[rendaw]

This is very weird to me. Is it that hard to find good fiction that hasn't already been made into a movie, that they need to hire someone else to do it? Is the difference between a good movie and a bad movie the quality of the source material it was based on? Maybe I'm reading this wrong.

[antasvara]

The number of bad book adaptations makes me believe this is harder than you'd think. It's really an act of translation; you have to figure out if a book "works" without being able to just say what a character is thinking, without using descriptive lanfuage to imply something, etc.

Plenty of great books would make terrible movies for this reason, and plenty of pretty terrible books can actually make good movies.

[Cthulhu_]

Likewise video game -> movie adaptations, it seems to be very hard to do. Or they just don't get it, but that's probably my own bias. Thing is, some games are basically interactive movies, but they still make changes to meet some Hollywood ticklist.

(I am forever salty about Max Payne, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, etc. Max Payne could've worked with 1/10th of its budget (no CGI or famous actors necessary).

[HardlyCognizant]

I'd imagine you have to read for a particular framework to assess viability. Translating from a literary medium to a visual one is very challenging. Much of the detail in the former will be lost in the latter, like inner monologue, narrative time compression, etc.

There is a reason most underlying film stories are so short, or feel tenuously connected from major scene to scene. There just isn't room to express much complexity through imagery and dialogue in 120ish minutes, unless you are also overtly narrating or exposition dumping. And a core rule of modern fiction is "show, don't tell" no matter the medium.