why do you think medium transions seem impossible

[Steven Biehler]

I want your opinion on why it seems that it is basically impossible for anything from one medium lets say books to easily transition into another lets say movies. This medium transition does seem to be the tamest but only for the books who's fans the director of the movie know will burn his house down if he messes up. I still want to kill the idiot who made the biggest mistake in the Eragon move for the one tiny reason that THE DRAGON IN THE MOVIE HAD FEATHERY WINGS!!!! DRAGON'S DON'T HAVE FEATHERY WINGS!!! WHY GIVE A DRAGON THAT SORT OF WING YOU STUPID (censored to prevent mod wrath). Why does it seem so hard to take a book or movie and turn them into a game also. (I know it seems harder than it looks and even harder for games to movies in the past) but now days we have epic story lines in our games that could easily be turned into a movie if you do it right. OK. had to get that out of my system.

so tell me what is your most hated medium transition mine is when they turned one of my favorite book series into a movie. I loved Eragon the book.
I despise Eragon the movie.

 

[TheIronRuler]

Because the narrative changes.
Video game lets the player participate and unless you're reading 'choose-your-own-adventure' type of book, a book is a straight line of plot. A movie needs to keep you entertained for 90 minutes, while you can read a book for ten minutes and then come back for an hour, the same goes for a video game.
Different needs, different narratives, different results.

 

[SouthpawFencer]

The main reason adaptations from books, comics and video games to movies tends to fail is because you need to compress hours of plot and dialogue into 90 or so minutes. If it's an EPIC movie, you might be able to double that. Sooner or later, you have to cut corners. Also, movies can only give you a look into a character's thoughts by either having a voice-over monologue, SUPERB acting, or false-sounding dialogue to get a character's thoughts on a matter clear. None of those are generally problems in books or comics.

Also, any attempt to adapt something into a movie will be likely to get a producer thinking that he can broaden the appeal and reach a wider audience. Incidentally, this is often why the second season of a original and entertaining television series will suddenly suck in Season Two: some producer sees that the show is a hit and decides to step in and "improve" it in order to get a larger audience, but they usually succeed in making the series worse, failing to pick up an additional audience, and alienating the fans.

Two failures of translation:

The "Starship Troopers" movie. The scriptwriter and director pissed all over Heinlein's novel. I'm not entirely sure that they didn't literally piss on a copy of the book once a day while putting that film together, actually. Either the director and scriptwriter never actually READ the book, or read it, hated it, and did their best to undermine it completely. Man, did they succeed!

"John Carpenter's Vampires". The movie was so stupid that I almost refused to read the novel that the movie was based on (John Steakley's "Vampire$"), until a friend of mine who'd read the novel told me that half the stupid shit they did in the movie was a complete contradiction to what was done in the novel. Example: in the movie, they clean out a house being used as "nest" by vampires by walking inside with submachine guns (even though bullets don't do much more than annoy vampires) and try to drag the vampires, one at a time, into the daylight using crossbows attached to winches; in the novel, they blow the house up with explosives and pull away the rubble to expose the vampires to sunlight.