Here's what's become exhausting about the current state of adaptation discourse: everyone wants literature to be the answer to a problem that doesn't actually exist in books.
The recent dust-up over translators critiquing film adaptations, the hand-wringing about whether source material is being "followed," the insistence that studios need to hire more literary people as gatekeepers—it's all symptomatic of an industry that has forgotten how to make decisions. So it outsources that responsibility to the written word and calls it integrity.
Let's be clear about what's happening. When a filmmaker adapts a novel, they're not transcribing it. They're translating it across mediums that operate on fundamentally different principles. A translator of Greek epic poetry understands language and cultural nuance in ways a screenwriter might not. But understanding Homer doesn't make you qualified to judge whether a cinematic interpretation works as cinema. These are separate skill sets, and the current trend of treating literary credentials as a substitute for actual creative judgment is making everything worse.
The real problem isn't that adaptations stray from their sources. It's that studios have stopped trusting their own creative instincts, so they hide behind the book like it's a security blanket. They want the book's credibility without doing the actual work of adaptation. They want translators and authors and loyal readers to sign off on their choices, as if literary pedigree can substitute for a coherent vision.
This is how you end up with bloated, confused adaptations that satisfy no one. You get projects that are too faithful to be cinematic and too compromised to be literary. They exist in an awkward middle space, defended by appeals to source material rather than by their own merits.
The winners in this space won't be the studios that assemble the most impressive literary advisory boards or hire the most acclaimed translators as consultants. They'll be the ones who make a clear creative choice and stick with it. They'll be the producers who understand that fidelity to a book's themes is different from fidelity to its plot, and that sometimes you have to change the latter to honor the former.
This applies equally to the trend of "elevated" and "prestige" adaptations. The pitch that romance novels deserve better casting and chemistry because they're being treated seriously now? That's the same trap dressed in different language. You don't elevate material by wrapping it in literary respectability. You elevate it by making something genuinely good.
The publishing world doesn't need to fix Hollywood. Hollywood needs to stop borrowing credibility from books and earn its own.
What we're really seeing is an industry-wide failure of confidence. Executives are afraid to make choices, so they hide behind the authority of the source material. Directors are afraid their vision won't hold up, so they invite literary experts to validate them. The result is a kind of creative paralysis dressed up as respect for the original work.
The simplification that needs to happen is this: separate the roles. Let critics evaluate films as films and books as books. Let filmmakers adapt freely, knowing they'll be judged on the film's merits, not its fidelity. Let literature be literature. Stop asking it to do the work that creators should be doing themselves.
The mess isn't created by too much freedom in adaptation. It's created by too many cooks trying to hedge their bets. The operators who succeed will be the ones who strip away all this defensive architecture and just make something. Something clear. Something committed. Something that doesn't need a literary translator to explain why it exists.