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Project Hail Mary is still all over a lot of my subreddits, especially the crafting ones. Embroidery, cross-stitch, crochet, all still coming out with Rocky and Grace themed crafts. It’s wonderful. The discussion has kind of died down in my more sci-fi related subreddits and discussion spaces, but I was left with a very strong impression: some of these sci-fi readers have apparently never experienced having a book or comic they like adapted before. They don’t have reasonable expectations.
There’s a bit at the end of the book where Grace is doing a lot of science by himself in the middle of space. A common sentiment was disappointment that this part of the book was glossed over a little more in the movie. However, it’s the slowest part of the book and would have absolutely dragged down the pacing of the movie. There were a few other parts that were squished from the book in terms of timelines and other plot points were paired down a little. This created a some room in the runtime for some really great visual moments that weren’t necessarily one-to-one from the book (and several that were).
This movie met and exceeded all of my expectations for how a book is adapted to a movie.
And that’s a totally different conversation from general faithfulness of the adaptation compared to the movie’s quality. Howl’s Moving Castle and Annihilation are both incredible movies that only half resemble the books they’re based on. The book and movie for Starship Troopers are basically two different stories, and the one you prefer kind of depends on how you’re introduced to it. It by Stephen King is one of the few books I ever regret reading, yet the 1990 miniseries is one of my favorite pieces of media ever precisely because it cuts out all the more egregious stuff from the book while still maintaining the vibes.
But if you really want to examine and dissect the art of adaptation, comic books are one area where you have a lot to look at and work from. Self-contained graphic novels you can treat like a prose novel to various and sundry degrees of success. It’s all more complicated, however, with longer running series and characters.
This summer we have the movies Supergirl and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Supergirl is reportedly pulling most of its main beats from Woman of Tomorrow. That is a relatively self-contained story, but Kara Zor-El as Supergirl has sixty-seven years of material to her name. So that’s the task set before the scriptwriter: using a single story as a template, how might they integrate other elements of Kara’s character to tell a unique Supergirl story. Outside her cameo in Superman, this story is also the starting point of the character in the new Gunn-led DC Movie Universe. This is the movie that sets the stage and there’s very little pre-established to account for continuity-wise.
Brand New Day is facing a vastly different problem. It’s pulling a lot from a story called The Other. This is where Peter goes through a major, spider-based genetic transmutation. Based on the trailers, the movie won’t really be following the storyline itself, just borrowing some of the concepts and scaffolding. More importantly, though, even if they wanted to follow The Other storyline beat for beat, the MCU wouldn’t currently allow it.
In the comics, The Other storyline takes place right before the Civil War event. The literal next storyline in Amazing Spider-Man is “The Road to Civil War.” Peter and MJ are still married, Aunt May is alive, and they’re all living with The Avengers (who are all still alive/in the present day). This is not the place, narratively, that Peter and the overall MCU are in.
The Other storyline also heavily deals with MJ coming to terms with Peter’s change in attitude, biology, and (temporary) death. She plays a pretty significant part of the story. Obviously this wouldn’t be something that MCU Spider-Man could cover.
That’s the symptom of being twenty years into a movie universe that’s it’s own separate thing from the comics. Things are just never going to transfer over completely.
And this gets even more complicated when you’re crossing characters over that might have different licensing rights. The amount of cross-over between different groups or “offices” of characters in comics is vastly underrepresented in other media.
Of course, my special interest character, Venom, is a symptom of this. The birth of Venom (with or without the extended alien suit saga) is a storyline that has been adapted at least a half a dozen times (one of those being the Ulimate version), and it’s never been one to one. Mostly because it’s just too hard and, often, limited by licensing.
First, it’s just a big story. It technically takes four real-world years to develop. There’s some timing weirdness between Secret Wars and Amazing Spider-Man in terms of which issue came out when, but there’s about a year between Peter getting the symbiote and “killing” it with the church bells. During which, the symbiote (in containment in the Baxter Building) has regular little one- to two-page cameos. Then they dissappear for three years before coming back as Venom. However, Venom only exists because of the Sin-Eater arc which had happened in the interim.
So to hit just the minimum main story beats, you’d start with Secret Wars and the “suit machine” Spider-Man finds the symbiote in. That requires a larger cast of heros, but Spider-Man: The Animated Series shows that’s doable without fully pre-establishing them within the specific media. Then Spider-Man needs to wear the suit long enough for it to form a bond and have an “oh shit moment.” The Fantastic Four has to be present to take the symbiote off and store it. The symbiote needs to be shown breaking out and sneaking into Peter’s closet to lead to our churchbell moment. The Sin-Eater storyline has to happen to give Eddie his raison d’etre. Finish with The Thing to wrap up that first encounter and secure Venom alive for future storylines.
And those are just the ingredients for the meat of the story. Let’s say you want the additional emotional punch that shows just how dangerous and trauma-inducing Venom is right from the get-go. That’s created by the presence of romantic relationships with Felicia and MJ.
Ironically, you don’t actually have to pre-introduce Eddie Brock. He enters the story properly at the same time as Venom.
And if you want to get extremely pedantic with technical canon, Deadpool is actually the first person to get the suit from the machine, put it back, then act as host briefly between Peter and Eddie. So you’d also need Deapool.
Outside the comics, most Spider-Man media just doesn’t have all these components, so some very common shortcuts emerge. Instead of getting the suit on Battleword, it comes to Earth on a meteor. You give Eddie Brock another reason to be pissed off at Spider-Man and/or Peter Parker.
The “alien suit makes Peter aggressive” repeating story element is an artifact of the compressed nature of any given alien suit saga interpretation. The symbiote’s corrupting nature is way more subtle in the comics. Adaptations don’t typically have the time to really get into what makes the symbiote the way it is or why it’s so mad, so they shortcut it by showing a change in Peter himself. The 90s show started it, and every show since has just followed in its footsteps.
So when looking at something like the Civil War event or 2015 Secret Wars, you sort of expect that those are going to get trimmed, because they simply have a lot of moving parts. But because of the nature of comics, even simpler stories could present interesting narrative challenges to adaptation.
With Mac Gargan being in the new Spider-Man movie, a number of us in the fan community are sitting here wondering “is this going to be the end credits where they introduce Venom to the MCU?” We’ve already had that weird little crossover with SSU Venom and other Spider-Men. If not this movie, then what about Secret Wars? Because Spider-Man fans expect it to happen at some point because most Spider-Man adaptations eventually get there.
And that’s on setting expectations around adaptation for big IPs.
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