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Sliding Scale of Adaptation Modification
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When creating an adaptation of a story already well-known in another medium, those making it are often faced with a crippling dilemma. How true can we stay to the source material without risking a financial or critical bomb? It can be a very hard call for a director. On the one hand, if the changes are done poorly or without rhyme or reason, fans will complain that They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, and they may find themself a victim of the fandom's ire from then on. On the other hand, not changing a thing can result in either a very poorly-made adaptation or one that relies so heavily on the source material that people unfamiliar with the work will be completely lost.

The scale runs something like this:

  • Identical Adaptation: An adaptation in which next to nothing is changed.
  • Near-Identical Adaptation: An adaptation that changes the material just enough to gain a specific rating or be of reasonable length. Sometimes re-released with a Director's Cut.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: Probably the ideal rating in most cases. An adaptation that manages to capture the spirit of the original work, while at the same time, embracing the new medium. These are often big hits.
  • Recognizable Adaptation: Contains many deviations, but still bears enough resemblance to its source material that it can be realized as an adaptation. May involve a Setting Update.
  • In Name Only: Shares only the name and possibly the main characters. It likely could have stood on its own as an original work otherwise.

The scale, however, is not set in stone, and often times there is overlap. Also, Tropes Are Tools as any adaptation in any of these categories can become a great success. However, the further an adaptation falls from the center, the less likely that is.

This trope is usually applied to movie adaptations — The Film of the Book especially — although it can be applied to adaptations from movies as well, since other formats (books, comics, television series, video gamems) have room for more material. See also The Problem with Licensed Games for the video game equivalent.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Level 5: Identical 
  • March Comes in Like a Lion: The anime’s only deviation is a minor rearrangement of chapters at the end and the addition of one brief scene. Otherwise the content is a word for word duplicate.
  • The Maxx animated series: Keeps the comic book almost word for word, even sticking very close to its artstyle.
  • Monster (2004): The anime changed very little from the manga.
  • Sin City: Going so far as to adopt a very distinctive look to match Frank Miller's harsh, black-and-white artwork.
  • Many film adaptations of stage musicals are essentially filmed versions of the musical, with the only difference being an increased budget:

    Level 4: Near-Identical 
  • 300 stays as close to the comic as it can, only changing or leaving out a few scenes. Like Sin City, it adopts an aesthetic meant to look like the comics, and even keeps a number of shots identical.
  • 1776: The film adaptation is nearly identical except for Richard Henry Lee mounting a horse during his song and the removal of "Cool, Considerate Men" due to literal Presidential levels of Executive Meddling. Rises to Identical on the DVD release, which restores the cut number.
  • Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017) is sometimes seen as a Tropes Are Not Good example, with some arguing that it's too similar to the original, except for some minor changes that don't affect anything even if they should.
  • The Butter Battle Book (the Ralph Bakshi animated adaptation): Almost Identical. It follows the art style, story and tone of the book to the letter, but also sandwiches in some new stuff.
  • The Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z anime series follow the manga pretty closely, but it's broken up with a lot of Filler that wasn't in the manga. Also gives Goku Adaptational Heroism compared to the manga.
  • Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas : Jim Henson stuck very closely to the original book, with the only real change being Adaptational Villainy to the River Bottom Band, making them a bunch of troublemaking delinquints and bullies.
  • Fences had a screenplay written by the original playwright, and all that really was changed was the location of a few scenes (the play took place entirely in a backyard).
  • Fiddler on the Roof cuts a few musical numbers, but is otherwise identical.
  • Fight Club most drastically changes the ending from the book, which the author actually preferred to his own. There are also some minor changes to dialogue and the order in which events are depicted. note 
  • The Fly (1958)'s main changes to the short story are giving it a Bittersweet Ending rather than the original short story's Downer Ending and fleshing out a few secondary characters.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which was explicitly made to be this in contrast to the 2003 anime adaptation, which deviated from the source material in the second half due to overtaking the manga. Brotherhood is even criticized by some fans for speeding through material that the first show had already depicted in order to get to the un-adapted content faster.
  • Season 1 of Game of Thrones tightly adapts nearly all of the major and minor events of the first novel with only mostly small changes to fit time, budget, and clarity constraints of the new medium, with some time left over for some Adaptation Expansion. The series strays lower down the scale as it progresses, the books get more convoluted, and eventually stop existing.
  • The first two Harry Potter films, Philosopher's Stone and Chamber of Secrets, are the most faithful adaptations of the series, only trimming out some of the less important details and other relatively minor changes. In part it was because they were adapting from the two shortest novels and could comfortably fit most of it into a film.
  • Animal Farm: Both the 1954 and 1999 film adaptations stick fairly loyal to the original book besides some minor character changes or omissions. The Downer Ending of the original book however is expanded in both takes to have the pigs get their comeuppance, likely to mirror the gradual downfall of the Soviet Union they were based on after the book was written.
  • The Rankin/Bass animated version of The Hobbit cuts out a handful of characters and scenes, though these cuts don't affect the plot too much, generally ups the pace of the adventure by slimming down scenes, and adds a couple new songs. Aside from that, it's startlingly close, especially when one considers its lean runtime.
  • Chuck Jones' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!; there's some Adaptation Expansion like a longer sleigh ride sequence and several songs, but the plot is nigh-identical, as is most of the narration and (minimal) dialogue.
  • Chuck Jones' version of Horton Hears a Who!. The only real difference from the book is that the mayor is downgraded to a science professor named Dr. Hoovey and a subplot is added involving the townspeople ridiculing his claims about there being life beyond Whoville and being an outcast as a result.
  • Holes: Due to the book and film having the same writer, there's only a handful of differences between the two, a lot of which is just streamlining existing scenes or using new scenes to replace exposition. (It does help that the book isn't very long.)
  • How to Train Your Dragon (2025) vis-à-vis How to Train Your Dragon (2010) is almost the same film but in live-action—even aesthetically, Toothless's model between the two is mostly the same. The main difference between the two is about a half-hour of extra material.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure's anime adaptation is extremely faithful, to the point that stills from the series are often near-identical to the original manga panels, but it does cut some minor scenes while adding a few of its own. The fourth season also swaps around the order of certain chapters in order to improve the pacing, but this doesn't really change the overarching plot.
  • K-On! just made Adaptation Expansions to the Story Arc of protagonists' senior year, but otherwise the overall trajectory of the story remains untouched.
  • Kim's Convenience's first season is Near-Identical, with some scenes being Identical. It follows the plot of the play almost beat for beat while introducing all-new characters and showing several scenes outside the convenience store, allowing for the expanded running time from a one-act play into a 13-episode sitcom.
  • A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms falls at a similar level as the first season of Game of Thrones, closely adapting the novella The Hedge Knight with only relatively small changes, omissions, and additions.
