Hard-to-Adapt Work - TV Tropes
- ️Sun Jan 26 2020
This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
"The bible was written by Bruce and Reed Shelly. Reading it, you could tell that they were still struggling to get a handle on the show. I mean, the core problem was obvious: There are no real characters or stories in a Nintendo game, so how do you turn one into a TV series?"
Some popular works never get adaptations, or if they do they have long and difficult production processes. It's not for lack of trying, however. Some works are just hard to adapt into certain mediums.
One common reason for this is an Audience-Alienating Premise. What might be popular for one medium is not for another. For example, xenofictional literature works are rarely ever adapted. Most are too dark for kids' shows or films, but most older audiences aren't interested in serious works about talking animals or non-humanoid anthropomorphic aliens. This often coincides with differing writing and content standards between mediums and even if attempted will often rely on Human-Focused Adaptation.
Story Branching is another common headache, particularly the form found in Visual Novels (which can already have vast amounts of text to work with). A single VN can feature not only multiple long, mutually exclusive storylines, but also cross-continuity Chekhovs Guns (i.e. a detail is explained but not relevant in the first route, then relevant but not explained in the second). Most adaptations either pick one route and stick with it, or invent a composite storyline with elements of all of them. Works that go to the extremes, a Slice of Life plot with a Mind Screw climax, may have been considered fundamentally too weird even in the original work.
The ability for novels to expand on environments, explain motivations and personality traits within the text makes it near impossible to replicate in a film format without tripling down on the exposition and explaining their emotions in a hamfisted manner. A reader can also experience a book at their own pace both in segments they read at a time and being able to easily double back on passages they might have overlooked, while a three-hour movie can continue on even if you leave the room. Films are rooted in visuals, dialogue and music to different degrees, all edited together in a cohesive whole. Kinetic action sequences timed to the soundtrack creates a fundamentally different appeal, as well as enormous spectacle filled with naturalistic details. See also Starring Special Effects.
And underlying all of this often comes down to budget. Even an Arbitrarily Large Bank Account may struggle in maintaining quality moment to moment, with the plot and characters easily getting lost in the spectacle.
This can lead to No Adaptations Allowed if a work is deemed too difficult to work with. This is also a major reason adaptations fall into Development Hell, and frequently undergo noticeable Adaptation Decay once they're Saved from Development Hell.
Before writing an example, please consider if the work has actually had adaptations, or attempts at adaptations, made. In many cases, the reason for why a given work has never had a good, major adaptation is simply that nobody with the ability to create such an adaptation has ever heard of it, or have passed up the opportunity for something that seemed more profitable. Simply listing every work that has never had an adaptation would constitute roughly 98% of stories in existence, as most stories are simply too bad, too obscure, or both to get the traction for a major adaptation. (Keep Fan Myopia into mind when adding examples.)
Video Game Movies Suck is a subtrope, given the incompatibilities between video games and film: either the former a) doesn't have enough plot to fill in the run time of a feature-length film without significant expansion, b) has too much plot for one without significant compression, c) is too strongly tied with the interactive nature of the medium in order to translate well into a passive format, or d) is so action-focused that a film would need a massive budget and choreography to do it justice.
Examples subpages (by original medium):
Other examples:
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Anime & Manga
- 20th Century Boys never got an anime for three big reasons: First, the manga is so long that a complete anime adaptation would have to be between 100 and 150 episodes long if not more, and the era of shonens lasting 300 episodes or more is over, making said anime even riskier. Second, being a Seinen thriller drawn by Naoki Urasawa, the anime would have to look much older than it would actually be. And finally, the manga involves so many band names (including the title) that it's a trademark minefield.
- AKIRA may be a successful manga adapted into an even more successful anime film, but efforts to create a live-action film have frequently stalled out, despite efforts from directors such as Jordan Peele and Taika Waititi. Most have pointed out that intricately detailed set pieces such as the destruction of Tokyo and Tetsuo's mutation are much easier to accomplish via animation (and even then the anime film cost so much to make that it risked tanking Japan's entire animation industry), and that its dark plot involving drug abuse, gang violence, and tyranny via superpowers does not have broad audience appeal. Not helping matters is the predominantly Japanese cast, raising concerns about the Minority Show Ghetto. Despite these factors, other Capepunk films inspired by AKIRA have seen success, and Chronicle can be argued to be a Spiritual Successor.
- Projects with character designs by Yoshitaka Amano tend to struggle with adaptation to animation, due to his designs being wispy, wavery watercolor paintings crowded with detail, depicting very similar-looking characters in very complicated and ornate outfits—all things that do not translate well to animation. This means that Amano projects tend to need either the high budget and short runtime of an OVA or film (Angel's Egg, which still ends up looking very strange in motion) or a significant redesign to the point of looking little like his original work (The Heroic Legend of Arslan, where the TV anime is based on the second manga adaptation by Hiromu Arakawa). This is even somewhat evident with his Final Fantasy work, where the protagonists of the first six games barely resemble their Amano-made character designs (though the monsters, being static sprites, were much easier to manage).
- Attack on Titan has seen great success in anime and video game adaptations. However, bringing the Titans to live action has proven to be difficult. The story is long and takes its time building the world and lore of that ultimately drive the Ontological Mystery of the series. Almost every character has lengthy backstories that often tie into other characters which helps explain their motivations and goals. Finally, the titular Titans are massive humanoid abominations that leave lots of destruction in their wake. Fights against them involve lots of swinging with the omni-directional mobility gear like Spider-Man or Titan vs. Titan battles akin to Kaiju works. To bring the Titans convincingly to live action would need an equally titanic budget. All of these issues have led to the series having a hard time coming to a live action medium:
- The two live action films from 2015 suffered from a case of Compressed Adaptation. They tried to fit the first 25 episodes of the anime into two movies, leading to many important characters and plot points being Adapted Out. The characters that did appear were radically different from their anime versions to the point where they might as well have been new characters. The movies also did NOT have the budget to make the Titans look imposing, leading to lots of Special Effects Failure and Narm. The only other crack at a live action version of Attack on Titans has been from Warner Bros, whose adaptation has been stuck in Development Hell.
- The stage musical went through a Troubled Production in an attempt to bring the swinging action to the stage. The death defying acrobatics used by the omni-directional movement gear is easy enough to convey in print or animation; doing it in a theatre setting is much easier said than done. It would require lots of safety harnesses and wires (and all the financial and logistical issues that come with it) to do safely, as well as athletic actors to perform the stunts. During testing for the original musical, acrobat Kazutaka Yoshino suffered an injury during rehearsals and ultimately died from his injuries, putting production on the musical on hold. That said, a musical for Attack on Titan did get off the ground in 2023, to favorable results.
- Berserk falls victim to this thanks to two major factors:
- The manga is a very long series that gets much of its atmosphere from a combination of decompressed storytelling and highly-detailed art. It's hard to cut out content because it has a lot of sensitive topics and Broken Bird characters (especially its protagonist Guts), which without the original context risk becoming pointlessly dark and nonsensical. Most adaptations tend to follow the Golden Age arc, since it's a Flash Back that's largely self-contained.
