Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2023

Fidelity is a controversial topic within adaptation studies, but one which continues to underscore analysis of film texts adapted from literature. The complex issues fidelity raises are again highlighted by the 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road by director Walter Salles. The film was praised by many for its authentic rendering of Kerouac’s novel. Others critiqued the adaptation, but still employed the framework of fidelity as the criterion by which the film was assessed. In this article, it is argued that Salles’s adaptation omitted elements that feature prominently within Kerouac’s text, namely the representation of the two central characters as angels. In advancing this argument, the intention is not to censure the film adaptation, but instead to highlight how the issue of the angel trope illustrates the imprecise nature of the concept of fidelity. The fact that Salles’s film was able to omit Kerouac’s angels and still be considered faithful to the source material indicates that frameworks of fidelity can be incomplete and open to interpretation. Yet at the same time, we cannot conduct such a discussion without employing fidelity as a framework. Thus, the concept remains useful when analysing adaptations from literature to film.

In 2019 Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: Endgame became the highest grossing film of all time, solidifying the status of superhero comic book films as Hollywood’s leading genre. This article attributes part of the blockbuster’s success to its status as an adaptation. It discusses the economic gains of the transmedia storytelling format employed by superhero comic book filmmakers and the importance of continuity, cinematic universes, multiverses and corporate synergy in this genre of movies and beyond. Although these concepts all precede the inception of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, their current popularity could be attributed to that endeavour. The view that transmedia storytelling and adaptation are at odds is challenged. It is argued that the organization of superhero comic book storytelling into universes has become an adaptation norm and that a similar trend could be observed over the past few years in Hollywood cinema.

Henry James’s The Ambassadors is considered by many James scholars his most complex novel and his central character, Lambert Strether, a man whose decisions are not always easy to explain to either the reading audience or the other characters in the text. Adapting this work to other media formats presented challenges that, this article argues, were not fully met. One of the major problems faced by the two television versions and one theatrical version of this work is their failure to address what James calls a ‘virtuous attachment’, a term understood by Strether to define the relationship between young New Englander Chad Newsome and his French ‘companion’, Madame de Vionnet. This article examines this issue as well as the particular demands that television and stage adaptations of literary works must address and that these ambitious and distinctive approaches to The Ambassadors faced, including adapting the work into a big Broadway musical.

The Danish Girl has three different versions – novel, screenplay and film. Through comparison, this study explored how Lucinda Coxon (2015) and Tom Hooper (2015) adapted David Ebershoff’s novel (2000), The Danish Girl, to the screenplay and the film of the same name, and how multimodal semiotic resources contributed to recontextualizing the screenplay and the film. This research selected a scene, which represented the ‘remade’ type, from The Danish Girl to instantiate recontextualization in depth. The study found that the adaptations of The Danish Girl mixed different methods. The study also found that the way of recontextualizing the film was more complex than that of the screenplay.