History Main / HardToAdaptWork

Another common issue is that literary works that have a TomatoSurprise plot can be very difficult to adapt into dramatic media without making the shock twist obvious from the start, especially if they rely heavily on TheAllConcealingI.

* ''Manga/MahouSenseiNegima'' is an [[LongRunner extremely long]] manga that famously went through a slow GenreShift over its life, transforming from a fanservice-filled slice of life comedy into a still admittedly fanservice-filled action fantasy tale. Thus, the vast majority of adaptations focus only on the earlier style, ignoring (or never reaching) the fantasy epic, though one OVA did simply start 100 chapters in and cover some of those later chapters. That the manga ended very abruptly due to [[TorchTheFranchiseAndRun rights disputes]] doesn't make it any easier, either.

* Creator/WilliamSBurroughts considered ''Literature/NakedLunch'' to be this, being deliberately incomprehensible, disturbing, and having nothing in the way of overarching plot. As such, when he allowed Creator/DavidCronenberg to adapt it into ''Film/NakedLunch'', the latter compromised by crafting a new story that incorporates many themes from Burroughs overall work. While still pretty MindScrew-y, it's much less so than the book.

* Generally-speaking, a good number of [[RockOpera rock operas]] fall victim to this trope, as the medium of a music album features a number of conventions and stylistic permissions that wouldn't be possible in a more visually-oriented format.

* One of the most infamous and unique examples ever is Mordecai Richler's ''[[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incomparable_Atuk The Incomparable Atuk]]''. It's not that its a difficult book to rewrite into movie; its a fairly straightforward comedy about an Inuit man who moves to Toronto. Rather, the issue is that everybody who tries to adapt it seem to either fail miserably or ''[[AuthorExistenceFailure die]]'', causing many to declare it [[TheProductionCurse cursed]]. Throughout the 80s and 90s, numerous different filmmakers, studios, and actors would try to make the movie, only for it to fall back into DevelopmentHell yet again for some reason or another. Eventually, everybody just gave up and declared it unadaptable.

* Music/{{Genesis}}' 1976 RockOpera ''Music/TheLambLiesDownOnBroadway'' is generally considered to be the musical equivalent of ''Literature/{{Ulysses}}'' in terms of works that would be impossible to make a good adaptation of, primarily owing to its MindScrew plot and heavy use of surreal imagery. The album was already hard enough to adapt on stage; the associated tour required a bevy of extraordinarily elaborate effects, and at no point was all of it ever able to work as intended.

* Despite the countless adaptations of ''Literature/JaneEyre'', to the point of AdaptationOverdosed, Charlotte Brontë's later novel ''Literature/{{Villette'}}' has only had a few radio adaptations. This is most likely because of the novel's UnreliableNarrator, who deliberately hides things from the audience, including never revealing her DarkandTroubledPast.

* Despite the countless adaptations of Literature/JaneEyre, to the point of AdaptationOverdosed, Charlotte Brontë's later novel Literature/Villette has only had a few radio adaptations. This is most likely because of the novel's UnreliableNarrator, who deliberately hides things from the audience, including never revealing her DarkandTroubledPast.

* One of the staff writer on ''Series/TheSuperMarioBrosSuperShow'' [[https://vantagepointinterviews.com/2018/09/11/do-the-mario-perry-martin-on-scripting-the-cartoon-adaptations-of-the-super-mario-bros/ explained]] that the show's production team found it hard to derive material from the [[ExcusePlot shallow plots and thin characters]] of [[Franchise/SuperMarioBros the games]] (which was especially the case in 1989, when the series' presence in the United States amounted to just the [[VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1 first]] [[VideoGame/SuperMarioBros2 two]] games-- ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros3'' wouldn't be out in the States for another year), which is why most of the episodes are structured around stock movie and historical parodies. Indeed, Nintendo of America themselves had cold feet about the idea of adapting the games into an animated series, and this trope may have been a factor in that opinion.
-->'''Perry Martin''': "''The bible was written by Bruce and Reed Shelly. Reading it, you could tell that they were still struggling to get a handle on the show. I mean, the core problem was obvious: There are no real characters or stories in a Nintendo game, so how do you turn one into a TV series? [...] There was little indication about the kinds of adventures our heroes would have, and a lot of unanswered questions about how we would incorporate elements of the game. I had no clue how to solve those problem and didn’t see how that show was going to work at all! But [=DiC=] had an order for 52 episodes and deadlines were looming. We had to make some decisions fast or fall behind schedule, which would be a disaster. So at the beginning there was a lot of urgency to solve those problems and get on with it.''"

