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"Holy crap! A ballad already?! And such a bold departure from the original source material!"
— Betelgeuse, Beetlejuice musical
When a work is adapted (whether to another medium, another culture/demographic, or both), you can safely assume that something from the original work will be changed in the process. Maybe characters are added, combined, split up, or omitted; maybe someone lives who originally died or vice versa, or maybe the whole thing is set in a completely different city/country/planet. The reasons for these changes can be as varied as the changes themselves, ranging from Artistic Vision to Executive Meddling to the constraints of the medium. Whatever they may be, expect cries of "That's not right at all!" from devoted fans of the original whenever these crop up.
Super-Trope to much, but not all, of the Media Adaptation Tropes index.
Please note that faithful adaptations can exist, or at least adaptations that don't directly contradict the source material in any way (e.g., by using Happily Ever Before on a work with a Downer Ending). Also, change is not necessarily a bad thing, and can make a work more accessible to other people or even iron out the kinks in the original work (such as an Adaptation Distillation, which seeks to make a more expansive/convoluted work easier to grasp).
See also the Sliding Scale of Adaptation Modification.
For the in-universe version of this trope, see Adaptation Decay.
Examples[]
- Regarding the page quote, the Beetlejuice Broadway musical mostly falls into this because of trying to combine the movie with the TV show, which are very incompatible.
- Just about every Fantastic Four movie falls into this trope, although it remains the case if it will be the same with the MCU version.
- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. However, people prefer it over the more faithful Tim Burton version, thus naming the Wilder Over Depp trope.
- The Shining is another Wilder Over Depp case: the Stanley Kubrick movie is this trope, but people prefer it over the more faithful adaptations.
- Planet of the Apes: the franchise in general only retains the very basic plot of the book, with just about everything else changed.
- Men in Black: the movie (and the TV show) took the basic premise of "The Men in Black fight monsters" from the comics and changed just about everything else.
- Eternals changes the comics completely to fit their pro-atheism Author Tract.
- The Guardians of the Galaxy movies change a lot from the comics, ranging from "same character with different personality" (Star-Lord, Rocket Raccoon, Ronan the Accuser, Ego the Living Planet) to "only grabbed the very basics of the character" (Drax the Destroyer, Mantis) to "barely recognizable as the character from the comics" (Yondu, High Evolutionary).
- iZombie only retains the "zombie solves crimes" aspect from the comics.
- Dragonball Evolution, so much so that it being this trope was Toriyama's main motivator for reviving the franchise with Dragon Ball Super.