I'm keeping myself mostly off of social media to avoid possibly getting spoiled on Alan Wake 2 stuff and in the meantime I'm distracting myself by rewatching Hannibal, which genuinely still holds up years later. It's gotten me thinking about things I like and don't like in adaptations. On the top of the list of things I tend to like it "respect," but I'll admit my idea of what that is may be a bit odd.
We've had long-running, continuous works of fiction for... I want to say we might be coming up on being able to confidently say "centuries" now? If we haven't already crossed that line, I mean. My frame of reference is unfortunately pretty narrow in that regard. And film adaptations are almost as old as the medium itself, going back all the way to just before the turn of the 20th century.
Before I continue, I should mention that I'm gonna be throwing the term "franchise" around. I don't really like that word to describe long-running works of fiction but it's admittedly the quickest shorthand I've got, so, here we go.
When we look at long-running canon, most often we find that they're not always uniformly "good" or "bad." Usually they run the gamut in quality with certain entries being more well-regarded than others. This is the nature of art and creation; sometimes we just sort of fuck it up.
So when we look at the idea of creating something new out of something old, whether it's a sequel to a long-running series or a brand new adaptation of a (mostly) beloved work, we're faced with a question: What do we do about the shit that sucks?
Let's consider some examples.
The Terminator
The Terminator, along with its excellent followup Terminator 2: Judgment Day, are excellent examples of the sci-fi genre and beyond that are stellar pieces of cinema. The follow-ups, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: Salvation, are not nearly as well-regarded. T3 is nearly parody and Salvation is just kind of... eh. It's a dystopian sci-fi action movie. Did you know originally John Connor was supposed to die and then have his face grafted on to Sam Worthington's cyborg character? That's so daring I'd almost say it would have made up for it.
Now Hollywood of course can't let a good dead horse go unbeaten, so when enthusiasm for the series as it was petered out, they decided to give it another go some years later (and then another go a few years after that, but we'll get there don't worry). But of course now we run into a question: What do you do about the stories people hated?
Well, the folks behind the Terminator series decided to ignore them completely.
The next two Terminator movies that came out would only acknowledge everything up to Terminator 2, deciding that 3 and Salvation weren't worth even a passing mention. Each one also, like... kills John Connor off, in their own ways, for some reason.
Me, personally? I don't like this approach. Even if Terminator: Dark Fate absolutely Fucks with a capital F, there's something about the idea of completely disregarding major entries in such a prominent film franchise that just doesn't sit right with me. Hell, Dark Fate doesn't even acknowledge Genisys, its immediate predecessor, because that movie was also poorly regarded. It's just a conga line of new movies being like, "Nay, we are the TRUE successor."
You want another really good and far more absurd version of this phenomenon, go check out the timelines for the Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre series sometime. Shit's wild.
X-Men
X-Men is another series that starts of really solid before falling off really hard. One of the first franchises borne of the Comic Book Movie Boom (but not the first, we respect Blade in this house). X-Men is by far the longest-running of any comic book movie franchise, stretching from all the way back in good ol' Y2K to whenever the hell Deadpool 3 comes out (I know it's an MCU movie now but Reynolds and Jackman are still in it so it's still going to count in my book).
X-Men 1 and 2? Amazing. Phenomenal. Probably a couple of my favorite comic book movies of all time. The Last Stand and Origins: Wolverine? Trash, but they're at least still pretty fun. But after their less-than-stellar reception, cogs began to turn behind the scenes.
We end up getting X-Men: First Class, a movie that is good but, if you've been paying attention up to now, basically completely incompatible with the canon established thus far. Then we get The Wolverine, a pretty alright solo Wolvie movie that's, uh... entirely dependent on the canon thus far? Huh?
In spite of the fact that The Last Stand is a lackluster follow-up to the first two films and Origins: Wolverine is pretty obviously an '07 Writers' Strike era film, when it came time to set up Days of Future Past, a clear decision was made: Nothing up to that point would be ignored. Yeah, some of it contradicted other stuff, but the broad strokes are maintained. Like, hell, you can hear echoes of Wolverine crying out Kayla Silverfox's name in both The Wolverine and Days of Future Past
This is the sort of respect that I'm talking about when it comes to long-running franchise stuff like this. You don't necessarily need to act like you like everything that came before, but there's something to be said about acknowledging that it happened. Because even if sometimes things are just a soulless cash grab, a lot of folks still put a lot of work into that!
Which brings us to...
Hannibal
Hannibal Lecter is a central character from a series of novels by Thomas Harris that began in 1981 with the release of Red Dragon. This was later adapted into a movie, Manhunter. Then in 1988, Harris wrote The Silence of the Lambs. This was later adapted into a movie of the same name (while Red Dragon would get another adaptation, with both films featuring Anthony Hopkins as the character). Then in 1999, Harris wrote another novel, simply titled Hannibal. If you can believe it, it was shortly adapted into another movie, again of the same name and with Anthony Hopkins, in 2001.
Now if money from film rights is what spurred Harris into writing further novels up to this point, I cannot say. As far as I can tell there's not a whole lot of info on it, but then I also didn't look into it too deeply. What I do know is that the novel Hannibal was generally regarded as pretty weak, and its film adaptation didn't fare much better, critically speaking. But sometime later, the studio came back to Harris saying they wanted to so a Hannibal Lecter origin story for... some reason. I mean, okay, money was the reason. It was money. Harris was reluctant but the studio made it clear that if he didn't want to be involved, they'd do it without him. And thus we got Hannibal Rising, which was also not really well received, whether it was the book or the movie.
So fast forward. NBC is making a Hannibal TV series, with a particular focus on Red Dragon as a plot inspiration. We get Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen, besties since their work on that one 2005 King Arthur movie, as the characters of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. So the question hangs in the air: You've got 4 novels. One of them you actually can't use due to licensing issues or something (this would be Silence of the Lambs) and two are generally regarded as pretty weak. Do you work with only the good stuff, throwing the things people didn't like out in favor of maybe just taking another crack at the concepts?
Nah man, you utilize everything you can and you make yourself a banger TV series in the process.
Large parts of both Hannibal and Hannibal Rising are utilized despite being less-well-regarded parts of canon because even though they might not have been as good as the rest, they're still there and deserving of respect like anything else in the series. Plus, why limit the amount of toys in the toybox you can play with when you don't have to?
I guess by way of conclusion what I'm trying to say is that I feel like some sort of acknowledgment of even the weakest or ugliest parts of canon is preferable to pretending they never happened. Just feels like you're in denial.
