WORDS WITH MR. KAUMANS- KEVIN KAUMANS
In all my 19 years of living, I’ve seen many attempts by movie studios to adapt a popular book or video game and turn it into a movie or TV series.
And from what I’ve seen, rarely does it work. Sure, there are some good movies adapted from books and games, take the “Harry Potter” series or the new “Super Mario Brothers” movie.
But when you look at Hollywood’s history of movies they’ve made based off of books, most of them are disregarded by critics as quick cash grabs with no heart or loyalty to the source material. Take the new “Avatar” series on Netflix, many fans hate it due to the “creative” changes they made by changing up the source material. I won’t get into all the details, but basically the live-action version took away many things from the source material and changed it.
The same thing happened with live-action “Percy Jackson” movies. Even the author of the books, Rick Riordan, denounced the movies, saying the people making the movies completely disregarded all the things he said during production and made it into a typical teen drama with a nonsensical plot.
And that’s the main problem with movies based on books: They don’t stick to the source material because they think they know better than the person who made the characters in the first place.
The same thing goes with video game adaptations. Well, kind of.
Not only is sticking to the source material a big problem with movie producers, but how to go about with making the game into a movie or series. Take the Fallout or Elder Scroll games for example: these are RPG games that feature a protagonist with no set gender, look, or voice.
If someone were to make Fallout: New Vegas, for example, into a TV series, how would that even work? The game allows players to be either a heroic savior of the wastelands or an apathetic psychopath who kills everyone they come across just because they can. Fallout: New Vegas has so many moral choices in it there’s no way the producers can make it where the Courier makes a choice that doesn’t at least enrage one part of the fandom because “That’s not the right choice to make.”