- The 90s anime and Golden Age film trilogy, despite being extremely violent (particularly the latter), still censor a lot of the more explicit violence, sex, and rape scenes, either toning them down or omitting them outright to make the series suitable for broadcast. A completely faithful adaptation of Berserk would likely demand an NC-17 rating (The third film in the Golden Age trilogy, where the Eclipse goes down and the ugliest stuff in the Golden Age Arc happens, even has an unrated version shown during midnight screenings). The manga itself ran on a seinen magazine, which gave it fewer restrictions for its content and subject matter. It's worth noting that the series has content that, even by manga standards, is intense.
- Another reason may be the series artwork, which is famed for its extreme level of detail that would be difficult to fully translate into an animated medium. The closest comparison would be to an artist like Gustave Doré.
- Cowboy Bebop is one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed animes of all time, but when it was adapted into a live-action TV series the critical response was far from ideal and resulted in the series being cancelled after just one season with accusations of this being understandably made. One of the primary reasons the anime is hard to adapt is because its fluid animation and stylistic character designs (especially Spike, Faye and Ed) are extremely hard to translate into live action without coming off as awkward or outright cringey. Another problem is that the Cowboy Bebop anime itself homages films like Blade Runner and Pulp Fiction, making it especially hard for the TV show to capture its style when it's already effectively borrowing from other The Future Is Noir works in its own unique way. Along with this, the anime was deliberately vague and minimalistic about the way the setting works and was very episodic in story structure. The TV show however has hour long episodes and in an age of prestige streaming shows with a dense Myth Arc, thus is obligated to have a lot of Adaptational Expansion and elevating minor characters into bigger importance (in 26 episodes, Vicious was in 5 and Julia 2, while here they are part of the main cast). Fair to note, that the anime isn't just difficult to adapt into live action, there is also a lesser-known manga adaptation of the series that isn't highly regarded either, despite it being much more accurate than the Netflix show.
- Dragon Ball has long since proved that it can be adapted effectively into animation, both 2D and 3D, being one of the most universally popular animes of all time. When it comes to a Live-Action Adaptation, however, it's proved three times to be phenomenally difficult, if not nigh impossible to adapt into live-action without serious Special Effects Failure or, in the case of Dragon Ball Evolution, ending up as In Name Only to the source material. The main difficulties is that the world of Dragon Ball is a massive anachronism packed Fantasy Kitchen Sink with a futuristic setting, dinosaurs, talking animal characters, robots, aliens, and multiple superpowered-martial artist characters who can fly around destroying mountains and planets, shoot beams from their hands, and also travel to other worlds up to and including the afterlife. To remotely do the series justice in live action, the budget would have to be around the level of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Avatar with fight choreography on the level of Ip Man and most Wuxia films, but few film companies are willing to go that length. Whilst there's been no attempts to adapt the series of late, films like The Matrix Revolutions and Man of Steel do pay homage to Dragon Ball with their high-flying fight scenes and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings can be seen as a Spiritual Successor to the point of a direct Shout-Out.
- There's also the issue of what era of Dragon Ball to adapt first. While it makes sense to adapt the early series first several problems would arise, most glaringly that Goku is a child here and that means casting a competent child actor who knows martial arts, which is a daunting task. Additionally, the deuteragonist Bulma is 16 at this point in the series, but thanks to Values Dissonance is still involved in many sexualised gags and harassed by horny characters, which would understandably be uncomfortable to watch if played straight. Furthermore the stakes are initially quite low in the early series and prior to the Red Ribbon Army, Crane School and King Piccolo, the threats to the heroes are Played for Laughs. The Dragon Ball Z era is generally better suited for a high-budget Hollywood adaptation being the most popular and recognisable era across the world and Goku being an adult man, however making a live-action movie starting with Saiyan Saga would still invoke some Continuity Lock-Out for puzzled newcomers, and would likely require flash backs just to explain who the characters are.
- Another issue, which goes for most Shōnen live action adaptations, is that Dragon Ball is known and loved for its Awesome Art especially when it comes to its characters and fight scenes. Translating it into a medium such as live action is very difficult, even when it's as faithful as possible. For example JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Diamond Is Unbreakable Chapter I, Fullmetal Alchemist (2017) and Bleach (2018) all got drummings for struggling to capture the look and feel of their source materials and ended up visually closer to just cosplay. Even something as simple as showing a character flying with their arms pointed back has a tendency to look awkward in live-action, as a front-on view of the character's face can look a bit fish-eyed, but when they point their arms forward Superman-style the shot is more balanced.
- Drifting Classroom: The premise of an entire elementary school being transported into a deadly post-apocalyptic future filled with monsters and mutants that want to kill you is played rather seriously, with multiple adults and kids shown committing suicide out of despair. It's no wonder there was never an anime adaptation. The various live-action adaptations take great liberties with the story and are comparatively Lighter and Softer.
- Fist of the North Star greatly helped shaped Shōnen as its known today and is one of the most influential manga and anime of all time. However when it got a Live-Action Adaptation in 1995, the film bombed hard and was panned by critics and fans alike. Hokuto no Ken is unique among this list, in that it actually shouldn't be too hard to adapt, being a Martial Arts Movie set in The Apunkalypse with largely realistic looking characters. However there wherein lies the biggest problem, a straight live-action adaptation of the manga as the 1995 film shows is likely just going to be considered a Mockbuster of Mad Max (the franchise that inspired the manga), with Vehicular Combat traded out for punching and kicking. This isn't a problem for the Hokuto anime and video game adaptations, which can be more stylised and be more distinict from Mad Max, but the 1995 film had no such advantages and came off as both a pale imitation of Mad Max and poor adaptation of the manga. Additionally The Hero Kenshiro is a blatant Bruce Lee Clone in the source material, thus the 1995 film's choice to make him Caucasian rather than Asian came off as whitewashing and further aided the unfortunate comparison to the Mad Max films. That being said, Boy Kills World proved to be a Spiritual Successor of Fist of the North Star, showing the series could potentially successfully make the jump to live action with the right studio, direction and budget behind it.
- Though Getter Robo saw many a successful adaptation to TV, film, and OVA, it stands out in the realm of toys for being almost impossible to work with—ironically for the series that essentially created the Combining Mecha concept, which went on to be defined by Merchandise-Driven works using it to make toys. This is because the mech's core concept requires three components that can take on four modes each (jet, upper third of a robot, middle third, and lower third), and just about every iteration of the Getter Robo design cheats the transformation heavily, fluidly morphing into a design that simply doesn't fit in the small jets that usually make up its components. The vast majority of toys from the series abandon transformation completely, and the ones that don't and manage to be even remotely accurate tend to cost hundreds of dollars. The sole exception to this is Getter Robo Go, which created a completely new design as well as designing the toys first.
- Goodnight Punpun, despite its great acclaim, is acknowledged by fans and critics alike to be a very difficult or impossible work to adapt for a number of reasons. The most immediately apparent is the title character and his family: they are all portrayed as child-like drawings of birds, even while the rest of the cast are drawn in a more standard seinen anime style. This directly contrasts with the tone and pacing of the story, which is a slow, depressing Coming of Age story that verges on Protagonist Journey to Villain.
