Transitioning media, your thoughts?

[EMWISE94]

You know what I'm talking about, some movie/book/comic/game is really popular or something and somebody in the marketing department decides that "If they liked it as a X, they'll like it as a Y"

It's happened several times, a franchise does really/reasonably well in its initial medium and it decides to take a crack at other mediums. The usual cycle is book/comic -> Movie -> game and it most cases once it hits game... it doesn't hit that hard, random example: Harry Potter, the books are great, the movies... well they hold up to some degree, the games... eeeeeh notsomuch.

Point of this thread: whats your take on media transitions? Do you like it? got any good examples of it? bad examples? honourable mentions? how certain transitions could have been made better? the works! lets get all talky, wordy, ranty and whatnot! Why don't I start as off with a franchise that I feel did well in all 3 mediums: Scott Pilgrim

The Comics: funny, great, well written and all that jazz. A nice change of pace to comic books, well at least it brightened up my comic book reading.
The Movie: Nicely done, i mean video game style action? as a gamer, how am I to say no? sure it changed some stuff from the comics, but in my opinion it stayed true as possible and got the job done.
The Game: Honestly... I fell in love with the game. usually whenever i see a game based off a comic or movie i dismiss it because they're never that great but i gave this game a shot and it was such drastic change from what I'm used to that i just played it over and over! it was a 16-bit side scrolling beat em up with a kickass chiptune soundtrack in an age of grey/grown loadsabloom orchestral fueled AAA madness, being a guy that grew up with a SNES... need I say more.

But I won't say more, now i hand the mic to you folks, what say you? *throws mic to crowd*

 

[Legion]

My issue with Book -> Film/Television is that they almost always cut out character building scenes in favour of fight, sexual or comedic sequences. None of those three things are necessarily bad, but I don't think important moments should be cut to add a completely made up scene just to keep people with a short attention span interested.

I cannot really think of a single example where this hasn't happened to some degree but the ones where it annoyed me the most was Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones).

Or you get ones such as Dexter and I Am Legend where they take the very basic idea, but twist it around because the original idea might not sit well with people who can't focus without everything ticking all of the boxes for your average show/movie. In Dexter the books have a slight supernatural element to them and Dexter is actually a lot more of a socio-path, in the television show he is a charming (but idiotic, although that seems unintentional) psychopath who also has a lot of very "normal" traits. I Am Legend and the film counterpart only have the name of the main character and the fact he is seemingly the last normal man on the planet in common, everything else was changed to make your average action film.

Games I am the least fussed about because they are almost universally just cash-ins with practically no effort put in, so I don't buy them. The fact they are almost released around the same time as the films is normally a good indication of how good they are likely to be. As for games made from other mediums such as comics and such, as long as they are an adaptation rather than a "game version" then they can be pretty good. The Arkham games for Batman are excellent for example, but that's because they took the world it's set in and made it their own rather than simply trying to transition Batman into a game.