  • The Lord of the Rings (Ralph Bakshi's adaptation) is a very faithful adaptation of the source material, with nearly all the differences being the result of cutting things out of the existing story and most of the dialogue being completely unchanged. That said, the process of cutting things down to fit a two-hour runtime means that so much is missing (such as segments of conversation) that it's rather difficult to follow unless you know the books.
  • My Hero Academia: The scenes in the anime are basically identical to the original manga except for some additional background details and character interaction differences, with the obvious difference being the amount of Filler episodes in the series. The most predominant difference is that Kyoka Jiro in particular is generally depicted in a worse light.
  • National Lampoon's Vacation changes some names and gives the story a mostly-happy ending.
  • Peter Pan (1953): Although very little of the original dialogue is the same, the storyline is quite faithful to Barrie's stageplay.
  • The Princess Bride: Having a screenplay written by the original author will do that. What differences exist are mostly down to cutting down on narration.
  • The Shawshank Redemption: As an adaptation of a shorter work, it had to add parts in, but otherwise adheres almost verbatim to what is in the book.
  • The Sound of Music: The only changes worth mentioning are that some of the songs occur in different parts of the film and Rolfe being stripped of his redeeming scene where he decided not to rat the Von Trapps out and does the exact opposite.
  • Swan Lake (1981) is by far the most faithful movie adaptation of Swan Lake, with the only real changes being the removal of the swan maidens and the addition of two talking squirrel sidekicks. Siegfried's name remains Siegfried (the other movie adaptations respectively changed it to Derek and Daniel), Odette was cursed to be a swan by Rothbart prior to the story, and Rothbart turns into an owl instead of a bat-like creature or vulture.
  • Thunderball, as the original book was even an expansion of a proposed television movie\episode.
  • The 2020 animated Toldi mini series, which is basically the original poem's text being read verbatim and visualized. Some verses are only animated but not read out, a few non-narrated scenes are added for pacing and atmospheric reasons, and slight corrections are made for the benefit of the story and historical accuracy. Even all of the poem's metaphors are made literal, adding a thick surreal layer to the otherwise mostly grounded story.
  • Tower of God first season anime: Some details of scenes changed, some elements of the story expanded and others given less space, but otherwise amounts to pretty much the same thing with the same story.
  • Vampire Academy is mostly loyal to the first novel of the Vampire Academy series. The differences are generally minor. Three characters receive name changes, one character is younger and more attractive than her book counterpart, three characters are of different age than their book counterparts, two characters who survive the original novel are killed in the film, Natalie Dashkov kills a different person than the one she killed in the novel (Ray instead of Mr. Nagy), Lissa does not practice Self-Harm, and some minor book characters do not appear at all in the films. The most obvious change comes from the style of clothes the characters wear. In the books, the students of the Academy wear regular street clothes. It is a sore spot for Rose that she can't afford decent clothing, at one point wearing clothes she received from the Salvation Army. In the films, both Moroi and dhampir students wear school uniforms. Rose wears a relatively stylish uniform.
  • Variable Geo: The anime adaptation of Advanced V.G. is mostly faithful to the original source material, despite making several major changes, such as Miranda Jahana already being deadnote . Likewise, the OVA casts Satomi as its deuteragonistnote  by making her the target of the Jahana Group, instead of Yuka.
  • Watchmen: The most notable change is the squid being replaced by a city-disintegrating explosion.
  • When the Wind Blows: Aside from remaining true to the text, there are a few lines omitted from the comic. One, in particular, being Jim's passage about the British Empire rising from the aftermath of the war. He also never says "stupid bitch" in the comic, and instead uses the words "stupid fool" (though Hilda still berates him for it) just before they duck and cover. The intro, attack and ending sequences are also more drawn out, and there are a few imagine-spots added in. Without these changes, it goes up to Identical.
  • The Falcon's Malteser: the screenplay for the film adaptation, Just Ask for Diamond, was written by the book's author Anthony Horowitz, and simplified one action sequence (Nick's escape from a flat he's being held prisoner in) and dropped another (Nick goes back to the scene of the crime and is attacked by the Big Bad) altogether, both for logistical reasons. Apart from that, the two versions are near-identical, and there are long stretches of dialogue in the film that are word-for-word the same as the book.
  • The Last of Us (2023): The story beats are largely similar to the game, but the series provides more worldbuilding, such as on the Cordyceps outbreak. There's less action overall, with many episodes (especially Episode 3) having more emphasis on character interactions and while Joel and Ellie kill hundreds of enemies over the course of the game, their body count is a more reasonable level- no more than a few dozen- in the series.

    Level 3: Pragmatic Adaptation 
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey: Very unusually, both the book and its film version were written in tandem by their respective authors.
  • AKIRA; though the fact the author\director was still finishing the manga also contributed for the story changes.
  • Black Butler: Season 1 (closer to Recognizable for the anime-original ending, but it's still very close in tone and theme to the manga and the previous 3/4 of the anime are very faithful to the manga).
  • Bokurano: The anime adaptation hits most of the same story beats as the original manga, but while the ending is largely similar, the story diverges from the manga after Maki's battle. The show also has more of an ensemble cast, unlike the manga, which had a focus on the characters or each arc.
  • Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is in essentials an adaptation of the first four books, but thrown into a blender first, so the timeline of events is presented very differently, and a few characters/situations differ from the books.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It would have scored a similar adaptation if their massively changed Willy Wonka didn't impact the story so greatly.
  • The Walden Media adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia are somewhere around here, with the level of accuracy varying from Near-Identical to Pragmatic
  • Death Note: The main story beats are the same, but some material is cut out, especially the post Time Skip arc. The ending is mostly the same, save for a character who Dies Differently in Adaptation, and the epilogue is removed.
  • The first Divergent film is compressed from the book in some places and omits certain supporting characters, but it is otherwise a fairly faithful adaptation. The second film, Insurgent, is Recognizable, as it's even more compressed from its source novel and has some notable deviations in the storyline (such as the five-sided box with the simulation trials, which was not in the original novel). However, it otherwise follows some of the same general plot beats, and is still a more faithful adaptation than the third film, Allegiant.
  • Fantastic Mr. Fox: Most of the incidents from the original novel remain (though not all in the same order), but the heavy amount of Adaptation Expansion alters the nature of the film to a fair degree.
  • Season 2-4 of Game of Thrones. While 10 episodes was ideal for closely adapting the first novel, the greater scope of later novels and an increase in Adaptation Expansion required more distillation to fit the same time constraints while still mostly keeping the spirit of the original.
  • Green Eggs and Ham (2019): Adds more/expands on existing characters and tells an original storyline, but remembers the book's spirit and moral.
  • Hangman's Curse: The story is the same but the background is dramatically different.