- Efforts to adapt Gundam into a Live-Action Adaptation have been met with Development Hell. Much like Dragon Ball or Evangelion, the series is extremely expansive and full of incredible spectacle regarding its beautiful mechs making it immensely hard to do justice in live action without a massive budget and creative scope. However, after the success of Pacific Rim "this can't be adapted" attitude towards the Gundam series has soften among fans and relatively more optimism towards announcements that Legendary Pictures and Netflix would take a stab at adapting the series.
- The works of Junji Ito heavily rely on the nature of print media to build suspense leading to Jump Scares and intricately detailed artwork depicting Body Horror, both of which are difficult to translate to the screen without resulting in Narm, Special Effect Failure, and Nightmare Retardant. While Ito's works have seen multiple live-action and anime adaptations, only the first episode of 2024's Uzumaki anime series is viewed with high regard by Ito fans, and even that episode required a large budget and painstaking attention to detail towards the manga in order to successfully pull off the effort at properly adapting the source material. Tragically however it suffered tremendously from Troubled Production, with the budget being slashed by Warner Brothers, the production being delayed four years, and the animation done more cheaply by a different studio following the first episode, again resulting in a lot of Special Effect Failure.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: It took the better part of 30 years for the manga to get a reasonably faithful anime adaptation for many reasons. Hirohiko Araki's character designs are incredibly busy and go through a lot of Art Evolution, the fights and powers are hard to work with if you don't have the aid of constant narration, and the most iconic part of the franchise that introduces the signature Stand system, Stardust Crusaders, is the third arc and serves mainly to tie up the plot of the first two (which deal with a completely different power system that becomes irrelevant from that point on). This even translates to trying to get it a Western release, as Araki's great love of Musical Theme Naming turns the series into a trademark minefield. The 90s OVA had to cut and change a lot of things to make it work, and the David Productions anime simply shrugged and embraced the operatic unreal stylism of the source material, going so far as to even create an animated equivalent to Araki's refusal to stick to a color scheme.
- A specific part that is hard to produce an anime for is JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run. The story revolves around an American cross-country horse race, and horses are notoriously difficult to animate in 2D. Even David Productions admitted that they would rather wait for technology to advance to help with 2D horse animation, as they don't want to rely on CGI to animate the horses.
- The original Kinnikuman anime never saw the light of day in America because distributors would have the difficult, if not impossible, job of translating/censoring the show so that it's suitable for their audience given the sheer amount of violence (and to a lesser extent, its Toilet Humor), the main protagonist being a drunken pervert and there being a heroic Nazi character with a lot of screentime. While toys and a video game based on the series did make it over stateside, it was renamed M.U.S.C.L.E and the aforementioned Nazi character was removed. Also worth noting is how the original cartoon did air in France, where censorship laws are less rigid than in the US... and was quickly banned.
- Naruto's live action movie adaptation has languished in Development Hell, despite talent like Michael Gracey and Destin Daniel Cretton being attached to the project, for multiple reasons:
- There are a lot of characters in Naruto. Most of the major players are in a Cast Herd of three trainees and a teacher, each with their own unique designs, powers, and character dynamics. While Naruto and Sasuke are the stars of the show, the other Teams do tie into their stories, as well as other groups such as the Chuunin, Academy Instructors, Village Elders, Akatsuki, among many others. A movie is inevitably going to have make cuts somewhere, which would irk long time fans at best, create potential plot holes at worst. Compounding the issue is the cast being Japanese inspired, which runs of the risk of Minority Show Ghetto or cries of whitewashing if non-Japanese actors are portraying the characters.
- Another factor is deciding what Story Arc to adapt. Making a Naruto movie a Superhero Origin story would have to condense one of the early arcs such as the "Land of Waves Arc" or the "Chuunin Exams Arc" into a two hour ride that again, would have to cut out some of the more important parts/characters of those stories for the sake of timing. There's also the option of making an original Naruto story for the big-screen, but that would require general audiences to have a basic understanding of Naruto's story to get the most out of. While Naruto is an extremely popular manga, it hasn't had the Pop Cultural Osmosis such as Superman or Spider-Man for even the most casual movie fan to know what's going on without some kind of origin for Naruto himself.
- Additionally, adaptating Naruto faithfully would require casting 20 or so child actors, all of whom expected to know martial arts and be competent actors to boot, both of which are very tall orders for studios and casting directors. This is all before even getting into the fact, the series depicts said children as soldiers in life-threatening situations and often getting grievously injured — which as you can imagine doesn't have broad audience appeal (putting aside Battle Royale fans). While you could get around this by making the cast late teens or indulge Dawson Casting, the early manga was about the protagonist and his peers going through Training from Hell and Misery Builds Character from the tender age of 12, and skipping forward to when they are older would cheapen the impact.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi is a manga that ran for nine years and famously went through a slow Genre Shift over its life, transforming from a fanservice-filled slice of life comedy into a still admittedly fanservice-filled action fantasy tale. Thus, the vast majority of adaptations focus only on the earlier chapters, ignoring (or never reaching) the later parts of the story when it becomes more of a fantasy epic, though one OVA did simply start 100 chapters in and cover some of those later chapters. That the manga ended very abruptly due to rights disputes doesn't make it any easier, either.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion was once considered for a Live-Action Adaptation by ADV Films and WETA only to end up in Development Hell. While Evangelion is rather popular in its native Japan and has a cult following in the US, its unique identity wouldn't be a sell for the general masses. A visually faithful adaptation would be ludicrously expensive for capturing the action and spectacle of the series, yet the series's graphic violence, sexual imagery (most of which involves characters who are minors In-Universe), angsty human drama, and surreal plotline would alienate mainstream audiences that would be necessary for justifying the enormous budget. Despite multiple attempts, the project was abandoned.
- One Piece is a manga known for many things, all of which are difficult to adapt into a live-action medium: its inherently outlandish and unrealistic character designs and locations; the surreal supernatural abilities, including the main character's Rubber Man abilities; its careful balance between comedic slapstick humor and serious and tearjerking drama; its keen attention to detail, with even minor characters and ideas from early in the story coming back in full force many chapters later; and finally its sheer length, as both the manga and anime have over 1000 chapters/episodes (and counting) of material to adapt. The series also saw difficulty gaining a large audience in North America; while the manga is the best selling comic book of all time, especially in Japan, the manga and its anime adaptation enjoyed a smaller audience, which is commonly blamed on its poor English dub by 4Kids Entertainmentnote and its more cartoony art style compared to other anime like Dragon Ball and Naruto. One Piece only saw live-action plays before Netflix took up the task of creating a live-action adaptation, with the task of making the franchise more appealing to western audiences. To avoid the pitfalls that have plagued other live-action adaptations from Netflix like Cowboy Bebop (2021) and Death Note (2017), the series creator Eiichiro Oda made it his business to get personally involved in the production, taking regular breaks away from producing the manga to choose the cast himself and ensure that the changes made by the creative team met his expectations, something he noted proved frustrating and difficult. The series began production in 2017 and released its first season in 2023, having some of the highest budgets-per-episode for a Netflix adaptation, but despite all odds, One Piece (2023) was met with a surprisingly warm critical and audience reception, who praise it for keeping the heart and spirit of the story while making meaningful and non-obtrusive changes.
