Live Action Adaptation Burnout Is Already Here

There was a time, many years ago, when people would have been excited about a Naruto live action remake. In fact, that time was 2015, when the project was originally announced. But in 2024, the announcement that there’s finally a director (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ Dest🅰in Daniel Cretton) attached to the project has largely been met with middling to negative reactions. We are at the point in the cycle that nobody wants this anymore, because nobody believes the adaptation will be any good. How can they, when Avatar: The Last Airbender is currently in the news cycle for being mediocre and missing the point of the series?

Why All The Remakes?

It’s easy to attribute the start of the live action trend to Disneyജ, which has released at least one live action adaptation of its own animated movies every year since 2014. But of course, we’ve had these adaptations since as early as the 1940s – a lot of the first superhero movies came out then – and the modern boom dates back to 2008’s Iron Man, released a year before Disney bought out Marvel Studios.

After all, Marvel movies proved that the IP formula worked. Take familiar characters and stories to capitalise on nostalgia, throw an actor in front of a green screen, slam the profit button. Chasing Marvel’s success, we saw a slew of old series rebooted, as well as beloved animated movies and series getting live action remakes. The animation to live action trend is just part of this wider trend of regurgitating IP, which aims to make as much money as possible by taking as little risk as possible. Take somethingಞ people already know and love, tweak it a little, and sell it.

Why Are They Failing?

But🎃 safety only satiates for so long, and now people are craving adaptations that surprise them. Marvel movies are beginning to fail very publicly in the box office because they are endlessly predictable, among myriad other reasons. But shows like The Boys and🌼 The Last of Us are succeeding in spite of this, because they bend the formula, slip in surprises, expand on the unexplored and subvert our expectations. Generally, live action adaptations don’t do this – they are often just the same show, but with human actors.

Personally, I don’t find the inclusion of real people makes a show any more appealing, and changing the medium of a show can drastically change its effect in ways its adapters don’t seem to be accounting for. People are now starting to doubt the value of these adaptations because they’ve seen so many fall flat. Most recently, we’ve seen a lukewarm response to Netflix’s adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but every live action Disney adaptation ever has also been met with shrugs in the cultural conversation, even if a fleeting few made huge profit initially. When animation is key to the storytelling, it’s rare that a live action adaptation manages to capture ꦍthe same energy in a different format.

Can live action adaptations ever work? Sure. The One Piece adaptation has been pretty well-liked, after all. What people are really sick of is mediocrity, because every adaptation stays within the safe and proven, never venturing to be more or different than the work it draws from. As long as adaptations are being churned out as part of ꦐthe machine instead of created as distinct pieces of art, they’ll rightly continue to be rejected by audiences. I want more stylisation and innovation. I don’t want more Avatars.