Why are books often darker than their adaption counterparts?

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Each time I read the book that a movie I liked was based on I end up finding harsher elements more than once.

 

[MasterEn]

Each time I read the book that a movie I liked was based on I end up finding harsher elements more than once.

i think that is the case about 99% of the time, from what i read and hear about.

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

i think that is the case about 99% of the time, from what i read and hear about.

While more people would watch a movie (so I can understand that toning down stuff like violence) I also think that maybe words on paper can talk about more solemn subject or description of things that would be traumatising if shown on a screen.

And maybe because if something's more family friendly it will garant more sales (Jurassic Park is still a great movie, just with less horror compared to the book).

 

[MasterEn]

While more people would watch a movie (so I can understand that toning down stuff like violence) I also think that maybe words on paper can talk about more solemn subject or description of things that would be traumatising if shown on a screen.

And maybe because if something's more family friendly it will garant more sales (Jurassic Park is still a great movie, just with less horror compared to the book).

yep. every medium has a built in limit. books and comics have page limits, which can go into the thousands and have a long time to establish and set up everything it needs to for the story, setting and characters.
movies have a limit on run time. and if the movie plays in theaters, 90 minutes is the goal. tv shows tend to be limited to 11, 22 and 44 minutes but can have multiple episodes to tell a story.
same for games as well.
family friendliness is definitely a goal a lot of companies aim for. endless potential customers and fans. it's the main reason why bowsette can't be a canon character in mario. she's not for good little boys and girls.

 

[RageBurner]

Basically because, in general, the wider the reach of a medium, the more catered to a wider audience it has to be. As such, a lot of elements get cut, adapted or otherwise flanderized to make sure individual 983747471-2 won't be a living landmine and cause the adaptation to fail commercially.

 

[Bonkers225]

Purely a marketing strategy from Hollywood to make the most money as possible. People generally don't like it, which they'll usually find out from test screenings.

 

[bjork]

Basically because, in general, the wider the reach of a medium, the more catered to a wider audience it has to be. As such, a lot of elements get cut, adapted or otherwise flanderized to make sure individual 983747471-2 won't be a living landmine and cause the adaptation to fail commercially.

It's definitely this. The book that immediately springs to mind is Let the Right One In, where there's

Spoiler: a subplot that would've been weird in the movie

an undead molestor guy going around with his dick out or something?

It's been so long that it's fuzzy in my memory but I remember reading the book and thinking, "yeah, this would've never worked in a movie they wanted to make money."

 

[Clippy]

I feel that books, especially horror stuff, will always be darker because when I watch a movie I simply see what the director has in store for me. When I read I imagine the horrors and my brain colors them in a very personal way.

 

[ATenderLad]

There's also just the advantage of describing a characters growing dread in text, an author can tell us the pants-shitting terror is weighing down on the protagonist, a movie needs to communicate with good acting, direction, music...

It's just tougher to get darker emotions across well in film than movies, I think, though when it's done well I think the payoff is higher.

Edit: Basically what Clippy said, beat me to it.

 

[Leifang]

You can kind of describe things in print that wouldn't pass visual censorship, for example Mass Effect is very tame on violence, there's a lot of deaths but it's rarely going past cartoonish disintegration or ragdolling. In the books Drew Karpyshin describes Cerberus maiming a quarian in detail, down to what happens when the eyelids get torn off... and red sand withdrawal. I still have nightmares. Even a regular rifle volley has detailed biological description of all the gory parts that get shattered when someone's shoulder turned into paste. In games, you just see flashes on the screen.

Otherwise, it depends, very few adaptations are exact, in Lord of the Rings you have entire chapters and major secondary characters cut for pacing, but then battle scenes expanded instead of fade-outs in the book. It's just right. Hobbit is darker in movie form, definitely, original is a children's story in tone. A lot of people disliked the changes, but I loved it because I knew they won't give more high budgets for fantasy combat scenes on big screen any time soon, so I just wanted to watch huge formations of elves fighting orks and more Legolas. I don't care if it's not accurate, it was fanservice to me.

Bond has a curious history of adaptations. Goldfinger is much better on action as a movie, but removes the absolutely insane internal monologues Bond has about lesbians and Koreans in the book. Most 007 movies also doubled the sex compared to books. Roger Moore era films got more comical, and Dalton got gritty detailed scenes despite not actually adapting books, i.e. License to Kill borrowed a graphic shark attack straight from Live and Let Die, just changed the victims and context... Dalton movies are very close to earlier books in tone, still Casino Royale changed a lot of events because it needed to adapt the story where there's basically zero action in and is set during early Cold War... they kept intact the ball torture scene almost exactly tho.

