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Watching it happen over and over, my impression has been that: (a) Creative leaders (producer, director, writer) hired for these projects chafe at having anyon
by ethbr0 4y ago
Watching it happen over and over, my impression has been that:
(a) Creative leaders (producer, director, writer) hired for these projects chafe at having anyone tell them what to do (and this especially includes the source material!).
(b) Creative leaders hired for these projects are typically not themselves fans, and do not elevate anyone who is a fan to a position of authority, and so lack even an awareness of the material. And critically, an awareness of what current fans enjoyed in it. Which is sometimes a feeling or deeper than just "these specific characters or places."
(c) As big budget projects, and costly rights acquisitions to start with, there are powerful committees put in place to keep creative on the rails, who are even more (a) & (b) themselves.
As a result, there is literally no one in the room with a powerful voice who understands why so many people liked this thing.
Say what you want about recent Marvel & Star Wars, but Feige/Favreau/Filoni seem to have a better sense and balance of "Why did people like this thing originally?" and "What will attract people who aren't fans?"
- dylan604 4y agoWelcome to the concept of creative license.
- ethbr0 4y agoThere's a distinction between creative -license and -arrogance.
- dylan604 4y agothere is always an inherent bit of arrogance anytime someone reworks the works of the original creator, so i'm still not sure what you're distinction is. just by attempting to update/modify the story signals you think your version is better. arrogance.
- ethbr0 4y agoThere's a difference in several orders of magnitude, to me, in adapting an unknown stage play into a movie (for example) vs adapting Tolkien. In the former, you could argue your own creative vision might be "better" (in the loose sense), given the lack of popular success of the source. In the later, it'd be a fair amount of hubris to assume you can make something more beloved than Tolkien's works.
- dylan604 4y agoHubris the size and shape of someone named Jackson? The BBC for making an animated Hobbit? No written tome is ever going to come out unscathed in a TV/film adaptation. Have you seen the Amazon Jack Ryan series, the Without Remorse movie? Hubris, arragance, etc. You're coming back to words that mean the same thing. Just because it's a work you personally are not familiar does not make it more/less egregious that someone has taken the material in their own direction from the original. It's just that you have a personal connection to the orginal and may or may not like the reworked version.
- ethbr0 4y agoIt's not a subjective but rather objective evaluation -- millions of more people are aware of Tolkien lore than... something off-Broadway. That's why Amazon paid $$$$ for the rights. It's unreasonable to ignore that and claim that taking the same amount of artistic license with Tolkien is the same as taking it with something else. It is objectively different to adapt a more popular and well-known work.
- lordlimecat 4y agoIf someone is rolling into a Tolkien IP believing they're better at high fantasy than Tolkien, it goes from "arrogance" to "megalomania". Sometimes it really is best to minimize the artistic license and let the masters work shine through.