We used to live in simple times. If a movie was based on an anime or a video game, it was bad. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. They were bad. Like, to an insane degree. In terms of box office poison, they were the cream of the crop.
Keywords in that paragraph being ‘used to.’ Times have changed. Now we’re getting movies and TV shows based on video games and anime that are actually… GOOD?!?!
Don’t get me wrong, there are still a ton of duds. Live action Cowboy Bebop, the Uncharted movie, the Halo show, the list goes on and on and on. There are literal decades worth of picks to choose from. But step by step, bit by bit, we’re getting there!
The number of good video game adaptations is increasing rapidly. The Mario movie was surprisingly good. The Last of Us show quickly rose to the top of HBO Max (I’m not dropping the HBO, screw you). The Sonic movies have found a surprisingly loyal audience, earning them not one, but two films with a third on the way! Castlevania was awesome, and the new sequel show looks really good too! Then there’s Arcane, a genuinely incredible show based on League of Legends of all things!
Yes, I know League has a really fleshed out world that’s actually pretty cool. But I’ll be cold in the ground before I stop making fun of that game.
Anime adaptations are… getting there. Most of them are still terrible. But there is hope! Netflix’s adaptation of ‘One Piece’ was stunningly good not just as an adaptation but as its own show! If future anime adaptations learn from it’s success, they could work!
Honestly, I’m amazed we’ve gotten to this point. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m more surprised that it took Hollywood so long to figure out how to do it. In reality, adapting these is the same as adapting a book or a comic.
When you adapt anything from one medium to another, you need to cut out things that wouldn’t work from the first medium and add things that would in the new one. With a book, you can’t film a ten-minute sequence of some dude reading the original text word-for-word. Why should it be any different with games or anime?
Just look at One Piece again. The showrunners were smart; they knew the over-the-top expressions and character personalities wouldn’t translate well. So they re-wrote the characters to be slightly more grounded while still maintaining the core of what makes them great in the first place. The results speak for themselves; One Piece has dominated Netflix’s charts for weeks now!
I’ll stop ranting about One Piece now, I promise.
Are all live action adaptations gonna be great from here on out? I wish, but no. We’ll still get plenty of movies and shows that try to be one-to-one with their source material and try to ‘replace’ the original because video games/animation isn’t ‘real’ art. It isn’t as though we’ve left that toxic energy behind.
But we’re going in the right direction. Maybe someday we can leave that energy behind. Then we can get a whole bunch of cool shows and movies that can exist alongside those original shows and anime.
And it all begins with writer’s being paid more. Here’s hoping that strike keeps going until it wields positive results.
Jonah's Books & Rants 
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