Baby Luigi said:
Mario Party X said:
Anyway, what makes books better than video games to adapt?
Because books are a story-telling medium, just like how movies are.
I once read that short stories / novellas are ideal for adapting since you can actually get the whole thing on screen, rather than having to chop out tonnes and tonnes of stuff.
But really, any medium can be adapted to any other medium if whoever's doing the adaption knows what they're doing, and how to alter the story to fit the new medium.
Make your film script but just be inspired by whatever it was you were uncreative enough to steal. And that gives you so much more freedom to do things besides shove your fanon into other people's faces, other people who probably have their own fanon that yours shits all over. Turn it into an original scenario, replace all the characters with your own. It's probably already distanced enough from what you were going to do an adaptation of anyway.
I really don't get why people get so high and mighty about this sorta thing, seeing as
most things are adapted (or I guess "stolen"?) from other things. Every time one of the big comic companies puts out a new animated show, or a live-action movie, or a new comic relaunch of a classic series, it's shitting over the established fanon, but people don't tell them that they should just turn female!Thor or black!Spiderman or HughJackman!Wolverine into original characters and stop bothering everyone already. No one complains that Shakespeare only wrote 2 original plays, with the other 36 being an assortment of OC-filled historic fiction, AUs and played-straight adaptations (with or without twist endings), and in modern times, re-mounting the plays with new spins on them (i.e. gender-swapped Hamlet, bollywood dance numbers for the curtain calls, Richard III in Nazi England, gay royal cousin incest love triangles, etc.) is way more common practice then turning them into completely different things (West Side Story, The Lion King, Slings & Arrows, Zetsuen no Tempest). People were happy to see the Harry Potter, Twilight, LotR and Scott Pilgrim films; eveyone's favourite Disney films started out as fairy tales or books (or are sequels to films based on said print material); the show Merlin was a pretty cool adaptation of the Arthurian legend; the latest reboots of Doctor Who and Star Trek are very unlike the classic series but are nonetheless very popular; And Another Thing... reads just like an authentic Douglas Adams book; The Megas and The Protomen's Megaman-based concept albums are awesome and tell cool stories; Pokemon works just as well as a video game, an anime and a manga; the list goes on and on and on forever.
Of course, realistically, your spec script will probably never be produced regardless of whether it's fanfiction, original stuff, or if you took the 50 Shades of Grey middle road and just renamed everyone and tweaked it enough that you only need studio backing and not studio backing and copyright holder permission (or whatever). Usually, your script's gonna go in the garbage, or maybe if it's good enough, producers will say "wow, you can write" and then put it in a drawer and tell you to go and pen the next Nicholas Sparks adaptation or be on the committee for Transformers 6. So imho, if you like writing fanfic screenplays, then go ahead and write 'em: be free, have fun.