  • The Harry Potter films from the third installment, Prisoner of Azkaban, and onward. In part because the novels were getting much longer, leading to more details being removed, and sometimes entire characters and subplots. However, the films also began to make other changes of their own, while occasionally expanding on certain aspects from the books, although by and large they were still faithful to the overall storyline. Deathly Hallows is about a 3.5; being spread across two films, they cover the final novel more thoroughly and faithfully than the previous films, while still condensing certain details and taking creative liberties here and there.
  • The Hobbit (Peter Jackson's adaptations): Similar to the Fantastic Mr. Fox example in that the major events and characters of the original novel are kept intact, but the films also feature a lot of Adaptation Expansion, including adding characters not part of the novel's narrative. Some of it is taken from The Lord of the Rings' appendices, while some of it is original content.
  • House of the Dragon, based on Fire & Blood. While an identical adaptation would probably have been impossible due to the nature of the original work (an in-universe history text that summarizes the events rather than showing them through POV), it includes close adaptations of tons of the original material, while simultaneously including enough changes (such as the restructured timeline) to prevent it from being near-identical.
  • The first Jurassic Park movie. The plot essentially plays out broadly the same, although some of the set pieces are different between them. Most of the characters are recognizable from the novel, although some (especially Hammond and Gennaro, but also Grant to a lesser extent) were heavily altered while still serving similar enough functions in the plot.
  • Koi Kaze: The anime is clearly recognizable as the same story and characters, but some events are cut out or happen in a different order to better fit the constraints of a 13-episode series. Notably, the controversial themes of the story are not softened in any way—if anything, it's more serious by taking out some of the more lighthearted moments.
  • The Last Airbender: Due to a blend of Compressed Adaptation (cutting down twenty episodes of TV to fit a two-hour runtime) and a somewhat liberal handling of the original material, it hits all the major beats of the first season but squashes down and alters a lot of them, while altering several personalities.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1992) is solidly Pragmatic. The story hews close to the plot of the video game, with a few surprises:
    • Agahnim and Ganon are explicitly shown to be different beings, communicating between worlds in one scene. (The Agahnim in Ganon's Castle, however, is just a glamour used by Ganon himself.)
    • Link cannot travel freely between worlds and is trapped in the Dark World once Agahnim transports him there. He maintains his form in the Dark World by controlling his emotions, whereas in the game the Moon Pearl is needed to keep human form.
    • The events of the Dark World are heavily abridged, and Link only saves two maidens before finding Zelda; though Link visits Misery Mire and the Ice Palace, no maidens are imprisoned there.
    • The Wizzrobe impersonating Zelda is an obvious riff on Blind the Thief. Rather than revert to his true form in sunlight, he waits for Link to sidle up before doing a creepy Face-Revealing Turn.
    • The collection of items vital to the game's completion are either changed (the "Bird") or excised entirely, with only the Book of Mudora appearing in the same capacity.
    • Interestingly, the Eastern Temple more resembles the game's Great Pyramid. In exchange, Ganon's lair has been modified into an alien-looking orb.
  • The Lord Of The Rings (Peter Jackson version): Scenes are cut down, characters are combined with each other, and there's a fair bit that is directly rewritten compared to the original, though it still adapts the vast majority of events and keeps a lot of dialogue.
  • Matilda. Changing the setting from Britain to America leaves an impact on the film, and some scenes are added or shuffled around, but overall it's one of the most faithful adaptations of Dahl's works.
  • Misery: The excerpts from the new Misery novel Paul is writing are dropped and Annie's violence is toned down.
  • Mr. Mercedes: The first season of the show is a fairly faithful adaptation of the Stephen King novel (and more so than subsequent seasons adapted the rest of the trilogy). Differences include the setting of the climactic showdown, the introduction of a Canon Foreigner and the protagonist and antagonist talking via video conference (which works better on TV).
  • The Muppet Christmas Carol is a funny example: it obviously makes some heavy deviations from the original in that most of the cast is played by the Muppets, which often necessitates modifications to their characters so that they can keep to their schticks (most notably, Jacob Marley gets broken up into a pair of brothers to facilitate him being played by Statler and Waldorf), as well as some additional slapstick and a number of songs. However, aside from the elements needed to fit the film into a Muppet-like format, it's alarmingly close, with a lot of dialogue and scenes being kept exactly: in particular, Scrooge, one of the few characters portrayed by a human performer, is basically right out of the novel.
  • Orphan Black: 7 Genes is a somewhat Lighter and Softer Japanese remake of the Canadian series of the same name. But other than a few character traits and fates as well as plot points from the original being reworked, the overall trajectory of story remains the same.
  • The animated version of The Return of the King takes a similar path to the earlier animated adaptation of The Hobbit, in that most of its changes are just cutting things out to fit its runtime and the parts that are adapted are lifted pretty closely... but given that Return of the King is a significantly longer and more complicated work, not to mention the third book in a trilogy, it ends up cutting so much that it ends up here. Also, while both films feature musical portions, the book version of The Hobbit had extended song sequences while Return of the King didn't, meaning all the songs on the soundtrack are original to the film.
  • The Novelization of Revenge of the Sith is somewhat unique for a novelization, being that Stover was given a lot of room to do what he wanted with the material. Quite a bit of dialogue is added or rewritten, and scenes get a fair bit of expansion, some of which outright contradicts the events of the film.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) (Post-Super Genesis Wave)
  • Sonic Rebound (external link) starts out as Identical, really trying its hardest to very faithfully retell the Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) in animated format, up to replicating the same scenes exactly and emulating the original artist's art style. It then goes down to Pragmatic with the crossover with the Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) universe, which was never anywhere in the original comic.
  • Star Trek (2009) brings back the tone of Star Trek: The Original Series at many points while the Actionization nearly makes it a close to the show. However, the Alternate Timeline setting allows it to establish its own canon and justifies the drastically updated effects for modern audiences.
  • The Walking Dead has the same overall plot as it’s comic counterpart, however, some plot lines have been expanded on or outright added to the show while others may have been condensed or removed. As for the characters, some of them have lived in the show where they died in the comics and vise versa and others have been killed earlier or later in the show. Also, some of the characters in the show may take traits from those in the comics. In addition, there have been several Canon Foreigners in the show and a few that have been Adapted Out or at least debuted at a different time than they did in the comics.
  • Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Most of the novel is kept, but the film adds several scenes involving Charlie (for instance, the Fizzy Lifting Drinks sequence and a subplot with him being approached by Slugworth), likely to flesh out his character and give him more of an arc rather than simply passively observing what happens at the factory. Aside from that, the film also alters Veruca Salt's fate, probably due to the difficulty of filming an actress being swarmed with trained squirrels, and adds a number of songs.
  • The first two episodes of the live-action drama based on Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches. Also the anime which follows the overall plot of the first 90 chapters of the manga fairly closely, but is forced to have a ridiculously fast pacing due to compressing 90 chapters in only 12 episodes; as such, many scenes are skipped or rushed through.