Philip K. Dick adaptations usually change the story a lot, Total Recall expanded a 40-50 minute novella into a full length movie and added a lot of violence, but somehow simplified We Can Remember it For You Wholesale's story, and got rid of extra plot twists at the end. They also plugged in the three-boobed lady from the Golden Man, an unrelated short... there was a one season series Electric Dreams based on his works, also mostly inaccurate... if you watch one episode, make it "Kill All Others", it's very relevant.

I can't really think of THAT many movie adaptations that were significantly darker in print. Maybe with exception of manga, which is almost always more unhinged compared to anime... Even when it goes the other way around, the manga novelization (mangaization?) of Fate Zero is significantly more brutal than the original series. Which is also pretty dark compared to VN, oh the anime version of visual novel removed the sex scenes, that happens a lot unless they're adapting a nukige like Bible Black.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Because books don't really have to worry about ratings or effects or anything like that. As long as the author can combine the right words to create the most terrifying of mental images, that's getting done.

 

[RageBurner]

There's also just the advantage of describing a characters growing dread in text, an author can tell us the pants-shitting terror is weighing down on the protagonist, a movie needs to communicate with good acting, direction, music...

It's just tougher to get darker emotions across well in film than movies, I think, though when it's done well I think the payoff is higher.

Edit: Basically what Clippy said, beat me to it.

The stars really need to align properly for this to work (otherwise there's no way to call upon and Old One, after all).

 

[Stingy Perry Stingy Perry]

Movie adaptations tends to notch down some if not every element of its source material to cater to a wider audience.

 

[miguk miguk]

Different types of media have different budgets to deal with due to the medium they are in. And they attract different audiences both due to the nature of the medium and how they are marketed. Consider:

• Books: Creation is mostly on the writer, a little on the editor. Technical budget hasn't changed in ages. Cheap product. Tons of competition beyond any other medium. Less overt marketing. Audience can be any niche segment of society or general.
• Movies: Tons of staff working on it, sometimes several commanding high pay. Technical budget continues to rise. Price varies based on delivery method (theater, disc, streaming). Doesn't compete with too much at theaters, but a lot on streaming. Massive marketing campaigns. Audience has to be general for high budget/studio films (mid education, mid tastes), niche for low budget/indie films (higher education, more diverse tastes).
• Live theater: Plenty of staff. Higher budget than you'd think. Price of admission is high due to limited seating. Marketing varies based on how new it is. Audience is picky AF, and yet prefers light entertainment.
• TV: Big staff but often less costly than movies. Lower budget than film, higher than theater. Competes with other shows, but gets heavy marketing by the channel/service. Audience is general and doesn't want to be challenged during their after-work relax session.
• Games: High staff, high budgets in corporate, low in indie. Massive competition. Massive marketing. Audience is typically young and not know to handle mature art.

So let's say you want to make a story into a medium. You try shopping it around to different publishers, and they give you different replies:

• Book publisher: Sounds great! The unique ideas you have in here will target this niche we are trying to sell to.
• Film studio: It sounds good, but the abstract elements have to go, the cast needs to be consolidated into less characters, and the ending needs to be happier. We need Joe Average to go to the theater for this one.
• Indie studio: This is great, but we need to cut the budget down because we can't afford the CGI.
• Broadway: This isn't an adaptation or remake of something. You don't even have any songs. How are we supposed to get people to watch this?
• TV studio: Sounds good, but we need to make the characters more typical TV, the drama more soapy, the locations less diverse (reuse some, please), the story more episodic, and some filler so we can get at least 16 episodes this season. Oh, and only half the story will be used to tease the audience to demand another season.
• Game studio: We need to remove the themes, undertones, and subtext from the story so even the most immature fans will get it. Also, we're replacing the unhappy ending.
• Indie dev: Looks good; we're going to make this look like a GBC game because we can't afford to make it AAA. I'm sure someone will play it.

So you get the most freedom with book writing because you can write for any audience you want and sell yourself as "the author for people who like X", as books are low budget and trying to compete on originality. The other mediums have much wider but more narrow-minded audiences, most of which can't handle the specific niche elements of your book, so changes have to be made or else the studio wastes its money trying to get more people than they can to see it. They can try to adapt it more accurately, but the budget is likely to suffer in the process and the audience will shrink.