- Sailor Moon rather unsurprisingly has proved to be a challenge to be adapted into live action, as seen by both Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon and Sera Myu. While both adaptations are quite enjoyable in their own ways with plenty of Narm Charm, the effort to try and replicate the iconic transformation sequences and general beautiful art and animation of the manga and anime, particularly in Pretty Guardian's case, is arduous. There’s just no getting around the fact the Sailor Senshi and the rest of the characters were designed to be as stylised as possible in both appearance and actions and attempting to bring them to life with only a modest budget, even when written by the original mangaka Naoko Takeuchi, is a recipe for trouble. Even more minor things like the billowing of the Senshi’s hair and skirts, which can be effortlessly done in animation, is lost in live action thanks to wardrobe and effects constraints.
- Kiyohiko Azuma stated that Yotsuba&! is in permanent No Adaptations Allowed status because, despite its Slice of Life nature and relatively simple premise, the series' distinctive pacing and comedic style are only able to work in the format of a comic, to the point where attempting to adapt the series into an anime or live-action series would result in a poorly-done Compressed Adaptation.
Comic Strips
- In one of their Sketchbooks, Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman mentioned that Zits is not meant to be animated due to much of the strips' humor relying on surreal paneling, oddly shaped speech bubbles, and other static visual gags that would be incredibly hard to translate in an animated medium.
Film
- Adaptation., as mentioned in the Literature subpage, is ostensibly based on a non-fiction book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Charlie Kaufman looked to turn the book into a movie screenplay, but it is a book about flowers where nothing really happens. So he turned his own struggles to adapt the book INTO the movie, focusing more on the existential crisis he now faces as he desperately wants to avoid throwing in needless drugs, sex, and violence to spice it up into a generic Hollywood movie. The movie still ends up going down that path, but far from any traditional story structure. The amusing part is by having Charlie obsess over all the details of The Orchid Thief the audience will still leave knowing the broad story and thematic points from the book, making it an oddly successful adaptation in the process.
- The Disney Live-Action Remakes often struggle with coming off as redundant to the original animated films they’re adapting. The Disney Animated Canon by nature was out to achieve what live action film couldn’t, with very deliberate and important choices when it came to character designs and how said characters looked and moved. These are difficult, if not outright impossible, to replicate in "live" settings, despite 3D animation improving all the time. Even classic live-action Disney films like Mary Poppins and Bedknobs And Broom Sticks understood the limitations of what could be done in live action and used 2D animation for some of the more fantastical set pieces.
- The Lion King (2019), which is an animated feature rather than live-action, made its all-animal cast of characters look photorealistic even though the intention of the 1994 film was to give them stylised and human-like appearances. This lead to massive criticism as it's actually extremely close to the original script but side-by-side comparisons were made to illustrate the Dull Surprise of the newer film.
- The animated films were beloved for their short, straightforward, and simple — if not simplistic — stories and storytelling. To justify their existence, Beauty and the Beast (2017) or The Little Mermaid (2023) feel obligated to expand upon or address often-minor plot points from the originals and often just raise more questions in the process. Combining this with Award-Bait Song add-ons, this results in lots of Padding.
- Remakes of even older films like Pinocchio (2022, Disney), Dumbo, Cinderella (2015), and Snow White (2025) also struggle with making their mostly-passive protagonists more interesting and with a less meandering story, to the point Dumbo is a Human-Focused Adaptation that runs through most of the original's highlights (with the exception of Dumbo learning to fly without his "magic" feather) in the first half and moves on to a completely new narrative in the second. These struggles are in part because none of these films can change their narratives in truly meaningful ways (i.e. Not His Sled, Truer to the Text, etc.) without risking offending purist adult fans of the originals.
- Values Dissonance means there are some aspects of the films that are questionable in modern films, but it was noted that a lot of changes attempting to fix a problem only exacerbated others. It was compared to taking the original, acclaimed, script and then doing a rewrite based on a Buzzfeed article. Beauty and the Beast (2017) was altered to try and make Belle more assertive and the Beast more refined, but in the process the growing connection and subtle Character Development between the two in the original was lost (Beast went from feral to more civilized through her influence and made kind gestures to show him softening up, the remake made the Beast eloquent from the start and moved those gestures to the servants or be less altruistic). Snow White (2025) trying to soften the depiction of the dwarves (instead of casting dwarf actors in a stereotypical role they made the dwarves Serkis Folk with only a single dwarf actor plus six normal actors), alongside Snow White being one of the many Pinball Protagonists given a more expanded characterization and story that didn't revolve around waiting on a prince to save her, was a key reason for the massive Flame Wars and extensive reshoots it experienced.
- While the rest of Encanto isn’t a slouch to translate to a live setting (e.g. meet ‘n greets at Disney Theme Parks, theatrical productions such as Disney on Ice, etc.), it does have a character-specific example in Camilo, whose signature power is to shape-shift into any human character in the cast. In a stage show, it would be nigh-impossible for the actor playing him to wear lots of costumes (including wigs!) at the same time to easily and convincingly quick-change into many different characters in order to simulate his power. Of course, he could be transforming less frequently and more slowly, or not use his gift at all, but it could end up being rather off-putting seeing that he does it on a regular basis in the movie. This is likely why Camilo is noticeably omitted from all productions of Disney on Ice with an Encanto segment, along with Antonionote , Julieta, and Agustín.
- Enforced for the Marx Brothers comedy Room Service. RKO Pictures reportedly didn't want the movie to deviate too much from the original Broadway play, possibly because they feared too many changes would alienate audiences. The movie ended up failing to play to the Marxes' strengths and ended up a Box-Office Bomb.
Live-Action TV
- Catchphrase had a Board Game adaptation in The '90s, but it's proved difficult to adapt except for as a smartphone game, where it makes sense.
- Doctor Who: While the series has seen a number of mostly well-regarded adaptations in other mediums, two of them are considered far trickier:
- Many fans regard the show as next-to-impossible to adapt into a movie. Much of this stems from the 1963-1989 series' nature as a serialized show, already featuring drawn-out plots that match or even surpass the length of most feature films, making the idea of a movie redundant. Additionally, the series' dense lore and tangled continuity would make it difficult to make a movie that appeals to neophytes, as so much stuff would need to be introduced at once. Only three Doctor Who movies were ever made — the first two were adaptations of already-aired serials set in an independent continuity, while the third was poorly-received by fans thanks to being indecisive about whether it wanted to appeal to longtime fans or newcomers.
