The Fan Proposal

           We’ve all seen it happen. A beloved TV show, book, comic book, toy, or even board game turned into a film, which is then flubbed up by Hollywood. Replace ‘flubbed’ with a similar F word and you get the general idea of what fans feel.  If you get your hopes up even a tiny bit the pain is increased a thousand fold. It’s like whomever gets the film rights actively chooses a director or writers that has never heard of or seen the source material, or if they have they give exactly zero $#!ts. It’s irritating but that is the way things are.
            A number of these films are not superhero films. This is because I want to highlight the breadth of things ruined by bad Hollywood choices. Each choice will be obvious when you get to them.

Deadpool is the Merc with the Mouth. WITH.

The Fan Proposal would hopefully decrease the likelihood of that significantly. The idea is that for any movie based on something else a fan of said franchise be on staff. Said fan would have the power to veto any ideas that are stupid, weird, or just plain offensive to the source material.

This is an idea that has been lingering in the back of my mind for a while now. It is the only way I can think of to stop really, really bad movie changes from happening. Other than not hiring the same directors over and over again when they’ve proven they don’t know what they are doing. I’m looking at you Michael Bay. Over-hyped directors that rely heavily on explosions and slow motion effects aside, I get that this plan would be difficult. Many directors and writers probably would take offense to someone being able to go over their heads but then again some of these guys could really use vetoing. I’m looking at you Shyamalan. 

How can you ruin this design? Bay found a way.

Creative film makers gone horribly wrong aside, he’s not the only offender. Michael Bay’s Transformers films (at least 1-3) are filled with weird little and big changes that have seriously offended fans of the various TV shows. The formation of Energon and Devastator’s wrecking balls come to mind. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, congratulations and don’t watch Transformers 2). There’s also the two unnecessary human love stories that were forced into a movie about giant robotic organisms blowing each other to smithereens. That doesn’t add complexity the movies, it bogs it WAY down.
Another film that comes to mind that had serious alterations form the source material is Dragonball: Evolution (2009) directed by James Wong. If you don't recognize the Director's name... well there is a reason for that. The movie is a big fat middle figure to the source material. The number of changes big and small, strange and awful are too many to list. At the end of the blog I'm leaving a link to "Everything Wrong with Dragonball: Evolution" done by the CinemaSin's guys on Youtube. He'll give you every gritty details. The one I will mention is the transformation of the Ki attacks, various forms of energy blasts, into weird puffs of smoke. When you change an energy blast that destroys mountains into a weird air blast that moves things a little, you are stupid. No ifs, ands. or buts.

Comrades, yes. Brothers, no.

The third and final movie I’ll mention is X-men Origins: Wolverine. They changed a lot of things in that film, the most glaring of which being making Sabertooth and Wolverine brothers. James “Logan” Howlett and Victor Creed have very similar powers, a reason for this is that one of the original writers actually envisioned them being father and son, but in all of the main continuity they have no such connection. Wolverine does have a brother named Dog that hunts him for a good chunk of his young adulthood but he is not Victor Creed. I can understand the confusion though, as Wolverine's Healing powers seems to be the rare mutation that is always inherited by the next generation, but I'll cover that later. I believe the idea was to give the two characters a connection and thus a reason for Sabertooth to hate Wolverine when their bond was severed early in the film. Everywhere else, they just hate each other. That’s it. Depending on the comic or show they delve more deeply into it but at least in the beginning they are just two dudes that hate each other’s guts. That’s all I ever really needed. Heck, even when they do delve into things it can be summed up as Sabertooth likes killing, Wolverine does not. End o story. Beautifully simple isn't it?

The real difficulty in this plan would be to find the perfect fan. One that is loyal enough to the source material that the outrageous changes would piss them off but not so loyal that they’d allow the changes necessary for a media shift. For example, one who cares enough that they get pissed off when the Dark Phoenix is turned into a split personality but not so much that the sight of Wolverine towering over Cyclops fills them with a homicidal rage. Yes, Wolverine is short, and the fact Hugh Jackman is not pisses some really gun-ho fans off. Weird, I know, but every group has its fanatics.

Did anyone laugh at these two?
I just felt uncomfortable.

Picture it, if my proposal was a standard then certain abominations wouldn’t have ever besmirched the source material. No taking away Deadpool’s mouth and giving him a ton of powers that he’s never had in X-men: Origins. No changing the Blob’s powers so that he’s a mutant with super strength that developed an eating disorder in the aforementioned X-men. No Dragonball Evolution…like at all. 

They got it SO wrong.

No really racist versions of Skidds and Mudflap in Transformers 2. No turning Bruce Banner’s father into the Absorbing man, two very different characters, in the Ang Lee’s Hulk movie. No splitting the Hobbit into three unnecessarily long movies in the Hobbit trilogy. No fusing Avatar Roku and his spirit animal in The Last Airbender. No powering down Earthbending so much that it takes five guys to move a stone that the most novice Earthbending could move in the TV show, again in The Last Airbender. No so seriously mispronouncing names that it makes it sound like you’re mocking the characters in The Last Airbender. No downgrading Prince Zuko’s scar from covering half his face to like a weird skin condition around the left side of his face in The Last Airbender. SERIOUSLY Shyamalan, could you not even get the tiniest detail right!?!? Deep breath, and I’m back on task.

I realize that the Fan Proposal is nearly impossible. It’d be hard to find one person for every franchise that loves it enough to keep something’s the same but change others. It’d be even more difficult to get directors to agree to have their authority undercut. In reality this is nothing more than a pipe dream of a man that really enjoys Movies, as well as TV, books and comic books. But I can dream damn it. 

I want to get excited, really I do, but this will probably be a movie in need of "The Fan Proposal" too.

http://www.moviechronicles.com/transformers/transformers-images/2009-04/ful-high-quality-cgi-renders-of-transformers-2-robots/

http://marvel-movies.wikia.com/wiki/Victor_Creed

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/the-last-airbender/images/9512162/title/avatar-last-airbender-cast-photo

http://xmenmovies.wikia.com/wiki/File:X-men-origins-wolverine-weapon-xi-deadpool-ending.jpg

http://michaelbay.com/2014/05/12/transformers-4-theatrical-trailer-debuts-at-apple-on-may-15-12am/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzIraLLe7U8