I saw the first three Harry Potter movies before picking up the books (and picked them up in order).

My English was pathetic at the time so I started with reading Harry Potter aur Paras Patthar. It was the first book I read outside school.

Somehow a friend got his hands on The Chamber of Secrets and gave it to me to read. I had already seen the movie, but found new details, dialogues, and things in the book.

Then my brother gave me Prisoner of Azkaban. I read that, and was hooked by then.

Goblet of Fire was the first book I read before watching the movie. I loved the movie even more this time!

I could compare and contrast the imagery I had in mind vs what the movie showed on screen. I understood how two different people can interpret the same line in different ways. And it was a great refresher, to relive the story in 2 hours (vs 2-3 months I took to read the book).

But lots of people complained about missing scenes, changed dialogues, etc. I started noticing these flaws from next movie onwards too.

Back in 2019, The Office released its Hindi adaptation. Being a huge The Office fan (watched US and UK versions multiple times), I felt this was pathetic. The essentially took the script and transliterated it to Hindi with Indianised names.

I found a bunch of other vocal fans saying that this was shit as well.

But one of my friend who hadn’t seen the original The Office loved it. She had no preconceptions, so she just took everything at face value, and couldn’t stop binging it. It was like me watching Pokemon in Hindi, and loving it!

Last year I saw the One Piece live action series. I hadn’t gone through the manga or anime before that. And I loved it; The whole series had me hooked!

Then I saw some chatter on twitter where people kept bashing this series. They said it’s not as good as manga, or anime.

I realized at that moment that new adaptions are not built for the same audience.

Producers might want to target the same audience so they get to recoup the investment in case it bombs, but new adaptations generally have fundamentally different audience.

If the audience wasn’t different, and behaved like the OGs, why wouldn’t they just go to the source and consume that?

Movies are more accessible to digest than books, but cost way more than them to make. Video Games demand total immersion. TV series’s are great for binging.

Different people like different medium. That doesn’t mean one is better or worse than the other, just different.

Same applies to our work where we have to create stuff.

Can you change the medium of something you love to make it more accessible to a different audience?

A new “Three Body Problem” series is coming out this week, and people are nervous about whether it’ll be as good as the book, which is what lead me to write this essay!