- The other medium Doctor Who has a strong amount of difficulty fitting into is video games. While the series' "fighting monsters through time and space" premise would theoretically make for a good game, it's set back by the fact that the Doctor is not a conventional action hero, preferring to confront enemies with guile more often than not, with the Doctor's companions typically acting as The Watson to them. It's also the result of bad timing, as the genre of video games that would suit the show, Adventure Games, were most popular in the 1990s when the television series was cancelled and by the time of the revival, Adventure Games were out of fashion. Consequently, while multiple attempts have been made to create viable Doctor Who video games, only a few of them were particularly well regarded. It says a lot when one notable Doctor Who video game, The Last Dalek, stars a Dalek and not the Doctor.
- Police, Camera, Action!, due to being an Edutainment Show / Gearhead Show has proven to be harder to adapt to another medium (aside from an obscure 1996 book with photo-stills) due to being a Real Life documentary, although a video game based on it would be a difficult exercise, and costly. Outside of parodies, there's been no real adaptations since.
- Super Sentai:
- Samurai Sentai Shinkenger is considered one of the best seasons and a Gateway Series for new fans, but it is also one of the hardest to translate into other languages due to its heavy rooting in uniquely Japanese cultural themes (Pillars of Moral Character, familial honor over profession, etc.). Because it was the first Sentai series Toei worked on after its western adaptation, Power Rangers was seemingly canceled, it's believed that they made a series strictly for themselves as they no longer had to worry about an international audience and how they'd deal with the inevitable cultural clash, and it's why it didn't even receive a Korean dub. However, Power Rangers was Un-Cancelled and the series was adapted into Power Rangers Samurai, which was seen as rather lackluster, in large part due to mostly being an untouched retread that repeated several plot elements and character beats but lacking the cultural assumptions motivating them, confusing western audiences.
- Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger is the 35th Anniversary series in which the rangers transform into past rangers, which naturally makes it really hard to make a good Power Rangers adaptation out of it: the Stock Footage has 15 other Sentai shows which weren't adapted at all and it would be hard (and expensive) to change the footage into only the series which were adapted. Power Rangers Super Megaforce responded to this by... just using the unadapted Sentai teams, and lazily handwaving it as them being teams "never seen on Earth before."
- Prior to the announcement of Power Rangers Cosmic Fury, producer Simon Bennett stated this was why the source series, Uchuu Sentai Kyuranger, would not be given an adaptation. The show features a full team of twelve Rangers, which is a logistical nightmare in terms of giving them all proper character development over a single season. Cosmic Fury took a third option with the show adapting the Kyuranger mecha footage and having the team from Power Rangers Dino Fury in new suits.
Music
- David Bowie:
- Diamond Dogs from 1974 was never the easiest to translate to another medium thanks to its lack of an actual plot— it was written as a Captain Ersatz version of Nineteen Eighty-Four after Bowie failed to secure the rights to make a musical adaptation of the book, but the album foregoes any semblance of a story in favor of simply exploring a general set of themes; it has less of a plot than Ziggy Stardust! The one time Bowie did try to bring Diamond Dogs to another medium was on the stage during the album's associated tour; like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, it was marred by constant technical issues, and Bowie eventually dropped the whole shtick altogether during the second leg of the tour in favor of a far more minimalist, soul-inspired setup.
- 1. Outside from 1995 never received the film adaptation that was suggested for it at one point, being perhaps more directly comparable to Ulysses in that it features a heavily non-linear plot and frequent use of internal monologues (most of which are the songs on the album itself).
- Genesis' 1974 Rock Opera The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is generally considered to be the musical equivalent of Ulysses in terms of works that would be impossible to make a good adaptation of, primarily owing to its Mind Screw plot and heavy use of surreal imagery. The album was already hard enough to adapt on stage; the associated tour required a bevy of extraordinarily elaborate effects, and at no point was all of it ever able to work as intended. Since then, nobody has attempted to adapt The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway into any medium, to say nothing of the performance stage.
- The Nutcracker has proven to be a challenge to adapt beyond the ballet stage. Since the show has its conflict reserved for the first half and is mostly a showcase of music and dancing, nobody seems sure of how to add a plot to a story that is so...plotless. Though Hollywood has certainly tried, no major film adaptation seems to have captured the spirit of the ballet too well.
- Eminem's Slim Shady mythology has had multiple attempts to adapt it, including an Animated Shock Comedy that he played episodes of before his tour dates in 2001, but all have either fallen through or faced severely negative critical response. Part of this is because most of the songs featuring Shady are just stream-of-consciousness punchlines about him doing Chaotic Stupid things, making the character useless for coherent storytelling, especially without the humour of Eminem's Inherently Funny Words, bizarre rhymes and unexpected turns of phrase. The other part of it is that the content of Eminem's lyrics is too disgusting to tolerate in non-audio formats. When Interscope wanted to make an Eminem movie in the early 2000s, Eminem's initial plan was to make a Bloody Hilarious, controversy-baiting shock comedy, but Eminem's label saw the movie as unwatchable grossout, and instead had Eminem take an Autobiographical Role in a serious, gritty drama movie. (And even there, the eventual 8 Mile had its shock comedy content excised from the original script, in which Eminem's character was shown to go into an Animated Shock Comedy Indulgent Fantasy Segue when he wrote his rhymes.)
- It took 10 years after Frank Zappa's death for Thing-Fish to see its long-promised stage production. The plot is so convoluted and directionless that it's hard to make any sense of it, even as the triple-album + libretto it was originally released as, to the point where its stage adaptation in 2003 had to take a number of liberties to ensure that it could even be made at all. At least Uncle Meat was meant to be the soundtrack of a never-released film than a conveyance of the story itself, and Joe's Garage intentionally derailed itself for the sake of humor— Thing Fish, meanwhile, is the story through and through, and attempts to play itself as straight as possible.
- Despite its popularity, Vocaloid has never received a true anime adaptation based on its charactersnote , with fans chalking it up to them being "unadaptable". Basically, the intention of Vocaloid is that the virtual singers are blank slates, with no distinctive personalities and traits. While this approach works well in the sense that they can be used for anything, ironically, this makes it difficult to translate them into an anime, as doing so will mean having to craft "official" personalities for them from scratch, which would taint and hurt their status as interpretive characters, which is a big part of what made them appealing to fans and content creators in the first place.
- This is likely why the planned HBO TV adaptation of Nine Inch Nails' 2007 Concept Album Year Zero died in Development Hell after Trent Reznor failed to find the right writer to execute his ideas. The album's story is basically a Scrapbook Story assembled from a series of now-defunct websites, emails, phone numbers, and even a live event (the Open Source Resistance meeting with the NIN performance cut off by the police raid). Details archived on nin.wiki include a timeline
of a 15-year chain of events that was becoming increasingly more reliant on alternate history until 2022 eventually came and went. The titular "Year Zero" is only six weeks long, has a lot going on around the same time, is largely reliant on internet usage, and is only resolved by sending information back in time that made the audience in 2007 prevent the Bad Future from happening simply by receiving the information. This works for an Alternate Reality Game like the one that promoted the album, but is harder to translate into a medium where more conventional storytelling is expected.
