This week's poll was suggested by residentgrigo. We've recently (i.e., in the last few years) had Western adaptations of stuff like Cowboy Bebop, Alita: Battle Angel, Ghost in the Shell. Think these are a step in the right direction or just firing a miss?

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: How often do you look at the scanlation releases on MangaUpdates?
Choices:
Multiple times a day - votes: 602 (22.9%)
Once a day - votes: 399 (15.2%)
Few times a week - votes: 570 (21.7%)
Once a week or less - votes: 631 (24%)
Never - votes: 425 (16.2%)
There were 2627 total votes.
The poll ended: April 30th, 2022 3:31pm PDT

I don't think many of you realize that the red numbers for most recently chapter in your reading lists are driven by the releases that are added here

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Alita is literally the only good western live-action adaptation I've seen.

So, on average, yeah, they still suck.

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Can't even do western comic/animation adaptions correctly in live action.... (Looking at DC and Disney)

:V

The one that's kinda good is the sci-fi one like Alita Battle Angel and Edge of Tomorrow mmm...
But Ghost in the Shell kinda bad so I'm not so sure mmm...

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So the world can change me mmm...

Not really great, but I respect the ones that know the source material and are committed to either following it or making deliberate changes more than the fanservicey ones where they know which scenes people want to see and wedge that into the adaptation even if it doesn't fit. But tbf Japanese live action adaptations aren't doing so hot at that themselves (who let the FMA live action be a thing lol)

I need a fifth answer of "didn't watch any" (I don't know if they suck, I just haven't watched much of anything lately, I only read mangas and webtoons)

Last edited by Trimutius at 4:01 am, May 1 2022

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I've only seen Alita and I liked it more than the source material ,so I'd say they're "Are almost respectable".

I also quite dislike Asian adaptations and how many actors heavily bleach their hair and look nothing like what they're adapting

Finally got good?

I watched Erased, Ruroni Kenshin, and Homunculus recently, and I was surprised that I quite enjoyed them. Especially Erased. I thought, "Ah, does JDrama/films adapted from manga finally got a new light?" 😅

PS
Anyway, I do realize that new chapter updates notifications on my list came from the Releases page. It's just I'm not too sure if I should answer "every day" or "never", since I always checked directly on my list page. 😂

Last edited by mallika23 at 1:34 am, May 2 2022

It seems that like almost everyone else, I've only seen Alita which was good but I've only heard bad things about the rest. I'm not really interested in live adaptations anyway (neither am I in anime adaptations usually). I prefer original works.

Where's the "Don't watch any" answer...?

The best recent western live-action adaptation film is indeed Alita but it is a 6/10 franchise non-starter. A Hollywood-ized, if reasonably accurate, prequel for things to now never come. Then we have a parade of absolute embarrassments (GitS and Bebop are appalling) so even slight improvements can´t be felt as of now. The single highlight is the light novel adaptation Edge of Tomorrow but it is now 8 years old and only broken even through streaming and home media. Is 2014 recent enough to say that things are moving up? Not really. Especially as Hollywood refused to look at the film to see what worked due to its non-performance.

Novel adaptations that strike out aren´t really new either. See Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2008). Remakes as The Magnificent Seven and Yojimbo from the 60s are also noteworthy. Even Star Wars was a remake of The Hidden Fortress in one of the early drafts but none of these are recognizable to have "Japanese" origins. Who knows what the next accidentally good Hollywood adaptation will be but it needs to feel or look "anime" to move the needle. Gundam by Netflix? I sadly have to go with still suck as no signs of a turnaround can be seen as of now.

Nolan and Phase One of the MCU were needed to give superhero films a baseline of quality. Full-on turds like Hellboy 2019 or hacked together messes like Dark Pheonix, Josstice League and Morbius are now exceptions. CBMs rarely offend unless the production process was disturbed. You can´t say that about the 00s despite giving us genre highlights such as Road To Perdition, Nolan´s Batman, Spider-man 1/2, Watchmen or X-men 2. Something like Jump Studios and one of the Big 5 going all-in on animanga would be needed to reach current CBM production standards but I could see the almost respectable stage being reached in a decade if things begin to turn around and fast. Award Buzz, a billion-dollar film and top positions on streaming are the goals and not "just" good films/shows.

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I’ve never watched any. Just on principle it’s annoying when some parasitic American company feels the need to take a beloved foreign film or show and make an American version which is inevitably going to be worse (since the original material was beloved!). To be fair, these adaptions are probably welcome to the original creators since they’re good publicity, but as a fan I dislike it.

I think they are very slowly improving but still ultimately kind of suck.

I find adaptations in general a hard thing to get right, in any medium, and live-action adaptation of anime/manga just balloons that difficulty exponentially since most anime/manga are made without any thought to realism or budgeting.

Modern-day CG has certainly brought down the expenses of making SFF live-action, but it's still a dicey risk to take, doubly so with a foreign franchise. And of course, most aren't really made with any thought to it taking place in the real world -- I mean, shoujo school-life series get plenty of (Asian) live-action adaptations, but Hollywood? Wants all the shounen action stuff with their wild action sequences and gravity-defying, multi-color hair. (But, then again, the western remake of Taiyou no Uta sucked, so we might be dodging a bullet with Hollywood's utter disinterest in shoujo romance adaptations.)

There are plenty of stuff that could work really well as a western live-action show, like Urasawa's thrillers, but those are somehow always the ones that end up stuck in development hell for some reason.