They Changed It Now It Sucks - Television Tropes & Idioms

"With the release of X-Men 2 this past weekend, fans of the comics have already found reportedly over 40 flaws within the film. And yet they can't seem to find the flaws in their own lives."

— Saturday Night Live

In cases where as long as it's still the same basic story and keeps all the best bits and characters intact, then it doesn't matter too much that Bob's bald, Alice doesn't die, the football game was changed to a horse race and they cut the watermelon scene, right? It's a bit of a shame they screwed that bit up, but really, it's not as if the entire work is Ruined FOREVER, right?

Wrong!

...or so you would be told by many, many a fan.

To some people, the very act of adaptation is decay. A Film version of something should be a direct word-for-word transcription, with utmost care that the sets, costumes and people be reproduced in every detail. If a character who wears a homburg in the original now wears a fedora, that will be enough to ruin the character, and therefore ruin the film. It will be all you will hear about from these fans on message boards, with them going on at length to explain how his homburg visually defined his entire personality in a way that a fedora never could.

Oh, and it just gets worse the bigger and more complicated the original work is. Make a film version of a popular comic book, and you had better not contradict a single thing that took place in any of the three-hundred issues of the comic, or the comic's spin-off, or indeed the entire Expanded Universe that the comic took place in. Yes, even if the comics contradict themselves.

And don't you dare suggest that in changing it, they made it better. The Fan Dumb isn't listening.

The inverse can occasionally be true as well, that It Is The Same Now It Sucks. In this case, however, it is because they don't want the same thing as before. When you have both It Is The Same Now It Sucks and They Changed It Now It Sucks, you wind up with an Unpleasable Fanbase.

See also Translation Style Choices, Replacement Scrappy, and Ruined FOREVER. Contrast Woolseyism. May overlap with They Don't Make Them Like They Used To.

A common complaint about The Film Of The Book. Of course, some changes really are for the worse: see They Just Didnt Care for the times when this is a legitimate complaint.

First, a special note to tropers: please, please resist the urge to add Justifying Edits and/or Natter below. They're unnecessary, unwelcome, and likely to spark an Internet Backdraft. Remember, Smokey The Bear says, "Only you can prevent flame wars!"

Also, this isn't a universal shield against criticism of changes. "You just don't like change" can be as weak an argument as the points stated by those who rail against minor changes.