But they shouldn't alienate their "core" either, because they are the ones who spread positive or negative word of mouth.
Well, that didn't seem to hurt
Smallville or Ron Moore's
Battlestar Galactica. Leaving the core unsatisfied can hurt your project if it isn't strong enough otherwise, but if it has enough audience appeal on its own merit, it may not
need the support of the core fanbase in order to succeed. Either it'll be popular enough without the core fanbase that it will still succeed, or it'll eventually win over most of the core fanbase despite its changes. So it's not an absolute rule. (And then you get something like the
Green Lantern film which is so fixated on pandering to the core that it forgets to tell a good story in its own right.)
In this case, lack of fidelity to the original seems to be just part of the pilot's problems. After all, the network execs who declined to pick it up weren't judging it on the basis of fidelity to the comics, but on the basis of whether they thought it would be a successful and popular TV show. And clearly they didn't.
For example, the new "Punisher" pilot that FOX is producing. I have several friends who enjoy super-hero movies and TV shows, who don't buy comics, who are going to pass on it simply because I told them that I was passing on it. I told them that it didn't sound like they were being faithful to the source material (which is always an issue with me) and that it sounded like "Punisher-in-name-only", more so even than the horrible Dolph Lundgren movie in the 90's.
On the other hand, the Mark Valley
Human Target series did fairly well despite having absolutely nothing in common with the original comic aside from the title and the main character's name. But then,
Human Target was never a hugely popular comics series, so it's not a great example.
I've never understood why people will aquire a property to adapt, and then ignore their source material. It has never made sense to me.
It's because movie/TV executives aren't approaching it from the perspective of the core material. Their job is to generate movies/TV shows. They need to get ideas from somewhere, so they look for things that might be source material for movies/shows and buy it. It's just raw material to them.
Keep in mind that
any concept acquired by a movie or TV studio, whether it's an adaptation or a wholly original script/series, is going to go through an extensive process of alteration and revision before it ends up on a screen. The difference is that when it's an adaptation, we can see the beginning of that process as well as the end and recognize how much it's changed, whereas with original concepts, we usually don't see the starting pitch and don't appreciate how much it's been transformed in the course of the development process. So it seems to us that adaptations are somehow atypically subject to alteration, but really they're treated the same way that original concepts are treated. There are lots of different producers and executives who can all demand changes based on their own preferences and expectations, or changes can be made based on focus group studies, or a certain producer or actor may have some approach in mind that they've always wanted to do and they choose to do it with this project, or whatever.
I do realize that comics and TV/movies are different mediums, and that what may work for one may not work for another, and that any adaptation is going to re-work the material in some ways, but adaptations that work are the ones strongly recall their source material and not go off the deep-end "Hollywood-izing" them.
Sometimes, but not always. Certainly the Marvel Cinematic Universe films have succeeded by taking a faithful approach, and the Raimi
Spider-Man films and the Nolan
Batman films are largely faithful to the essence of their characters even though they take certain liberties. But on the other hand, the
X-Men film franchise has taken immense liberties with the characters and continuity, throwing out standard histories and relationships and characterizations all over the place, but it's still generated three very popular movies out of five. And again I'll mention
Smallville, whose whole initial purpose was to take the basic story of Superman and divorce it as completely as possible from its comic-book roots (though that obviously changed in later seasons, and the ratings were lower then).
You just can't make blanket generalizations about what works and what doesn't. If you could, if it were that simple, then nobody would ever make an unsuccessful movie or show. Sometimes you can discern general patterns, but the variables are complex enough that there are always exceptions. Ultimately whether something is
good (or at least tickles some popular fancy well enough to draw in the audience) is a more important determinant than whether it's faithful to some particular ideal or formula.
Certainly something more faithful to the comics'
Wonder Woman -- whatever that means, since she's been so many different things in the comics -- would probably have been better than this. But it's just as possible that a different producer could've come up with an equally revisionist take that would've actually been
good. Just because this particular revisionist take wasn't enjoyable, that doesn't mean revisionism can never work.
I have to ask, are you familiar with the 48-year history of the series and all the multiple times it's been reinvented? The whole thing that makes Doctor Who work is revisionism, the way that it constantly changes actors and producers and storytelling focus and thereby stays fresh and vital and new. It went through many changes over its original 27 seasons, and the current revival series is hugely revisionist in itself, a profoundly new take on the whole thing, which is the whole reason it works.
