The TVTropes Trope Finder is where you can come to ask questions like "Do we have this one?" and "What's the trope about...?" Trying to rediscover a long lost show or other medium but need a little help? Head to Media Finder and try your luck there. Want to propose a new trope? You should be over at You Know, That Thing Where.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks! — That is to say, "This adaptation cut too many corners, left too many characters underdeveloped, and rushed plot bits, so it sucks compared to the source material."
If you're talking about a completely new intellectual property that just wasn't done well or might have been done better in a different medium, that seems extremely subjective. It might be better to focus on what wasn't done well, for example Special Effects Failure which is less of an issue in mediums that don't use "special effects" as such.
Edited by KD
I'm talking specifically about book series that receive the extreme version of Compressed Adaptation, so instead of being a TV series, or a movie series (or even just the "standard" trilogy), there is a single movie, cramming into less than 3 hours more than 3 Doorstoppers, leading to very rushed story.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks! is for situations where fandom complains about things not matching the source material in an adaptation. I'm looking for something more specific, and also associated with broader audiences, who, despite lack of exposure to the source, still notice the rushed nature of it. Things like The Dark Tower (2017), or Queen of the Damned (which managed to achieve it despite just having 2 books to go with, and still messed up royally), or the recent The School for Good and Evil (2022). They all have the same thing in common - taking a book series and trying to make out of it a single movie, which makes the plot choppy and the characters severely underdeveloped (or just reduced to extras).
In other words: try to imagine the sort of a mess you would get if seven Harry Potter books would be turned into not eight, but just one, 2 hours long movie.
Edited by Tropiarz
This actually sounds more like a variant of Hard-to-Adapt Work than anything - in this case, it's a work that's hard to adapt to a specific medium. I wonder if that might be the better approach to take here, since I can think of other cases than just compressing long book series into a single film.
But it's not hard. It just takes making more than a single movie out of it to "solve" the problem, or making it a (mini) series. Rather than doing so, a single feature is made, which is particularly weird nowdays, when streaming services not only exist (thus allowing easier distribution), but even said services make their own one-feature-adaptations. And I'm specifically about extreme compressions, because they always have very distinctive final results.
I’m not sure such a page would be allowed since it would intrinsically be a complaining page. We used to allow complaint pages and still have some left, but a lot have been eliminated, and new ones aren’t really countenanced anymore.
I can certainly see the point. Still, a bit of let-down for just a standard production practice to not have a trope, complains or not.
I guess Compressed Adaptation would have to do, then.
Hard-to-Adapt Work would most certainly cover works that would require an extended production like a miniseries or multiple movies to adapt without significant trimming.
Making movies and shows involves a significant investment of time and money, especially when you're asking an entire cast and crew to commit to a long-term project. If you want to give a studio's financial department a collective heart attack, tell them you want commit to producing a 12 part series based on a genre work.
It's only in the past couple decades that a few producers like Netflix, AMC, and HBO have not only been willing to gamble on a top-shelf adaptation of a long-running comic book series about zombies or give an R-rated fantasy series a blank check to keep a bajillion characters' actors on retainer and add photorealistic dragons into scenes filmed in actual castles, but actually had the budget to do it.
Edited by Scorpion451
>tell them you want commit to producing a 12 part series based on a genre work.
Except it's about the same money as if making a 150 minute long feature movie, if not cheaper. Miniseries were HUGE in the 80s, too, including genre ones. Guess I'm getting too old for this.
Either way, I will settle for Compressed Adaptation, because it's the closest to what I need. And this query can be closed.
Is there any specific YMMV (or not) trope for a situation where great material for a TV series or a mini-series is "wasted" on a feature film, and as a result, it ends up cutting corners, under-developing characters, rushing plot bits etc.? Or when an adaptation of a book series ends up with a single feature movie, doing Compressed Adaptation, much to the detriment of the material and the final product?