    Level 2: Recognizable Adaptation 
(aka Adaptation Inspiration)
  • 8-Bit Theater is this, bordering on In Name Only. It parodies the story of Final Fantasy I relatively faithfully up to the defeat of Garland, albeit with drastic character personality changes. After that, though, things pretty much go Off the Rails and it only takes some of the broad set-pieces and characters, often mixing in elements from later Final Fantasy games. The overarching plot still does end up bearing some loose resemblance to the plot of the game, though, particularly with the Light Warriors breaking a Stable Time Loop that was designed to torment them.
  • 80 Days: same characters, includes much of the plot and various supporting characters in certain routes, but in a substantially changed world, and most of the other routes are completely original.
  • The early Barbie movies often went under this:
    • Barbie in the Nutcracker draws on both the ballet (featuring a heroine named Clara, as well as Tchaikovsky's score and ballet sequences) and the original story, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (having the Nutcracker as the Love Interest and the Mouse King as the recurring Big Bad), but changes the plot to be about a heroic quest to save the Land of Sweets from the Mouse King. It also gives Clara an Age Lift to be a teenager instead of a child, and combines her character with the Sugarplum Fairy (here called the Sugarplum Princess).
    • Barbie as Rapunzel retains the fairy tale's core premise, being about a maiden named Rapunzel who has long hair, is imprisoned in a tower by a witch named Gothel, and marries a prince. It otherwise has a completely original story that involves a magic paintbrush, talking dragons, a war between kingdoms, and Rapunzel being revealed to be a long-lost princess.
    • Barbie of Swan Lake keeps the basics of a girl named Odette being cursed to be a swan by an evil sorcerer named Rothbart, who has a daughter called Odile, and falling in love with a prince, who is tricked into declaring his love to the disguised Odile. It also features Tchaikovsky's music and ballet dancing. The rest of the story is significantly different; Odette is a baker's daughter, rather than a princess, and The Chosen One whose destiny is to save a forest full of fairy folk from Rothbart. The prince's name is also changed from Siegfried to Daniel.
  • Battlestar Galactica's remake keeps the general premise of the Galactica being a spaceship on the run from a machine race called the Cylons, but adds in the idea that many of the Cylons have become human sleeper agents (partly to save on budget). This concept only was touched on in a single episode of a spinoff before, but the remake turns it into a huge part of its tension and themes. Aside from that, a number of characters got their names, characterization, and even genders altered.
  • BIONICLE the game and Bionicle Heroes were ostensibly made as adaptations of the parts of the story running at the time, but they're so wildly different as to be their own continuity, keeping the character designs and roughly a single sentence's worth of the plot summary.
  • Casino Royale (2006) A 21st century adaptation of the very first 007 book by Ian Fleming, from 1953. Needlessly to say, there were no cellphones, GPS or even the country of Montenegro when the book was written. Even the game played in the casino is changed from Baccarat (that used to be popular among European Aristocrats) to Poker, more familiar to present-day audiences. The producers followed the usual Bond movie formula of adapting for the time period the movie is produced and released instead of making a period piece, maintaining only a similar structure and a few names and roles. And it worked: Casino Royale was a box-office and critic success, still widely-regarded as one of the best movies of the franchise, not many fans cared at all about the many deviations from the original book.
  • The Cat in the Hat (2003): The original is only a few pages long, so it comes with the territory, but even then, the Cat in the books bears very little resemblance to the figure Myers plays.
  • Many films in the Disney Animated Canon fall into this category, by virtue of their Disneyfication:
    • Aladdin: Overall, more an adaptation of The Thief of Bagdad (1940) than the original folktale—one can see the events in the film, but the resemblance is loose, with many characters being altered or combined and the film's tone and style being all its own.
    • Beauty and the Beast: Hits the most basic beats of the original story, but not much more, with characters being cut out and scenes either removed or shuffled around. It owes a lot to Beauty and the Beast (1946), and heavily alters the tone and message of the story (notably, the original is about Belle learning to love the Beast, the Disney film is more about the Beast learning to show his love for Belle).
    • The Little Mermaid: Hits most of the major notes, but completely alters the ending and the specifics of those notes, and lightens the story as a whole, cutting out a lot of its more theological aspects.
    • Big Hero 6: Disney picked it up out of a collection of very obscure characters because they liked the name, and you can tell. The Marvel Universe connection is almost completely dropped, the characters go from a team of Japanese heroes to a fairly diverse crew of Americans (though the setting is basically a heavily Japan-ized San Francisco), and just about everyone's character is either modified or bears no resemblance.
    • Pinocchio (1940) deleted many of the characters and challenges of the original book.
  • Elementary: Aside from the Setting Update, it gives Watson a Gender Flip and noticeably alters a number of characters, though the broad premise of "Holmes solves mysteries week after week" stays intact.
  • Ella Enchanted: Keeps the same basic premise (a Cinderella story where the protagonist is under a magic curse that forces her to be obedient) and the major characters are mostly the same as far as names and relationships with each other, but the setting is completely changed (the book had a classical setting, while the film's setting is relatively modern) and most of the actual events of the story are similarly altered.
  • Eragon keeps the basics of the characters and plots, but changes practically every other detail, to the point where it gained a reputation of being In Name Only—even if it strictly speaking isn't. The tie-in video games are mostly at this level as well—including a few elements from the books that weren't in the film, while also omitting details that the film covered and making even more changes of their own—but the PSP version leans towards In Name Only (following Saphira as the main character and only adapting a few scenes of Eragon's journey), while the GBA is a Pragmatic Adaptation that includes a lot of book characters and locations that didn't make it into either the films or the other games.
  • End of Watch, the third book in Stephen King's Bill Hodges trilogy, was adapted in season 2 of Mr. Mercedes. It broadly follows the novel's before greatly deviating in the second half, as well as omitting anything that wouldn't make sense out of order, such as obviously, Bill Hodges' death, which is left entirely out of the show and not just moved to season 3.
  • Finders Keepers' TV adaptation (see above) follows the novel's plot through to the end, but makes some major changes, including eliminating the dual timelines, introducing a significant Canon Foreigner and devoting a sizeable portion of the runtime to a storyline exclusive to the show that began in the previous season.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist (2003). It starts off as Pragmatic, but deviates further and further from the manga as it progresses. It deviates further still with the follow-up movie, The Conqueror of Shamballa, bringing it to In Name Only.
  • Seasons 5-8 of Game of Thrones, partially because the show simply Overtook the Manga but also because the show-runners began increasingly covering even published material with heavily-altered or entirely original content and even adding Not His Sled twists.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): The film is most heavily based on the 2008 Abnett-Lanning run, with most of the characters and the overall tone and aesthetics hailing from that era, but modifies the personalities, backgrounds, and overall concepts of just about every character involved and covers a largely original plot.