* A ''Literature/{{Warrior|Cats}}s'' film has been greenlit, however a film adaptation has previously been in DevelopmentHell for this reason. The series has over two dozen books and over a ''[[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters thousand]]'' named characters. This alone makes it difficult to produce a self-contained film based off of even the first arc due to its length and the number of characters. However, the major issue is that the series is about [[StrayAnimalStory feral cat colonies]]. With its crap ton of FamilyUnfriendlyViolence and {{Family Unfriendly Death}}s (with the first book more-or-less ''beginning'' with a cat being murdered), it's impossible to get a kid's film out of the series but it's unlikely the film would appeal to the mainstream teenage demographic. ''Warriors'' already had [[Manga/WarriorCatsManga adaptations]] in the case of {{Comic Book Adaptation}}s, but they have [[LighterAndSofter heavily toned down]] compared to the books and go for the BloodlessCarnage route.

* ''Film/{{Adaptation}}'' is an adaptation of the Susan Orlean book, ''Literature/TheOrchidThief'' about how it's hard to adapt a that very same story, that basically has no plot, and is mainly about flowers.

Books are allowed more wiggle room than film or television, which is why {{Middle Grade|Literature}} and {{Young Adult|Literature}} books contain more mature topics than what appears in many cartoons for that same demographic. Prose works that rely heavily on [[InnerMonologue internal monologues]] are hard to adapt to film or television mainly because depicting one often stops a movie dead in its tracks. Stories with a TomatoSurprise plot may be difficult to adapt to a dramatic medium as it is harder to hide the twist element (especially if TheAllConcealingI is involved) without tactics that are so obviously artificial that they tip off the viewer in themselves. StoryBranching is a common headache, as described by CuttingOffTheBranches. ArbitrarilySerializedSimultaneousAdventures and SimultaneousArcs don't work well in all media, and can cause issues when there isn't an easy way to convert them to TwoLinesNoWaiting.

Video games also have a completely different way of writing than film (assuming they ''[[NoPlotNoProblem have]]'' [[ExcusePlot plots]]), which is a component in why VideoGameMoviesSuck.

* This trope is likely the reason why it took until 9 years after Music/FrankZappa's death for ''Music/ThingFish'' to see its long-promised stage production. The plot is so convoluted and directionless that it's hard to make any sense of it, even as the triple-album + libretto it was originally released as, to the point where its one stage adaptation in 2003 had to take a number of liberties to ensure that it could even be made at all. At least ''Music/UncleMeat'' was meant to be the ''soundtrack'' of a never-released film than a conveyance of the story itself, and ''Music/JoesGarage'' intentionally derailed itself for the sake of humor-- ''Thing Fish'', meanwhile, '''is''' the story through and through, and attempts to play itself as straight as possible.

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* Perhaps the most famous example of this trope is with Creator/JamesJoyce's landmark novel ''Literature/{{Ulysses}}'', which makes heavy use of lengthy internal monologues, incredibly surreal and postmodern imagery, highly experimental chapter structures built strictly around breaking ''literary'' conventions, and a plot that attempts to follow multiple different characters over the same series of events. As a result, the book is typically considered the archetypal example of a work that is impossible to effectively adapt into any medium other than the one in which it was originally published. That said, adaptations of the book ''have'' been attempted to varying degrees of success, including a 1967 film that earned BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Oscar nominations for for Best Adapted Screenplay.

