hell of a lot
I once took a literary class in college all about adaption. It was a fun class. But it was a little soured by the professor looking down on me when she found out I listen to audiobooks more than read physical books. It's not my fault my ADHD makes listening to books easier than reading text.
The Linda Hutcheon quote at 15:26 is why when an adaptation is made of something I don't already know, I don't seek out the source material until after I experience the new adaptation. Sjo I can go in with fresh eyes.
Sonic's films are better as Sonic basically is a more developed character. It also helps that they took more risks with the character than the 2023 Mario film while not being as far devolved as the 1993 adaptation...despite them nearly going that far. Tv shows are the same, post 2000, there's not been a bad one.
Sonic also has a lot of lore with the different Tv series and comics to pick from when making a movie version
I disagree with that. Both of the Mario Movies aren’t exactly my favorite, but it at least they’re about the Super Mario Bros compared to the Sonic movies, as the first one was all about James Marsden while the second film decides to make Tom’s sister in law the main character for a big chunk of the 2nd act.
And this coming from a guy who used to prefer Sonic over Mario.
i'd completely take 2023 over 1993 as being weird doesn't automatically make it better as a lot of it was just pure even for that time bad compared to being a great reimagining of the 1st game(compared to in sonic where it wouldn't work shoving everything in/at that point just ask for nekotoons to make a tv series it works for mario as the 1st game didn't have a plot to fully stick by the book to.) .
with what we know of the series now added in(there are times when asking for it to "stay true" is more whining about headcanon's that were never solid to begin with than actual criticisms/more flaws of film standards with length thinking everything needs to be 2 hours when it really doesn't at all.).
and done in a well handled way to give it's own exploration of it's world in a sequel now that it has room to fully go there without worrying of being safe for newcomers.(where with pokemon it banked on the idea of "what if they were in our world"as compared to it detective pikachu is standard in areas but like them has enjoyable protagonist to carry it.)
When I was 9 I was incensed to learn that in the original Wizard of Oz Dorothy had Silver Shoes, and they just changed it to Ruby Slippers.
Because red would really pop in technicolour but silver would just look dull.
not only that but the prop used in the film was actually silver too, and they colored them red in post.
Did you have a nice 96th birthday this year?
@@MattEldritchHorrorthe wizard of oz is still watched by kids to this day
That Battleship movie came out when I was 14 and I thought it was absolutely incredible.
nobody asked but here's some of my favorite movies that are adaptations: Arrival, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Steve Jobs, Dune, The Social Network, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Sharp Objects