  • Heart of Darkness (1958): Scenes are cut out, the critique of colonialism is pushed to the background, relationships are altered, the ending is changed to a happy one, and it's implied that part of the story was a Vision Quest. But the basic movement of the story remains intact (Marlow goes to Darkest Africa in search of Kurtz, finds him, and is appalled) and several minor elements, such as secondary characters and lines of dialogue, are retained in recognizable form.
  • Howl's Moving Castle keeps the core plot, the characters' roles in it and the castle as described in the novel, but everything around that plot is changed drastically, as is the setting.
  • How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) contains pretty much the entire story of the original book (filtered through the lens of the original animated special) but the sheer amount of Adaptation Expansion seriously changes how the characters and events come off. The tone of the film is almost completely opposite too, coming off as cynical and grimy. The Grinch himself is also a much wackier character, although more emphasis is placed on the pathos of the character to balance him out.
  • How to Train Your Dragon: All three films, which keep the concept of Vikings taming dragons and the names of a good number of principal characters, but that's about it. For instance, in the books, the Vikings have been domesticating dragons for a long time, while the film has it as something the protagonist comes up with in defiance of cultural tradition, the dragons go from fully sapient and able to speak in their own language to being animalistic, and Toothless goes from an extremely common and weak breed of dragon to a rare and fearsome one.
  • Legend of the Seeker, based on the Sword of Truth series. The general plot structure covers the same basic events as the books, but most of the actual episodes are purely Adaptation Expansion, actual book plotlines are either heavily compressed or entirely omitted, and even the most faithful episodes feature plenty of changes.
  • The Legend of Zelda (1989) and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! adapt a lot of the items, enemies, music, sound effects, and even some of the game mechanics of the NES games, but the characters' personalities are mostly invented wholesale (partially due to each series only having two games out at the time, which didn't establish much characterization beyond the absolute basics), and both contain only occasional references to the plots of the games.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power covers the Second Age of Middle-earth, and took a lot of freedoms from the source. Amazon paid the Tolkien Estate $200 million to secure the TV rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit which are mainly set in the Third Age, but not other books/writings directly (except for a case to case basis for permission to use stuff published elsewhere), and the show expands upon the appendices of LOTR and other background lore that mainly can be found in those two main books for their depiction of Middle-earth, as opposed to the writings directly about said topics. The Estate gave Amazon plenty of creative freedom for new characters and plots, including significant time compression, but they were not allowed to contradict or change anything about the Second Age in which the original story takes place.
    "It is impossible to change the boundaries which Tolkien has created, it is necessary to remain 'tolkienian,'" — Token scholar Tom Shippey
  • Maken-ki!: The anime adaptation borders on In Name Only, since only its first season has anything to do with the manga. The characters and setting are still recognizable, though there are significant changes in how they're portrayed. Season 2 deviates from the manga altogether.
  • The Meg: it has the same basic storyline skeleton as the novel, and some of the same characters (albeit the Japanese characters are now Chinese with different names to match), the actual scenes and characterization are fairly different, and the tone of the story is far more tongue-in-cheek and over the top than the novel (perhaps drawing from later novels in the series).
  • Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
  • The 2011 Live-Action Adaptation of Ranma ½. Possibly a Pragmatic Adaptation if you're generous enough: it keeps the general setting, all main character names, and the basic premise intact, but it also adds many elements that weren't present in the original manga and anime (including a brand new antagonist).
  • Silent Hill, the plot is heavily changed (resembling the original only broadly) and so is much of the characters, with some of them being Adapted Out, but the atmosphere, the basic premise, some concepts, and monsters of the original were kept intact.
  • Most adaptations of Sonic the Hedgehog fall under this category:
  • Superman (1978) gets most of the fundamentals right, but alters quite a few aspects compared to the comics of the time: the Kryptonian aesthetics and Lex Luthor's personality are completely changed, Superman and Lois are softened, the whole concept of Superboy is cut in favor of having him debut as an adult, a lot of the weirder ideas are toned down or removed, and there's a few Canon Foreigners, while major characters are absent (most notably Jimmy Olsen). Complicating this somewhat is that a number of aspects of the film made their way back into the comics, to the point that when compared to some runs, it looks closer to a 3 or even a 4.
  • The Super Mario Bros. Movie has a lot of changes to how certain characters and power-ups work in the games, but is overall accurate to the series.
  • The Michael Bay Transformers films seem to have started life as an adaptation of the franchise's initial "Generation 1" incarnation, with far more elements being taken from there than every other series combined. If that is to be taken as the source, then many characters have had their names changed or their personalities altered, the aesthetic is far different from any prior series, with quite a few characters being unrecognizable in appearance, and many concepts and characters are entirely invented. Consequently, though G1 has its fair share of divergent continuities, the franchise as a whole considers the films to be their own "branch."
  • The Wheel of Time (2021): Like The Witcher mentioned below, it's most similar to the source material in the first few episodes, with the changes to every part of the story and characters quickly mounting up with each new episode, some even having more added or expanded material than storylines actually adapted from the books.
  • The Witcher (2019) starts somewhat similarly to the books, but further into episodes, the plot of the books is only distinctly adapted; the show also adds a lot of changes into the characters of the novels
  • All but the first two episodes of the live-action drama of Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches.
  • The manga versions of every Yu-Gi-Oh! anime past the original start out with the same blueprint as their anime counterpart (characters, settings), but usually have completely different plots, and some characters are radically different in personality and backstory. In the GX manga, for instance, Judai has an entirely different backstory than in the anime, and while he still has Winged Kuriboh and chooses to stay in the Osiris Red dorm, his changed backstory recontexualizes both of these elements of his character.

    Level 1: In Name Only 
  • Abigail (2024) is a remake of Dracula's Daughter, but with little in common other than being about a vampire who's the daughter of another vampire. (Abigail's father isn't even called Dracula, though he hints that he might be.) Generally considered a good movie, just very different than its source material.
  • Barbie:
    • Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper has a similar title and the same premise as The Prince and the Pauper, being about a royal and a commoner who are Identical Strangers and live in each other's roles for a while. The similarities end there, with the story being an entirely original yarn where the titular pauper, Erika, has to do an Emergency Impersonation of the titular princess, Anneliese, after she's kidnapped on the orders of an Evil Chancellor.
    • Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses maintains the concept of twelve princesses sneaking out to dance at night in a magical land, but changes everything else. The protagonist is one of the princesses (here named Genevieve), rather than the soldier of the original tale, and the movie has a Canon Foreigner villain who seeks to take over the princesses' kingdom.
    • Barbie in A Christmas Carol features the same theme as the original story (a Scrooge-like character is visited by three ghosts around Christmas and must reform), which it uses as a jumping-off point for an original plot. Scrooge's counterpart is a famous Victorian opera singer named Eden Starling, whose motivations and backstory are completely different.
  • Black Butler II: The entire season is anime-original, having no basis in the manga.