* ''Series/DoctorWho'' seems to have gained a reputation for this in the decades since its beginnings, cancellation, and revival. Much of it stems from the fact that the series already tends to feature long-drawn out plots, which in the 1963-1989 iteration of the series already tended to reach or even surpass the length of a feature film. As a result, it would be difficult to create a ''Doctor Who'' movie that didn't tell the kind of story that could already be told in the show itself (barring the possibility of better effects, and even then the 2005 revival is generally considered to be close enough in that department). Additionally, the heavy continuity and complex premise of the series would make it difficult to create a film that could appeal to neophytes, as there's so many things that would need to be introduced at once that it would end up bogging down the pace of a film. The show had only been adapted to the big screen on [[Film/DrWhoAndTheDaleks two]] [[Film/DaleksInvasionEarth2150AD occasions]] in the 1960's, and these were adaptations of [[Recap/DoctorWhoS1E2TheDaleks already-aired]] [[Recap/DoctorWhoS2E2TheDalekInvasionOfEarth serials]], adaptations that existed within their own continuity independent of the show. The one time the series got a movie actually based in the show's continuity was [[Recap/DoctorWhoTVMTheTVMovie a TV movie]] in 1996 intended to kickstart an American revival of the series, but this ended up flopping as a result of its indecisiveness about whether it wanted to appeal to old fans or new, unfamiliar viewers (to say nothing of its glaring continuity errors) and is generally seen as SoBadItsGood as a result.

* One of the staff writer on ''Series/TheSuperMarioBrosSuperShow'' [[https://vantagepointinterviews.com/2018/09/11/do-the-mario-perry-martin-on-scripting-the-cartoon-adaptations-of-the-super-mario-bros/ explained]] that the show's production team found it hard to derive material from the [[ExcusePlot shallow plots and thin characters]] of [[Franchise/SuperMarioBros the games]], which is why most of the episodes are structured around stock movie and historical parodies.
-->'''Perry Martin''': "''The bible was written by Bruce and Reed Shelly. Reading it, you could tell that they were still struggling to get a handle on the show. I mean, the core problem was obvious: There are no real characters or stories in a Nintendo game, so how do you turn one into a TV series? [...] There was little indication about the kinds of adventures our heroes would have, and a lot of unanswered questions about how we would incorporate elements of the game. I had no clue how to solve those problem and didn’t see how that show was going to work at all! But DIC had an order for 52 episodes and deadlines were looming. We had to make some decisions fast or fall behind schedule, which would be a disaster. So at the beginning there was a lot of urgency to solve those problems and get on with it.''"

One common reason for this is an AudienceAlienatingPremise. What might be popular for one medium is not for another. For example, {{xenofiction}}al literature works are rarely ever adapted. Most are too dark for kids shows or films, but [[MatureAnimalStory most older audiences]] aren't interested in serious works about talking animals or non-humanoid anthropomorphic aliens.

This often coincides with differing writing and content standards between mediums.

* For decades, ''ComicBook/{{Watchmen}}'' was considered impossible to adapt due to the large amount of supplemental material that was connected to the plot. Creator/ZackSnyder eventually managed to create an adaptation that covered most of the plot points, but neither author Creator/AlanMoore nor the book's devoted fans were happy with it.

* Despite the countless adaptations of Literature/JaneEyre, to the point of AdaptationOverdosed, Charlotte Brontë's later novel Literature/Villette has only had a few radio adaptations. This is most likely because of the novel's UnreliableNarrator, who deliberately hides things from the audience, including never revealing her DarkandTroubledPast.

* This was the main reason given why it took decades for Franchise/WonderWoman to get her own feature film or animated series. She's a part of the "Big Three" at Creator/{{DC|Comics}} (alongside Franchise/{{Batman}} and Franchise/{{Superman}}) but, except for a 1974 film starring Creator/CathyLeeCrosby, the [[Series/WonderWoman 1970s series]], and the 2007 [[WesternAnimation/WonderWoman animated direct-to-video film]] that sold worse than expected, she never starred in her own work until 2017. Wonder Woman has been regulated to co-starring alongside other Justice League members. Wonder Woman doesn't have a concrete [[DependingOnTheWriter personality]], lore, RoguesGallery, or supporting cast compared to Batman or Superman, so she was considered hard to work with. The GirlShowGhetto also didn't help. In 2017 ''Film/WonderWoman2017'' finally came out and was very successful, paving the way for more material starring Wonder Woman.

* ''Manga/NegimaMagisterNegiMagi'' is an [[LongRunner extremely long]] manga that famously went through a slow GenreShift over its life, transforming from a fanservice-filled slice of life comedy into a still admittedly fanservice-filled action fantasy tale. Thus, the vast majority of adaptations focus only on the earlier style, ignoring (or never reaching) the fantasy epic, though one OVA did simply start 100 chapters in and cover some of those later chapters. That the manga ended very abruptly due to [[TorchTheFranchiseAndRun rights disputes]] doesn't make it any easier, either.