Adaptations

Elliot Page Will Bring His Video Game History to a Beyond: Two Souls Series

Page's PlayStation 3-era adventure video game adaptation will maintain its non-linear storytelling.

Amazon’s Mass Effect Show Is Inching Closer to Reality

BioWare veteran Michael Gamble will serve as the series' executive producer.

So Where the Hell Is My XCOM TV Show?

Video game adaptations have had a rough history. They’ve been almost uniformly crappy over the past few decades, meaning the recent release of Tomb Raider represents a leap forward by being average instead of just awful. But here’s a thought: Why aren’t we bringing video game adaptations to the small screen instead? We’re living through…

Key Mutations Show How Tibetans Thrive at High Elevations

At altitudes of 15,000 feet, Tibetans live in environments that would incapacitate most humans. New research has uncovered several genetic mutations that appear to be responsible for these high-altitude superpowers—including a trait inherited from an extinct human species. Geneticist Chad Huff of the University of Texas, along with colleagues, have uncovered variants of five distinct…

This Mutated Fish Can Now Withstand Absurd Levels of Toxic Waste

Researchers have discovered that Atlantic killifish are now 8,000 times more resilient to high levels of toxic waste than other fish, allowing them to survive extreme levels of pollution that would normally be deadly. It sounds like an evolutionary success story, but examples like this are exceptionally rare in the animal kingdom. New research published…

All 58 Stephen King Movie and TV Series Adaptations, Ranked 

No contemporary author has seen his work made into more movies and TV shows than Stephen King (and many more, like The Dark Tower, are in the works). The fact that he’s astonishingly prolific is certainly a contributing factor—as is the fact his works, horror and otherwise, tend to feel cinematic even on the page.…

Looking Back at Marvel’s Wonderfully Weird Comic Adaptation of the First Star Wars Movie

Marvel recently released the first issue of its The Force Awakens comic adaptation, and it is weird. It is weird in 2016 to see a straight adaptation of a movie in comic form, months after the movie came out. But it’s part of tradition for the company, one that stretches all the way back to…

Could Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother Become The Next Hunger Games? 

Hollywood’s appetite for YA dystopian thrillers isn’t dying down anytime soon. According to Deadline, Paramount Pictures has picked up Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother for a potential franchise. The novel, released in 2008, follows 17-year-old Markus (also known as w1n5t0n), he he and his friends are caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in…

It’s Survival Of The Most Useful When Protecting Species

Consensus is growing that we are steering towards a sixth mass extinction event. There are calls for increased efforts to stop the accelerating loss of plants and animals. But do we really need to protect all species from global extinction? Top image: Coral reefs are like an underwater metropolis – and function in similar ways.…

Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Adaptations Are Statistically Too Damn Long

Look, we know everyone’s been complaining about the length of the Hobbit trilogy ever since the decision to make the adaptation into 3 separate movies. And they were right to! But now we have actual statistics to show that they’re some of the most gratuitous book-to-movie adaptations ever. Data blog FiveThirtyEight took the unenviable task…

Why Are Some Franchises So Content With Retelling The Same Story?

As you might have known, this weekan officially licensed game set in the HBO version of the Game of Thrones universe was released. Naturally as a fan, I checked it out – and while I enjoyed it, I was jarred by how much it felt like it was just a retread of stories Game of…

The Best times An On-Screen Adaptation Strayed From The Book

The disappointing changes made in the on-screen adaptations from some of our favorite books have been well catalogued. But what about the times when the on-screen adaptation diverted from its source material, for the best? In response to this post on the reasons not to worry over adaptations switching up plot points from the books,…

Ancient Europeans were lactose intolerant for 5,000 years after switching over to agriculture. DNA extracted from skulls dating from 5,700 BC to 800 BC shows that Europeans carried the genes for lactose intolerance. But that didn’t stop them from eating dairy products like milk and cheese for 4,000 years. The study shows that genomes can…

Why Adaptations changing things up can be a good thing

Game of Thrones’ book reading fans were given a bit of a shock yesterday when set pictures from the TV show’s upcoming season revealed another huge change from the source material – but amid the concern, there was some hope. Sometimes, change can do us all some good when it comes to adapting our favourite…

What Is The Worst Change A Film Adaptation Has Ever Made?

Movie adaptations always require a few changes from their source material. Sometimes those changes can result in a totally new and wonderful experience—and sometimes they’re just plain terrible. Which alteration is the very worst? Include the title of the film (and the source material, if it has a different title), the change the filmmakers made,…

What Book Series Would Work As A Television Adaptation But Not As A Movie?

There are some books that we can’t wait to see as movies, and then there are some that we reallyonly want to see unspool across seasons on television. Which are the book series that you hope to see make it to the little screen, but not to the theater? Responding to reluctance for a Sandman…

Why Prey Animals Are Some of the Most Badass Creatures on the Planet

When it comes to evading hungry predators, prey animals have no shortage of tricks — things like like camouflage, prickly defenses — and a hell of a lot of speed. But they’ve also evolved some lesser known strategies as well. Here are some ingenious ways prey animals avoid becoming a delicious meal. Predators tend to…

How Hope Larson got to adapt Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to comics

We haven’t heard anything lately about the Wrinkle in Time movie that was announced a year ago, but at least cartoonist Hope Larson (Mercury) is adapting it into a graphic novel in time for its 50th anniversary next year. At the Larson spotlight panel at Wondercon, she was asked how she got this plum assignment.…

Robert Rodriguez’s Machete is slicing its way to comics

The “Mexploitation” action flick — which sprang from one of Grindhouse’s fake trailers — will get both a prequel comic and an ongoing series from IDW starting in September. Awesome. The only problem: They picked the wrong Grindhouse character. Don’t get me wrong: If the comic — cowritten by Rodriguez and Aaron Kaufman, with art…

The Secret History of the Giant Man is heading to the screen

Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black is adapting Matt Kindt’s somber, moving graphic novel 3 Story — about a man who can’t stop growing, told by the three women in his life — for Warner Bros. It’s a slightly odd move for Warner to scoop up a Dark Horse comic, and one with such an indie…