Do movies do better as adaptations or as original stories?

Having an original story carries an obvious benefit of it being more tailored to the medium of film, built around its possibilities and limitations (choice of actors, special effects, audio, visual storytelling). That's in theory, but in practice, when I go through my favourites, I see the two types are somewhat equally represented.


Apocalypto - original
An Event - adaptation
A Wonderful Night in Split - original
Excalibur - adaptation
Conan the Barbarian - adaptation
Viy - adaptation
Siberiade - original
The Return - original
Voyna - original
Come and See - original
Fantastic mr. Fox - adaptation
War of the Worlds '53 - (loose) adaptation
Idiocracy - original
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - original
Fight Club - adaptation
And so on.


So, I don't have an answer to this question. While most of the big award-winning films are adaptations, I figured that's just the Academy being the Academy. So, what do you think?

Adaptations have the evolutionary advantage of having already favorably passed through one round of natural selection; only that which has proved to be good/great is selected for adaptation. Originals, on the other hand, are of untested quality before they're released to public.

An adaptation is a separate work of art that doesn't have to be closely based on the original. Many of the greatest book adaptations differ substantially from the original book. People often see this as a downside, but this is actually a good thing! The director takes the book as an inspiration, as a starting point, and then builds on top of it.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

That's a good point.

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I'm the Yugoslav cinema guy. I dig through garbage. I look for gems.

I have to admit that there are probably more than a handful films that I have seen that I don't know, off the top of my head, whether or not they are original screenplays or adapted from elsewhere. Actually, I just reread the title of this thread and if I'm interpreting the question correctly, I don't think being an original screenplay or an adaptation has anything to do with the quality of a film.

See the book, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, to demonstrate this. Francher was so intent on creating the world he found in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, that he eventually had to be reigned in by a script doctor. I think the original movie, Blade Runner, was a masterpiece, while I think the book was just okay. Most of what is in the movie is not in the book, but what Francher and Peoples ended up with was along the trajectory of what Phillip K Dick wrote.

The book is... ...different. I found it strangely affecting. Dick has a talent for melting reality around his reader.



The big difference is that Scott did what almost everyone in the genre has done. He humanized his robots. Indeed, he may have set them a rung above mere humans (recall his statement that the Replicants are "Supermen who can't fly"). Androids draws a line between the human and non-human. It makes the argument that it is empathy. The Andies are sociopaths to the core. Blade Runner, on the other hand, denies that there is a simple line between human and non-human. The film is, itself, an exercise in empathy. It is yet one more repetition of the allegory that the other is also human--resulting in the literary equation that the robot is also human. Alas, we are more than primed for the takeover of our robot overlords.