Mythology & Religion
- Anything based on The Prophet Muhammad simply because it is taboo to make any image of Muhammad. So making any kind of visual adaptation of his story is going to be borderline impossible to make without some controversy.
Tabletop Games
- Battleship was based on a board game with no plot beyond just two players trying to locate and sink each other's ships, which sounded like an absurd idea to most people. Universal and Hasbro tried to spice it up by adding some sci-fi elements to the story, but that only made it look like every other blockbuster movie at the time. Ultimately, it ended up flopping (in the U.S., at least), and any plans for a sequel were sunk.
- Champions saw many abortive attempts at adapting itself into a superhero comic, most of which ended in short and unsuccessful runs. Though the quality of those comics was never particularly high (being stuffed wall-to-wall with Fetish Retardant will do that for you), the entire appeal of Champions was supposed to be the fact that it let you play a tabletop game version of a superhero comic. While it does have its own lore, that lore was also purposefully generic—move it into a superhero comic and you just have a generic superhero story.
- The reason so many of the earliest attempts at adapting Dungeons & Dragons to film proved failures in some way or other can be attributed to the difficulty of adapting the game into such a medium. This is because DND is a social game, meaning you have the meta aspect of playing the game, and the story aspect of what the dice are being rolled for. Although the meta aspect is generally more important due to being the reason events can happen, it also is just rolling dice and people playing a character, which isn't going to seem appealing to a casual movie goer. Due to that, films often focus on the fantasy side of DND as a name and at most just reference things from the game, but because DND is still a social game about dice and playing with people, the loss of the meta aspect makes it a generic fantasy movie, which tends to cause people to not want to see the films. As a result, almost every DND movie released exclusively focused on the fantasy side of DND, and ended up failing due to coming across as generic fantasy movies that seem to think just the name DND is enough to get people to watch. It would ultimately take until 2023 for one to come out that gained a very positive reception, and it only did so by incorporating gameplay mechanics into the setting and narrative, making it as close to adapting the meta aspect as possible while avoiding the whole game aspect.
Theatre
- The movie version of The Boy Friend took so long to be made because of the musical's theatrical nature, being a pastiche of real 1920/30 musicals like No No Nanette, the plot is very simple, with a small cast of over-the-top characters that are made for the stage. These flaws present themselves in the movie version with the attempts to make the storyline of the show, the supporting storyline and the backstage drama the main storyline, making a long and dull movie that Ken Russell admitted was harder than any of his controversial movies and Sandy Willson seeing it didn't belong on screen.
- Cats is a play based on a book of poems. Virtually every song is a poem set to music. There's no dialogue in the play, with the story being told through song. The loose, vague story and characterization makes it hard to adapt into other mediums, and even then one of the many criticisms was that the play's structure and thin plot is something one can only accept on the stage. The very specific, campy costumes of the visuals are also difficult to translate to anything but theater, as the main characters are cats that frequently spring into complicated dance numbers but make a few cat-like mannerisms on the side. It ultimately drew on the energy of a live performance with enormous sets, fanciful costumes and boisterous music, which would require an adaptation to match that step for step (an animated film produced by Steven Spielberg was once in the planning stages). Despite its popularity it took until 2019 to get a film adaptation, which attempted to translate as this as actors rendered with CGI to look like cats and Green Screen Sets, and it did not go over well with audiences.
- A Chorus Line is a musical about the lives of Broadway chorus dancers, combining elaborate choreography with musical soliloquys from each of the dancers. As the show is heavily based around Broadway culture and purposefully lacks a main character, the 1985 film adaptation did not do well with critics or audiences. The appeal of seeing all the dancers come together on stage is lost on film, and rather than focus on its Ensemble Cast, the film makes Cassie the main character, even recontextualizing "What I Did For Love" as her Break Up Song to Zach as opposed to the cast singing about their love for their craft. Note that a huge theme of the original story is that every character in the ensemble is important in their own way, but the choice to prioritize Cassie's story to give the film a more traditional narrative undermines this.
- Cirque du Soleil has successfully recorded many of its shows (which usually feature Excuse Plots at best) for the TV/video market, but attempts to adapt them — or at least their acts — into narrative media have by and large failed. The IMAX 3D Movie Short Film Journey of Man worked due to its deliberately episodic "stages of life" plot, brief length, and the shows being excerpted having similar aesthetics to each other. By comparison, the dramatic film built around Alegría was too dark for children and too odd for adults, the Variety Show / Thematic Series hybrid Solstrom came off as a hard-to-market Quirky Work for non-fans and a butchering of the original shows for fans, and Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away's loose stringing of vignettes lifted directly from actual Las Vegas shows upon an original Everywoman's quest resulted in an aimless story and odd tonal shifts due to the shows' clashing visual and aural aesthetics.
- A major criticism people had with the film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen was that, similar to Cats, the original stage show was too inherently theatrical to transition to a cinematic setting. On Broadway, the show is executed with a Minimalist Cast and little in the way of an actual set, instead utilizing dynamic lighting that dominates the stage, matches the music, and showcases Evan's inner feelings and increasing instability. This was completely lost in the transition to film, making the finished movie look a lot less lively and more mundane. Several of the musical's more dreamlike elements were also dropped in this transfer, including the majority of Connor's role, which significantly damaged the audience's understanding of and sympathy for Evan. Multiple plot-relevant songs were also cut, likely to prevent the movie's runtime from being too lengthy; however, the absence of "Good for You" made it feel like Evan never really got any kind of comeuppance in the end, to say nothing of how the other cut songs severely limited the side characters' development. And, finally, the main plot of the musical is something of an Audience-Alienating Premise when taken at face value, and removing it from the spectacle and theatricality of Broadway forced the viewers to confront it more directly, which made Evan very unlikable for some.
- Despite being a popular and near-unanimously acclaimed musical, making a film adaptation of Hadestown wouldn’t be an easy feat to successfully accomplish, as the narrative of the show is highly embedded in theatre. Firstly, there is No Fourth Wall. Hermes urgently narrates to the crowd and watches the story unfold throughout. Several songs are sung directly towards the audience (with one crediting the musicians). This part works through theatre’s intimacy between actors and audience, but film doesn’t have the same actual interactivity. And one of the main themes of the show is that, regardless of what happens at the end of the story, the company will continue to tell it again and again anyway, with the hope that, one day, Orpheus might succeed in his quest. The suspense and effect of this is reflected through the repeat of theatre, but film has only one rendition to go by and therefore the exact same experience every time. It doesn’t help that the musical is fully sung-through with almost no breaks between songs. Understandably, no such attempt at an actual Hadestown movie adaptation has ever been considered, and with a Filmed Stage Production having been recorded in early 2025, it will most likely stay that way for a very long time.
- Into the Woods's two-act structure is vital to the original story, as the actions made in the first half directly initiate the conflict in the second. While the film does have a fake-out ending, it jumps right into the events of Act II — without an intermission to signify the passage of time, this results in Ending Fatigue. Many believe that this structural difference between the play and film is ultimately what gives the former the upper hand. Unless the film could somehow squeeze in an intermission (which many movies have done in the past), or even split the story into two parts, it will not have the same impact as the original show.