 

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

Movies aren't only movies, they are also in grand part an investment made by corporations and individuals seeking to profit in a super competitive industry, so they need to adjust the source material to an approach that is less risky as possible while still maintaining the interest of the public. Basically meaning that investors can't afford to lose money because the public reception might be too negative because they might be too impacted by the tone of the movie, so they tend to stick to usual softer formulas.
You see this in other industries like anime, with how the Isekai formula became successful and then the investors thought "hey, this sells a lot, make something identical to that so we can get some money too" and thus the industry became so over-saturated with almost identical anime with little actual value. Same with game industry with the usual AAA atmospheric realistic cinematic experience games.

 

[dropsmegamega]

because some stuff is just too fucked up to actually show

 

[miguk miguk]

because some stuff is just too fucked up to actually show

I see you also read Stephen King's IT. (From the era when the man did so much coke he couldn't remember writing Cujo.)

 

[Bakuma1997]

Easy... books lack light like a TV or a Projector *Rimshot*

 

[DunkeyKong]

Like what @Clippy and @ATenderLad have said, it was like a different perspective. From directors POV to the readers, it might not as scary

Our own mind can give ourselves the biggest dread since only we know what we're really scared of. But sure, maybe some biblical angel stuff would be enough to scared most of the people

However, some of these can still be a great adaptations without removing anything that makes it good in the first place. But of course, most of them are either censored (quite heavily) or just removed the entire gore or basically the "painful to look at" sequence

It depends though

 

[Xdqwerty Xdqwerty]

More people watch films than read books

 

[Izzy]

I got a few examples to roll with on this one; Dune, Akira and IT. Now if you read of them, you gotta realize that the lore is FAR heavier for reader consumption than over the movie form. Now if it took two versions to draw out IT and Dune, lore would be that reason. A lot had to be changed for it to be acceptable for the general audience to watch it. Now you got something like Akira. If you seen any of Katsuhiro Otomo's work, it's very jarring...it's almost on par with other masters like Go Nagai and Yoshiyuki Tomino in that respect. I speak from experience cause I had a book series (out of print now, but currently an offsite project of mine) that had a LOT going on with the main character and a lot of it had to be toned down for public consumption. Now let's say I made a revival of the series, I'd tweak what was already there on the original and bring it out for use. For example, my character had made some high-tech weaponry but never used it in his time, but it was used in a later era of the timeline. I could tweak it to where a crisis was so cataclysmic that there was a legit use for it. Now let's go to anything King had done, a lot had to go to edit hell just so the public could take it in. I don't know about the rest of you but I've seen my share of J-Horror in both live and animated forms where most I'll get it out of it would be a twitch or a shiver. Western horror not so much cause...it's hardly that. Not as it was during the 60s to 90s. I rather have something that'll have me so focused that the only thing that'll have me jump is a door knock. I feel if you want the true experience is through the actual book series because they don't skimp on the details of how out there the environment can go and it has a more surreal feel than over seeing it on the big screen.

 

[water_kooler]

Nobody has the patience to read a book. To reach a widespread audience, movies cater to the lowest common denominator. Books are more personal. A connoisseur appreciates literature and cinema film is only an imitation of art.

 

[Izzy]

Nobody has the patience to read a book. To reach a widespread audience, movies cater to the lowest common denominator. Books are more personal. A connoisseur appreciates literature and cinema film is only an imitation of art.

All too true, what's even crazier is the cost.

 

[ekkolocria]

Yeah, I really do think it's just a mix of "This would be hard to sell given the extreme content" and "that's a bit too fucked up for the target audience to show visually"

Like as a kid I was pissed about the shitty Despero adaption but honest how do you do a one-for-one adaption of that without it being too fucked up for kids?

 

[miguk miguk]

Nobody has the patience to read a book. To reach a widespread audience, movies cater to the lowest common denominator. Books are more personal. A connoisseur appreciates literature and cinema film is only an imitation of art.

Film is definitely an art. There are plenty of great works that have been done on film that books could not capture. Show me a pure text book that matches the visual splendor of Baraka. Show me a book that has the atmosphere of Blade Runner. (No, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? doesn't count; it has the same story, but not the music and visuals. Even PKD was shocked how well the A/V created the world he envisioned.) You might have examples, but none that match the cinematic quality.

The difference between them in not lesser or greater; they are just different mediums. Nobody rolls their eyes at Les Misérables on stage because it isn't a book. It's a just different art form.