Originally Posted by
Mary Jay
It's weird because when I first read the OP post, my first reaction was "probably almost never" but what you're saying resonates with me. Like Revolutionary Jack said, there are very subjective parameters. All the changes made to the GotG franchise, for example, don't really bother me as a MCU fan, since I don't have an emotional investment in the original characters that made up the team to begin with. I can appreciate the movies for what they are, and the characters in them for what they are. Mind you, if they had gone for the original team and not... let's say "adapt" the characters, I probably would have appreciated the movies just as much. So for me, a casual fan, it didn't really matter. On the other hand, the Ant-Man franchise adaptation really got on my nerves, as a huge fan of the characters. I can still appreciate the movies for what they are, but am still longing for a more faithful movie adaptation, which now will never happen.
I do think it would be a bit arrogant of the filmmakers to say they made the product, i.e. the characters and their stories, "better". They made them "different" but again, "better" is a very subjective term. For an old school fan, the characters were fine the way they were, and didn't need any sort of improvement. Then again, I never heard a filmmaker flat out say that they made something better.
My biggest beef with adaptation is, and will always remain, when the adaptation starts to bleed onto the original medium. Peter Quill and Scott Lang come to mind. They didn't used to be that dumb, in my opinion, but they are now written like in the movies. Same with characters that pop out of nowhere to match the movies.