- While most of Little Shop of Horrors wasn't difficult to adapt for the 1986 film adaptation, the ending proved to be a case of this. Originally, the film was supposed to retain the stage musical's ending where Audrey and Seymour are killed and Audrey II begins its spectacular conquest of Earth to the tune of the song "Don't Feed the Plants". However, the Downer Ending proved to be a disaster with test audiences and the creators were forced to create a Focus Group Ending where Audrey and Seymour live and Audrey II is defeated. Director Frank Oz later realized that the differences between theatre and film were the reason why the original ending was received so poorly.
Oz: In a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow. In a movie, they don't come out for a bow, they're dead, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive.
- Sleuth: The major twist of Inspector Doppler actually being a disguised Milo is much harder to pull off on screen than on stage. However good a job the actor does in altering their performance, the camera being much closer to them than the audience watching a play makes it much easier to spot. And even if someone did notice it was the same actor while watching the play, they might well assume it was just part of the theatrical tradition of the same actor playing different roles between the two acts. The 1972 film resorted to crediting Doppler as a separate, fictional actor in the opening credits.
- Timon of Athens has received no major big-screen adaptations; even Cymbeline had a film with Ethan Hawke and Milla Jovovich attached to it in 2014. This might be due to the fact that the play is incredibly bleak, to the point where it's considered more of a "Problem Play" than a true tragedy; William Shakespeare's other tragedies had some form of spectacle (such as the cannibalism and mass murder in Titus Andronicus) or comic relief (Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet) and the tragic flaws of the characters in those plays were genuinely tragic (Titus was to blame for his own downfall, and Romeo and Juliet were impulsive and couldn't communicate their love to their new family members properly). Timon's tragic flaw is that he's too generous.
Toys
- The idea of a Barbie live-action film was touted around since The '80s, and went through a ton of writer, director, cast and studio changes, mainly due to the factors of Barbie being synonymous with the Girl-Show Ghetto, the overall idealistic and bright tone of the franchise risking Sweetness Aversion, the toyline generally not having much of a plot or lore behind it, and most prior storylines such as the Barbie animated movies and Barbie Vlog revolving around either straightforward Fairy Tale adaptations just with Barbie, simplistic original fantasy stories that just happened to star Barbie, or a Slice of Life with trivially low stakes. It was ultimately the association of Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and Warner Bros. that cracked the code and produced a financial and critical success out of the toy line in 2023, largely by making the movie a metatextual romp about Barbie as a pop culture phenomenon rather than attempting a conventional adaptation of the character.
- In the early 2000s, LEGO has turned down adaptation proposals of their popular BIONICLE line because every pitch tried to add humans, and the company was adamant that the series took place in an alien, human-free universe. Other factors hindering adaptations were LEGO's strict anti-violence policies and the franchise's reliance on lengthy story arcs and interconnected mysteries being built up and slowly unveiled across years. Miramax Films and Creative Capers and later Universal and Tinseltown Toons managed to secure Direct-to-Video film deals by allowing LEGO to keep some control over the stories. But even so, all of the films suffered heavily from constantly referencing things new viewers wouldn't know, neutering violent scenes, arbitrarily changing character personalities, compressing the plots to heck, and aping popular movies of the time — the third movie mirroring the plot of Revenge of the Sith reportedly made one of the LEGO writers mad. And to make up for the "no humans" rule, many characters were given odd redesigns to make them more expressive, which divided the fans greatly.
Visual Novels
- Infamous H-title Bible Black was once optioned for a Live-Action Adaptation, and it died a swift death in Development Hell. Bible Black's plot is dark, confusing, grotesque, and straight-up weird. Condensing the game into a coherent, two hour experience is a tall order for any writing team. Not to mention the first title has plenty of Multiple Endings to collect, which would not translate well to a movie. Media Blasters also confirmed it was going to be Tamer and Chaster than the source material, which is difficult to do as the deviancy is directly tied to the main plot. Add to that non-Japanese actors playing Japanese characters and the premise alone being an Audience-Alienating Premise for almost all movie goers, and it's no wonder the movie didn't get far into production other than a few stills and a teaser trailer.
- Some criticisms of the CLANNAD anime, particularly the ending of ~After Story~, are largely the result of the differences between anime and visual novels as storytelling mediums. The ending of the visual novel is a proper Omega Ending that requires the player to collect all Light Orbs and view all the other main scenarios before unlocking it, ensuring that Tomoya and Nagisa's happy ending feels properly earned. The anime, which can't replicate this process, is consequently much less effective in foreshadowing this outcome, giving the appearance of a Deus ex Machina ending even though that was not what the writers intended.
- On top of struggling with the usual hurdles of adapting the Visual Novel medium, Dies Irae has a few more factors further complicating things. In addition to the routes needing to be read in a specific order due to the Eternal Recurrence plot going on, it has the added hurdle of the novels sheer length which means it would require a lot of episodes to cover everything. Even Fate barely scraped by with its 24 episodes for just one of its routes which of course means that the Dies Irae anime's episode count of 17 was far from enough.
But further making things more difficult is that, due to the power scale of the verse, it uses a lot of fairly flowery language to describe abstract concepts and ideas that would be extremely difficult to portray on screen in contrast to the written format. Add in all of the both internal monologues and philosophical musings by the characters that is essential to understanding them and their motivations on top of all this and it is no surprise that any attempt at an adaptation will be fighting an uphill battle. - While Eternal Fighter Zero's other source visual novels, AIR, Kanon, and One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e all have anime adaptations, MOON never got one, and One only has a couple of OVAs with enough episodes to be counted on one hand. The anime of One doesn't bother explaining the story or characters to those who haven't played the visual novel, cuts out all iconic scenes of all character routes, and has even less action and tangible conflict than Air and Kanon. Meanwhile, MOON has a plot of a H-Game and is so dark, disgusting, and graphic that no studio will ever risk making an anime adaptation without cutting out much of the content and therefore making the story incomprehensible.
- Fate/stay night, while one of the more successful VNs in terms of adaptations, has a number of elements that are very hard to preserve in other media. Most of these relate to it not only having multiple very long routes (each one is about ⅔ the length of The Lord of the Rings), but requiring them to be played through in a specific order.
- The first route, Fate, takes the time to put all its cards on the table for the player's sake, and demonstrates how the central conflict is intended to play out. This makes it pretty straightforward to adapt since all the exposition is already there— in fact the first anime adaption came just two years after release, with the only major deviation being the removal of the porn scenes. That said, it is also generally considered the blandest of the three routes, because it explores Shirou's character the least and more or less goes how you'd expect it to gonote , which is likely why it tends to fare poorly in adaptations after that initial one. Even that first adaptation threw in scenes or references from the other two routes in order to better pace the run-time and give characters Out of Focus in Fate more character.