  • Carnosaur: Aside from the plot having dinosaurs revived through altering chicken DNA, the movie has nothing to do with the novel it's purportedly based on. A big part of the novel is a mystery story following an Intrepid Reporter trying to discover an aristocrat's dinosaur revival operation hidden under a zoo in the English countryside. The movie is set in the desert in the United States, neither of the two main characters are reporters, and they only sort of stumble onto the main villain's plans (who herself is a generic mad scientist instead of an aristocrat). The main villain shares the first name of the wife of the villain in the novel, but that's about it.
  • Catwoman (2004), outside of sharing an origin that was invented for Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns which was already quite different the comics, this version of Catwoman doesn't even make the lead Selina Kyle.
  • The third film in The Divergent Series, Allegiant, only retains the broad premise of the novel as well as most of the major characters. The rest of the story deviates quite heavily, with several elements added to the film that were not in the novel, including a completely changed climax and a cliffhanger ending.note 
  • Some of the more extreme departures from the source material in the Disney Animated Canon:
    • The Fox and the Hound: Names are changed, characters are changed, and the overall flow of the plot is very different. The big one is that in the book, the titular fox and hound have no friendly relationship and the resolution sees both of them die, while in the Disney version, the entire plot is dedicated to the fact that they're childhood friends driven apart in adulthood and the ending is more of a Bittersweet Ending where they stay apart but reach an understanding.
    • Frozen: It takes place somewhere in Scandinavia, there's a character in it who can be described as a "snow queen" where a goal of the story is to reach her castle, and they mention a "frozen heart" in a few scenes. That's about it. Earlier drafts were closer, such as making the snow queen character a proper villain, but over time they drifted in the direction of making her a non-malicious victim of her own Power Incontinence.
    • Hercules (1997) is either on the low end of Recognizable or the high end of In Name Only—it features enough references to Greek mythology and the original story as a whole that it's clear the creators did indeed do their homework, but it's equally clear that they threw most of it out afterward. It doesn't really adapt any Hercules myth (though the climax is vaguely reminiscent of the Gigantomachy), and ends up being more a blend of the plots of Superman (1978) and Rocky (1976), taking place in a Purely Aesthetic Era version of ancient Greece. Hercules is only similar to his mythical self in that he's Zeus's son and he's very strong and heroic, the Twelve Labors, the most famous myth, is largely glossed over in a single montage, and the Greek pantheon is Hijacked by Jesus, with Hades (a marginal and largely benevolent character in the original myth) being bumped up to main antagonist status, displacing Hera.
    • The Jungle Book: Walt Disney actually requested that the creative team not research the original story, as he felt it wasn't kid-friendly. The only things they have in common are the premise of a wild boy in India and a few character names.
    • The Princess and the Frog: The classic story has a lot of versions, but the film is an original plot that only takes that single concept of a prince turned into a frog who wants a girl to help turn him back. Even the most basic telling usually takes place in an ambiguous Fairy Tale setting rather than early-1900s New Orleans, and has a female lead who's an actual born-into-royalty princess as opposed to a commoner who's mistaken for one.
    • Tangled: It takes the basic concept of a girl named Rapunzel with long hair who lives in a tower owned by a sorceress and meets an outsider she romances. Everything else is original to the film, including the reason for her being in the tower, the character of the outsider (who goes from a classical prince to a wanted criminal), and the entire plot outside of the romance arc and setup.
  • Dragonball Evolution: A borderline case between this and Recognizable—it keeps the character names, the theme of martial arts, a few techniques and plot points, and the use of the Dragon Balls as a Plot Coupon, but it's very much a case of "if you changed the names, you would not be able to tell." Very little of the manga's aesthetics carry over, the characterization is largely altered, and nearly every plot point it keeps is different in some way.
  • Edge of Tomorrow, adapted from the light novel All You Need Is Kill—it keeps the alien invasion, the power suits, the main character being a soldier in a timeloop, and most of Rita Vritaski's character. That sounds like a fair bit, but between the altered setting, and aesthetics, the main character's ethnicity, and the overall plot beyond the existence of a wartime "Groundhog Day" Loop playing out very differently, a lot of people are surprised to hear it was an adaptation at all, much less of a light novel.
  • Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The film is this relative to the book that it's inspired by. While the book is reference material about the titular fantastic beasts, the movie is a narrative about that reference book's author and an adventure he had before completing his book.
  • The Fly (1986) compared to the short story and previous film adaptation thereof (which was Recognizable). The basic premise of a scientist's Teleporter Accident is there, but that's about all. The original Charles Edward Pogue draft of this screenplay was similar, but David Cronenberg's rewrite nigh-obliterated that. (Both scripts, plus the original short story, can be read on the Collector's Edition/Blu-Ray releases.)
  • While the film version of Hair keeps most of the songs and the character names from the stage version, the plot is completely rewritten.
  • The Gene Dietch adaptation of The Hobbit. The broadest strokes of the plot are the same, as well as a handful of character names, and everything else is changed or cut. Much of it comes down to it being a severely Compressed Adaptation (it's about twelve minutes long), but even then, there are enough deviations that can't be credited to the runtime for it to end up here.
  • Logan, as an adaptation of Old Man Logan. The only similarity it has with its source material is that it's story following an older Logan traveling through America, in a future where the other X-Men are dead. The plot beats, set pieces, supporting characters, villains, and reason for the journey are all completely different. Even the setting itself is so different (20 Minutes into the Future vs an apocalyptic wasteland ruled by supervillains) that one of the main similarities arguably doesn't count.
  • Men in Black (1997) keeps the broad idea of the Men in Black as an organization that protects the Earth and covers up the presence of aliens and the protagonist being a guy codenamed Jay who gets mentored by a guy codenamed Kay, and adapts the first couple pages of the comic pretty closely. And that's about it—most notably, while the comic was a rather grim satire where the titular organization was framed as a bunch of borderline-fascistic Villain Protagonists, the film is a lighthearted buddy-cop action-comedy where the Men in Black are purely the good guys.
  • Meg 2: The Trench in contrast to the first movie in the series which was at least recognizable as an adaptation of the first book, this movie has virtually nothing to do with the book it's supposedly adapting. None of the major plotlines from the book are retained, and only the existence of a research station in the trench ties into the book. Even then then it's only a minor set piece that gets destroyed fairly early on in the film rather than the setting of one of the two main plotlines of the book.
  • The Mighty Thor: To Norse Mythology; the plot doesn't really utilize any myths and the canon foreigners outnumber the characters from the myths. Makes liberal use of Related in the Adaptation, Promoted to Love Interest, Unrelated in the Adaptation, Adaptational Backstory Change, and Adaptation Personality Change, among others. Depending on the Writer, Continuity Snarl, and crossovers have not helped.
  • Rosario + Vampire: The second season is this, completely ignoring the manga to create anime-original content focused solely on Fanservice. Many fans weren't pleased.
  • Scaredy Squirrel (2011): Aside from the protagonist being a neurotic squirrel, it shares no similarities with the books it's based on. Justified in the sense that the books have very little content to work with.
