When you spend any amount of time in a particular medium and/or genre, there’s always a desire to see it expand beyond what it is. Some go whole hog over the years, where you have something like Star Wars go from a single movie to a monolith that’s evergreen in creating sales, new characters, stories and adventures (whether you like it or not). Other times you have something that’s so good but never truly goes beyond its original work. Or it can take decades to be properly realized, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy (yes, I love the animation too, but still). It’s not limited to age where you wish for things to be adapted into either wider forms or to different forms, but when you get older you start to look for more interesting things to be adapted that can be a challenge. One of the best adaptations to hit in the last couple of years continues to be A Game of Thrones, which has in our opinion masterfully used the right material from the books with minimal changes when taken into context.
And once you have something like this, fans then start to scour their libraries to see what else should be given that treatment. And you know once something is a hit like that, the studios are doing the same. Even with the winnowing of various comic book movies in the last couple of years that comes at the same time of some big blockbusters, there’s still a lot of properties being acquired and put into production. So we want to know, what would you want to see adapted into another form, what form and why? Here’s some of what we’d want to see.
The big guilty pleasure would be to see Adam Warren’s Empowered get adapted into either a really saucy live action version or a heavily fanservice version true to its origins in anime form. Oh my.
When it comes to books, there’s so many things over the years that could be well done. Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality? Isaac Asimov has a trove of potential, but the Elijah Bailey novels like Caves of Steel could easily be adapted into modern sensibilities and acquire new meaning along the way. I’d love for a strong version of the Dragonlance books to be done to wash away that awful animated movie, but I’d be even more keen to see an HBO style adaptation of either the Darksword trilogy or The Rose of the Prophet books.
The granddaddy of comic book adaptations for me would have to be a Legion of Superheroes film, but that’s unfilmable for plenty of reasons. Superhero comics were my bread and butter growing up so I’m hopeful for DC Comics to get an animated miniseries done for Crisis on Infinite Earths, but that’s a huge pipedream. Maybe we can get Before Watchmen‘s books made into films just to annoy the fans. But really, for comics to film, the original Aliens vs. Predator is a must in order to wipe away the stain of the two “things” that were made.
So what about you? What do you want to see shifted from its original medium to another in an attempt to broaden the audience or tell the tale in a new way?
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