- The second route, Unlimited Blade Works, has a clear point of divergence that allows the story to focus on certain characters and events that were glossed over or even Killed Offscreen the first time around, but this point is before more of the exposition happens. Shirou actually complains several times that he has to play catch-up with all the magi-babble Tohsaka spits out, but the game knows the player's already familiar with these concepts. This all makes UBW very difficult to adapt to another medium without destroying the pacing with tons of additional exposition, and even the best-regarded attempts are admitted to have some Continuity Lockout. Furthermore, the UBW route is the most fight heavy, as it focuses on the Servants duking it out more than the others, so it relies on a lot of exposition and detailed breakdowns of the characters abilities, which doesn't flow well outside the confines of a visual novel.
- The third and final route, Heaven's Feel, was long considered completely un-adaptable. Put simply, the plot is driven by an In-Universe case of Off the Rails and without understanding how things are supposed to go (which is completely skipped, as the player's been shown twice by now), it's next to impossible to see where things go wrong, let alone understand the characters' reactions. Additionally, a third subset of characters are focused on, and take full advantage of two whole routes worth of Foreshadowing; without it, most of their development teeters back and forth between Diabolus ex Machina and Ass Pull. Finally, the route includes two alternate endings ("Mind of Steel" and "Sparks Liner High") which are among the most popular scenes in the VN, but impossible to work into the main story.
- In all routes, Shirou is a First-Person Smartass with severe psychological issues which leave him unable to laugh or smile, and compel him to help others even when he knows they're just using him; at the same time, he knows he's strange and tries hard to conceal it from others. Whenever the player is given a choice on how Shirou should act, usually picking the more reasonable options will result in him dying in bizarre and horrific ways, with the option that sounds crazy being the only way to progress. The story actually encourages you collect as many of these bad endings as possible before moving on to the correct answer, and they often provide Foreshadowing for later plot developments. None of this is easy to work into the adaptations (which are linear and usually don't include any of Shirou's snarky narration), resulting in Shirou coming across as far more of The Fool than his VN counterpart.
- While the anime adaptations of Higurashi: When They Cry were fairly successful and led to a full-blown Cash-Cow Franchise, the same can not be said for that of its successor, Umineko: When They Cry. The story is massive, features dozens of characters, and heavy post-modernism elements. The anime suffered from being a Compressed Adaptation, with key scenes either being heavily abridged or omitted entirely. This led to the mystery being unsolvable due to important clues not appearing. For comparison, the manga had over 40 volumes while the stage-play has stuck to adapting one episode per 3-hour show.
Webcomics
- Andrew Hussie has said that Homestuck was meant to be the sort of story that could only be told on the internet, as it makes extensive use of Infinite Canvas and multimedia. When asked by a fan how he would hypothetically adapt Homestuck as a film, Hussie answered that he would throw the plot away entirely, and just write something set in the same universe and that conveyed the same themes as the comic.
Web Original
- RWBY is a series that would very likely face difficulties in attempting a Live-Action Adaptation. A key part of the series's appeal are the over-the-top, Rule of Cool-driven, anime-inspired fight scenes featuring complex Swiss Army Weapons that would undoubtedly be hell on the budget. In addition, the show's current length of nine seasons and counting would be hard to trim down to a film's runtime without losing a lot of the story and character growth, as well as running the risk of the teenage main cast quickly outgrowing their roles as real life time moves on much quicker than the timeline of the story, as the aforementioned nine seasons all take place over the course of just under two years at the lowest. There's also the fact that, due to the closure of Rooster Teeth, the series's main plotline was left unfinished, meaning any adaptation would have to either end extremely abruptly or come up with its own ending (though the final volume, at least, did seem to be building towards a conclusion).
- SCP Foundation: While fans have been clamoring for a big name company to adapt the Foundation since the mid-2010s, it's unlikely to ever happen. The Foundation and all of its works are created under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
license, meaning that any adaptation must allow derivative works of itself, which would be a nightmare for the legal teams of major studios. Some independent projects have popped up (such as Confinement), there are some Serial Numbers Filed Off derivatives (such as the FBC from Control (2019)) and readings of individual works are posted to Youtube frequently, but only a single 'professional' adaptation, of There Is No Antimemetics Division, currently exists.
Western Animation
- The live-action adaptation of Æon Flux is very unpopular with fans of the original cartoon, but the entire format of the show makes it hard to see what the filmmakers really could have done with it. The show has very little plot, not a lot of characterization, and lends itself rather poorly to a feature-length format. That's not to say there was nothing the filmmakers could have done better, but there was a good reason this time due to the continued low quality of live-action adaptations.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender has had two Live Action Adaptations, the 2010 film The Last Airbender and the 2024 series Avatar: The Last Airbender. While the latter series was much better received, and the former is widely derided by fans, both adaptations suffer from being a Compressed Adaptation by necessity to fit their runtimes (under 2 hours and within 8 episodes respectively), which means that several bits of the original animated series's extensive worldbuilding have to be discarded or altered. The show also focused on very young characters with some fudging of the age of the performer. A live action role places a lot of strain on a young actor to do a quality performance, in addition to replicating the franchise's Supernatural Martial Arts. Especially with the film their solution was to use Coconut Superpowers to fill in the gaps (leading to an infamous Special Effect Failure known as "The Pebble Dance
"). The live action series didn't suffer as much from the translation to live action, as the longer runtime certainly helped, but still suffered in the inability to include a Breather Episode. But it did manage to pull some interesting twists and further seasons were ordered.
- While it is very possible to build video games around most of the cast from My Little Pony, the same cannot be said for Discord, whose incredibly godlike powers of Shapeshifting and reality warping that go far beyond the power of most of the other powerful magic users in the setting make him very difficult to feature in a video game. On the one hand, featuring him in a video game as a player character or antagonist would require somehow managing to make the game challenging, yet still winnable, despite his blatant Story-Breaker Power; yet lowering his power level or even taking his powers away (the latter of which has actually happened in the show more than once) to create a manageable challenge defeats the whole purpose of involving The Omnipotent on either side. Case in point: In Mega Pony, all he does as the Final Boss is pilot a Wily Machine and throw shot-deflecting fireballs. Not to say that it's impossible to have a similar character designed with video games in mind (such as Teseo).
- An episode of The Simpsons has an In-Universe case of this, in a flashback plot where Homer and Marge are crew members on a film Krusty the Clown is directing based on his favorite sci-fi novel The Sands of Spacenote which was stated to be impossible to adapt, with Krusty intent to make it as accurate to the book as possible.
- The Transformers: For a character-specific example, Arcee
is a notoriously difficult character to get right in toy form, to the point that even the Masterpiece toy was largely derided. The problem is that Arcee's character model
◊ simply does not have the parts necessary to turn into anything, having been so heavily modified from her original prototype that she's essentially just a Robot Girl with a few flaps on her shoulders. Consequently, your options are to have a somewhat functional car mode that folds up into a massive chunk on her back
◊, have a car that looks like a folded-up woman
◊, or redesign Arcee completely so that she can actually turn into something
◊. This is before getting into the perceived difficulties of selling a hot-pink-and-white female character in the boy's toys aisle, which has seen a lot of Arcee toys get cancelled over the years, including her original toy for the '86 movie.