  • Sonic Underground: For starters, Sonic from the games (or any other adaptation) is not blood-related to royalty, doesn't have siblings, and doesn't fight against evil with The Power of Rock.
  • Enforced with The Spy Who Loved Me. Ian Fleming hated his original novel so much that he only sold the rights to the title, ensuring that the film that took the name would not be an adaptation of the book.
  • The Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie. Beyond the broadest characterization (Mario and Luigi are human good guys, King Koopa is an inhuman bad guy) the dark and gritty sci-fi dystopian universe comedy film is basically unrecognizable from the light-hearted, cartoony, fantasy-based, child-centric source material, even after conceding that the games (and comics and animated series) didn't exactly establish the deepest universe to begin with.
  • Teen Titans Go!: The original cartoon was already a pretty loose adaptation, and Go is a massively Denser and Wackier version. There's no Teen Titans run that bears even a passing resemblance to it.
  • Wonder Woman is to Classical Mythology what The Mighty Thor is to the Norse myths. For one thing, the Amazons were descendants of Ares, not his enemies, and Diana is a Latin name, so finding it on a Greek character makes it Sadly Mythtaken.
  • World War Z: Max Brooks himself stated that the film adaptation had so little in common with his novel that he ironically was able to enjoy it since it didn't ruin any of his characters or stories, due to them never appearing.
  • Arrowverse: Most of the shows and their versions of many characters tend to bare little in common with the comics, and grow even further as time goes on. The shows mostly started off as an early-days/semi-prequel story, taking liberties to fit a 'CW formula', but as they go on the changes they made are focused on while the comic roots are pushed aside.
    • Arrow to Green Arrow: Is about a rich white guy named Oliver Queen who survived being shipwrecked on an island in the Chinese sea before returning home and using the survival skills he learnt to fight crime. That's about it. The show at least starts as almost Recognizable note , but decays into In Name Only as Oliver's Adaptation Personality Change settles and the few characters from the comics are pushed out in favour of Canon Foreigner types.
    • The Flash (2014) to The Flash: It's about a man named Barry Allen who gains Super-Speed after being hit by lightning in his lab and fights crime in a red suit. At first the show is a Recognizable, almost Pragmatic, adaptation of the The Flash (2011) era of the character (itself a Recognizable adaptation of the comics proceeding it), but it delves further down as it introduces characters from the The Flash (1987) era of comics, but each one is increasingly In Name Only. Each season is almost recognizably lifting from a Wally West storyline, but makes such heavy changes to the story and characters (such as Zoom, Jesse Quick, Savitar, and others), not to mention the fact they're re-written to work around Barry Allen instead of Wally West, while Wally himself is pushed out of the show without ever graduating out of the Kid Flash mantle, never mind the fact he was heavily retooled in the first place. The show similarly adds a 'team' around Barry, using Vibe and Killer Frost (and later, Elongated Man), but who (with the exception of Elongated Man) have no prior history working with the Flash and in the show have their personalities, backstories, and even their powers changed and altered. They also make Barry the foster brother of his love interest Iris West and created a completely different character as her father to act as a Parental Substitute to Barry.

Special Cases:

  • The Abridged Series are all pragmatic and altered to at least some degree, but how much this is the case can vary. Some of the more faithful ones (Dragon Ball Z Abridged, most notably) border on Near-Identical, most (such as Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series and Sword Art Online Abridged) lean towards Recognizable, and a few (Alternate Reality DBZ being one particularly glaring example) are In Name Only. However, reliance on the original footage means they can never really reach full In Name Only territory.
  • The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad: The Wind in the Willows segment is Recognizable, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow segment is Pragmatic.
  • The 1897 novel Dracula has had so many adaptations, they can be sorted into rough groups, with more faithful levels being increasingly uncommon.
  • Dragon Ball Super and its manga is an odd case - Neither the anime nor the manga are adaptations of each other, but rather based on a plot outline provided by franchise creator Akira Toriyama. Since the plot outline in question is evidentally rather loose, the anime and the manga vary wildly in different aspects - major plot points can be completely different and anime-exclusive transformations are commonplace, but random throwaway jokes appear in both formats. In practice, they're ultimately both a Recognizable Adaptation of each other.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The first three books, radio show, TV version, and movie are pretty consistent — Recognizable or even In Name Only; even the dialogue sometimes matches. But the episodic bits are often shown in different order. The movie added some new material.
  • Hunter × Hunter has three separate anime adaptations, each one falling on a different part of the scale. The Jump Festa short film, produced shortly after the manga began, ranks as a Recognizable adaptation by adapting the introductory chapters more or less faithfully, but adding in battles against sea monsters that weren't in the original and are a tonal mismatch for the rest of the series. The 1999 anime is a straightforward Near-Identical adaptation, largely faithful to the manga's story, but adding in multiple elements of Filler that either expand on existing elements of the manga or introduce new situations to lengthen the story, and giving some slight changes to Killua and Kurapika's personalities and demeanor. The 2011 anime is a borderline Identical adaptation (though a couple moments in the first few arcs suffer mild Bowdlerization due to the move to a daytime timeslot), with the only major story deviation being Gon's backstory with Kite being kept a secret until the beginning of the Chimera Ant arc.
  • Film adaptations of Les Misérables run the gamut from Near-Identical (1934, 1958, 1978) to Pragmatic (1982) to Recognizable (1998, 2012) to borderline In Name Only (1935, 1948, 1952).
  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe. While most people would agree it's usually a Pragmatic Adaptation, there are some movies that are Near-Identical (using a lot of elements from the comics as they were, e.g. the Super Soldier serum), with others being Recognizable (removing or heavily altering comic book elements, e.g. how Pym Particles work).
  • Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 plays it safe by adapting only Volume 2, Section 5 of War and Peace, but that section is an Identical adaptation.
  • Pinchcliffe Grand Prix: The original 1975 movie is a Recognizable adaptation due to changing the personalities of most of the characters. The late movies lean more toward Pragmatic adaptations, being feature-length films based on a series of comedic newspaper pages, although some Adaptational Villainy is still in effect.
  • Adaptations of the Pokémon games fall all over the scale, though so far none have quite reached the extremes of In Name Only or Identical. Of the more widely-known adaptations:
    • The original anime is a Pragmatic Adaptation with heavy Recognizable leanings, with exactly how heavy depending on the circumstances; most of the basics of the world of the games are there and the show adapts parts of the plots of the games to at least some extent suiting its format (collecting badges to face the League, fighting the evil teams of each generation), but there's a lot of Adaptation Expansion and the fine details of it all can get a fair bit different from the games.
    • Pokémon Adventures is very much a Pragmatic Adaptation, but has shades of Near-Identical and Recognizable in its interpretation of certain aspects of the 'verse, certain characters, and certain plotlines (Recognizable for the latter two being more common early on).
