Turning an existing story into a movie or television series sounds simple enough. Find a popular book, comic, older movie, television show, or established franchise. Take the characters and story people already love. Put them on the screen. Easy, right? Not exactly. In reality, adapting something audiences already know can be one of the trickiest challenges in entertainment. An original movie gets to introduce its world without viewers arriving with decades of opinions about what everything should look like. An adaptation rarely gets that luxury.
Fans may already know the characters. Alexander Hilary Kurtzman explains that they may have favorite scenes, favorite lines, and very specific ideas about how the fictional world should work. Some have been following the material since childhood. At the same time, simply recreating everything exactly as it appeared before is not necessarily the answer. That leaves filmmakers with a complicated question: How do you respect what people already love while creating something that still feels fresh?
Fans Bring Expectations With Them
One of the biggest differences between an original story and an adaptation is what happens before the opening credits even begin. The audience already has expectations. Someone who has read a favorite novel five times may have spent years imagining what the characters look and sound like. Comic fans may know decades of history surrounding a superhero. Fans of an older movie might remember individual scenes almost word for word.
Established franchises bring another challenge entirely. People may have grown up with those characters and worlds. That means a new version is not starting at zero. Every casting announcement, costume, trailer, character change, and story decision can be compared with something that came before it. That does not mean filmmakers should simply give audiences exactly what they expect. If everything is completely predictable, there is not much excitement in seeing a new interpretation. The challenge is figuring out which expectations matter most.
A Book and a Movie Don’t Tell Stories the Same Way
Books have one enormous advantage: time. A novel can spend pages inside a character’s thoughts. It can explain history, relationships, motivations, and entire fictional cultures through narration. Readers can spend hours, or days, moving through the story. Movies usually have a couple of hours. That difference alone means changes are almost inevitable. A filmmaker may need to combine characters, shorten events, move scenes around, simplify subplots, or find visual ways to communicate information that originally existed inside someone’s head.
A sentence such as “he had never trusted his brother after what happened ten years earlier” can be explained instantly in a novel. A movie has to show it somehow. Does it use a flashback? Dialogue? A photograph? An awkward silence between the brothers? Does another character explain what happened? Suddenly, one simple sentence has become a filmmaking problem. That is why judging an adaptation only by how closely it reproduces every page can miss part of the challenge. Books and movies are different storytelling formats. Something that works beautifully in one may feel awkward in the other.
Comics Create a Different Kind of Challenge
Comic books might seem easier to adapt because they already contain pictures. The characters have designs. Action sequences have been illustrated. Locations exist visually. Sometimes individual panels practically resemble storyboards. But comics introduce another problem: there can be an enormous amount of material. A character who has existed for decades may have hundreds or even thousands of stories. Which version becomes the movie version? Do filmmakers recreate a famous storyline exactly? Combine several stories? Borrow one villain from one era and another character from somewhere else? Update the setting? Change an origin story that modern audiences may already know?
There may not even be one definitive interpretation. Characters evolve. Costumes change. Backstories get rewritten. Different writers emphasize different personalities and relationships. So when fans say they want a movie to be “faithful to the comics,” the next question can become surprisingly complicated: Which comics?
Remaking an Older Movie Comes With Its Own Problem
Remakes face perhaps the most obvious comparison of all. The original movie is sitting right there. Anyone can watch it. If the new version changes too much, fans may wonder why it shares the original title at all. If it changes almost nothing, another question appears: Why not just watch the original? That is the remake puzzle.
A new version needs a reason to exist beyond simply having newer cameras and updated effects. Sometimes that reason is a different perspective. Sometimes technology makes it possible to visualize something the original filmmakers could not. A new setting, different cast, tonal shift, or updated cultural context can also change how familiar material feels. The goal is not necessarily to replace the earlier movie. Ideally, the new version brings something of its own.
Franchises Have to Serve Two Audiences at Once
Long-running franchises create another balancing act: longtime fans and newcomers.
Imagine entering the tenth installment of a fictional universe without having seen the previous nine. A new viewer needs enough information to understand what is happening. But longtime fans probably do not want characters spending half the movie explaining things they already know. That creates a surprisingly difficult storytelling problem.
A franchise installment has to provide context without turning into a history lesson. It needs references that longtime viewers appreciate without making newcomers feel as though they forgot to do their homework. When it works, both groups can enjoy the same story for different reasons. A returning character may simply seem interesting to a newcomer. To a longtime fan, that same appearance could carry years of history. Those layered experiences are part of what makes established fictional universes so much fun, but they also make them complicated to manage.
Sometimes Changing Something Is the Most Faithful Choice
This sounds contradictory, but staying true to a story can occasionally require changing it. The important question is what “faithful” actually means. Does it mean recreating every event exactly? Or does it mean preserving the spirit of the original? Suppose a book has a long sequence showing a character slowly becoming more confident over several months. A two-hour movie might not have enough time to recreate every event.
The filmmakers could instead create a shorter sequence that communicates the same emotional journey. Technically, the events are different. Emotionally, however, the destination may be the same. This is where adaptations become interpretation rather than duplication. Filmmakers have to decide what is essential. Maybe it is a relationship. Maybe it is a theme. Maybe it is the personality of the central character or the feeling audiences get from entering that fictional world. Those choices can determine whether an adaptation feels familiar even when individual details change.
Nostalgia Is Powerful and Complicated
There is another ingredient filmmakers cannot manufacture easily: memory. People do not always remember older movies, books, comics, or television shows exactly as they were. They remember how those stories made them feel. Maybe someone watched a movie every weekend as a kid. Perhaps a particular comic was their introduction to superheroes. A book might remind them of a specific time in their life. A new adaptation is not only competing with the original work. Sometimes it is competing with nostalgia. That is an impossible contest to win directly. A filmmaker cannot recreate someone’s childhood experience of discovering a story for the first time.
What a new adaptation can do is create new moments while acknowledging why the old ones mattered. That might mean bringing back a familiar piece of music, recreating an iconic visual, including a recognizable line, or finding a completely new way to capture the same sense of wonder.
New Ideas Still Matter
Respecting familiar material does not mean treating it like something behind glass in a museum. Stories survive because people keep retelling them. Every generation interprets characters and ideas differently. Technology changes. Audiences change. Filmmaking changes. The world surrounding the story changes.
That gives adaptations an opportunity to explore familiar material from a new angle.
A supporting character might receive more attention. An old story could be viewed from another perspective. A fictional world that appeared briefly in the original might be expanded dramatically. There is always a risk involved. But without experimentation, established franchises can start feeling like repetitions of themselves. Audiences often want familiarity and surprise at exactly the same time. That may be the hardest expectation of all.
There Is No Perfect Formula
For someone like Kurtzman, whose career has included projects connected to major franchises and established properties, the adaptation question is hardly unfamiliar. His body of work has moved through recognizable fictional worlds, blockbuster filmmaking, television, science fiction, and reimagined stories.
Those kinds of projects highlight just how many decisions exist between familiar source material and the finished production audiences eventually see. What stays? What changes? Which characters matter most? How much background does the audience need? Which famous moments should return? Where is there room to surprise people? There is no single correct answer. That is part of what makes adaptations so interesting.
When audiences watch a movie based on something they already know, they are really watching two stories at once: the story unfolding on the screen and the version they carried into the theater with them. Sometimes those versions line up perfectly. Sometimes they go in completely different directions. And sometimes the most memorable adaptations find a place somewhere in between—recognizable enough to remind audiences why they loved the story in the first place, but different enough to give them a reason to experience it all over again.