    • Pokémon Origins is a blatantly Near-Identical adaptation (and deliberately designed as one) of the original pair of games. There are still several things preventing it from being an Identical adaptation, however, the most notable being the franchise debut of Mega Charizard X.
    • Zigzagged by Pokémon Detective Pikachu. Compared to the original Detective Pikachu game, it's at least Pragmatic with the same cast of characters and basic premise. However, the game is a rather obscure spin-off. When placed side-by-side with media like the main game series and the anime which the general audience would be far more familiar with, it's In Name Only, with the only point of commonality being that it has Pokémon in it and passing mention of places from the games and anime.
  • Power Rangers has varied in faithfulness to Super Sentai from season to season. They range from being as similar as Near-Identical (Wild Force, Samurai) to as different as In Name Only (In Space, RPM).
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017): The first three episodes (The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window) are all Near-Identical, while the fourth episode The Miserable Mill (which is the only episode not to be written by the original author, Daniel Handler) is somewhere around Pragmatic or Recognizable The rest of the series is a solid Pragmatic Adaptation, with the changes present for the series carrying over across all the other parts of the story.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. The World arcs downward as the film goes on, due to both runtime and the nature of its creation: it was greenlit somewhat early in the run of the graphic novels, and it was finished at a point before the release of the final installment. Volumes 1 and 2 get a Near-Identical bordering on Identical adaptation, with just about every major scene being kept and a lot of the dialogue being the same, Volumes 3-5 get what's more or less a Pragmatic adaptation, with characters and scenes getting squished down, removed or altered, and Volume 6 ends up as approximately a Recognizable adaptation, with the extreme broad strokes of the ending being the same (i.e. Scott fights Gideon in a nightclub, briefly dies, and ultimately wins and gets together with Ramona), but almost all the details differing significantly.
  • Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining is interesting in that it starts out as Near-Identical, but it gradually deviates further and further from the book until it becomes a Recognizable adaptation. It stands out more as a special case in book adaptations in that while generally considered a must watch horror film for how it does its themes of madness and isolation, the original book's author Stephen King has made it well known he considers the film a betrayal of his work in how it handles themes and characters.
    • The Nutty Professor remake has a similar process. The first half ranges roughly between Pragmatic and Near-Identical, and the second half becomes In Name Only, but becomes Near-Identical again at the climax.
  • The first Shrek 1 film is somewhere between In Name Only and Pragmatic. The film borrows very few elements from the William Steig book save for Shrek himself and Donkey (who only appeared on one page), but a picture book does require some major Adaptation Expansion to make it viable for a feature length film.
  • The Disney Silly Symphonies shorts adapted Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling twice—the 1931 short is an In Name Only adaptation of the original story, while the 1939 short is a Near-Identical adaptation that sticks much closer to the source material.
  • Simon Birch, the film adaptation of A Prayer for Owen Meany, steadily shifts from Identical to In Name Only as the story progresses.
  • Son of the White Horse shifts between Near-Identical and Recognizable, but mostly lands in Pragmatic. Being based on an ever-changing folk story, it slavishly lifts certain elements, lines and scenes full-cloth from different versions of said tale, but alters their meaning, combines their characters, expands them with material taken from unrelated myths, and mixes in plenty of original content. The visuals and added symbolism veer closer to Recognizable.
  • The Betty Boop cartoon Snow White (1933) starts off as Near-Identical, but drifts into In Name Only around the middle.
  • Thomas & Friends started off as Near-Identical for its first two seasons, adapting The Railway Series stories near word-for-word besides some mild streamlining and certain stories being Out of Order. Seasons three and four took more liberties with the books, and also made some original stories, but still adapted a lot of events faithfully, keeping it roughly Pragmatic. Afterwards the series stopped adapting anymore stories directly and took more liberties with the material, bringing it all the way down to In Name Only. A handful of stories were adapted in Season 20 as well as the first stories getting a retelling in The Adventure Begins, which are largely all a Pragmatic adaptation with occasional liberties and restructuring.

Patterns:

  • The older and more established the original work is, and the more existing film adaptations that have been done with it, the less "need" new adaptations will feel to stick closely to the original, and the more likely it is that they will take their own approaches. This is especially true if the work is in the Public Domain, and that's why works by people like William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens get so many Setting Updates and reinterpretations.
    • Conversely, if the vast majority of preexisting film adaptations fall low on the scale, some filmmakers will feel a greater need for a future adaptation to stick closely to the original; if the earlier loose adaptations causes Adaptation Displacement, this can both incentivize and deincentivize a more faithful later take, depending on how the filmmakers and studio executives respond to it. This can also occur if a work only had a single adaptation (or at least a single high-profile one), but it was relatively loose in approach and old enough to fall into legacy status (e.g. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory vs. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 34 years later).
  • Musicals and more recent plays that get film adaptations tend to be relatively faithfully adapted, other than for length. It helps that they're already adapted to a more similar medium (they have a script, they take into account the visual element in a way novels don't, etc.)
  • Anime fall into some predictable patterns:
    • Manga and novel adaptations that are of finished works tend to be between Pragmatic and Identical, unless they are very old and established works with previous adaptations, in which case they might fall lower on the scale.
    • Manga and novel adaptations of ongoing works vary based on what the original creator and the studio want them to do with it. If they just stop the story at a certain point (planning to animate more when there's more if the show does well enough), they're usually Identical or Near-Identical. If they stall for time using "filler arcs" (see: Naruto and One Piece), the presence of those fits them into Pragmatic Adaptation. Series that get anime-original endings vary based on how early the ending is established, varying from Pragmatic to Recognizable. depending on that.
    • Video game and Visual Novel adaptations necessarily have to make some changes to turn a branching story into a linear one, so they're usually Pragmatic or Recognizable. In the case of some mobile or card game adaptations, they might have to make up a story from scratch where the original didn't have one, falling into In Name Only.
  • Movie novelizations, due to their very nature, are typically Identical or Near-Identical, with the main differences being either extra information added or being based on an earlier draft of the movie.
  • Animated shows based on shared-universe superhero comics tend to be Pragmatic: telling stories inspired by those of the comics and constructing a world meant to resemble them, but going in their own direction in terms of how they interpret events and characters. (Some may dip into Recognizable if they're particularly fanciful in their interpretation, such as Teen Titans or My Adventures with Superman.) This is typically because they're based on universes so complex and long-running that doing a direct adaptation would be a difficult endeavor. If they're adapting a specific issue that isn't an origin, they'll usually try to stick as close as possible within the runtime: for instance, the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Laughing Fish" and the Justice League episode "For the Man Who Has Everything" are Near-Identical when compared to the stories that inspired them.

Alternative Title(s): The Sliding Scale Of Adaptation Decay, Sliding Scale Of Adaptation Faithfulness, Sliding Scale Of Adaptation Decay, Sliding Scale Of Adaptation Fidelity

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