They Changed It, Now It Sucks/Film

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• Star Wars. Best exemplified by the Robot Chicken parody of the I Am Your Father scene.

Darth Vader: No, I am your father! Luke: That's not true! That's impossible! Darth Vader: And Princess Leia is your sister! Luke: (bewildered) No! That's....improbable! Darth Vader: And the Empire will be defeated BY EWOKS! Luke: (totally lost) That's...very unlikely. Darth Vader: And as a child, I built C-3PO! Luke: (By now completely stoic): ...Huh. (Later, with Vader sipping coffee and Luke smoking a cigarette) Darth Vader: (matter-of-factly) And the Force? Oh, that's just microscopic bacteria in your bloodstream, called midichlorians. Luke: (getting up, bored and exasperated) Look, if you're not gonna take this seriously, I'm out. (exits)

• • In the DVD release of the original trilogy several things have changed. Most notably is that at the very end Luke sees young Anakin's ghost, not the older version as he did originally.
  • In the Blu-Ray release, Darth Vader has one final line as he throws the Emperor over the railing: "Nooooo!"
    • Got rather ridiculous as numerous angry fans tried to turn Vader shouting into the new "Greedo shoots first". While various characterization arguments re: Han and his shooting first could be made (thus arguably an example of "They changed it and made it suck" instead), Vader's shouting or silence just boils down to "They changed it, now it sucks". Somewhat justified: while more people defended this change than the infamous Han Shot First and Hayden Christensen Force ghost edits, others (not just the nostalgic Fan Dumb) argued that Vader's Big No turned a once-emotionally powerful scene into a heaping pile of Narm.
    • A better example would be Boba Fett's voice. While both Jason Wingreen and Temuera Morrison provided similar vocal performances for the character, fans treated what is basically a change in accent as just as horrible as Greedo shooting first. Let's not even get started with the fact that Fett only has about three lines to begin with.
• The X-Men movie, based on possibly the most sprawling, confusing and self-contradictory comic book franchise in all the land, had an infinite number of complaints leveled at it, from "Wolverine's like a foot too tall!" to "Magneto's too old!" to "Rogue's too young!" to "Since when is Jean Grey a doctor?!" to "How come Storm didn't freak out when she was in that elevator shaft, she's supposed to be claustrophobic!" to...well, let's stop while we're still young. Subsequent films in the series have just made things worse.
  • Lampshaded with the "yellow spandex" line.
  • Storm actually did freak out in the elevator shaft. That's her Big Scene, when she blasts her way free with lightning, and flies for the first time in the film, before delivering the worst line in the movie. But even so, Storm in the comic doesn't have claustrophobic freakouts on the regular either. She struggles with it depending on how severe the confinement is.
  • One of the most ridiculous examples of this is fans complaining about Juggernaut being a mutant. Never mind his relationship with Xavier being removed. Never mind that his character was poorly used. How he got his powers is more important...even if those powers came from the magical, cursed artifact of a heathen God in the comics. They're wondering why the filmmakers didn't stuff a subplot like that into a movie canon that a) has never mentioned magic or any kind of superhuman powers other than mutation and b) is already staggering under the weight of Loads and Loads of Characters?
  • Don't even get fans started on the Rogue/Iceman relationship with Gambit nowhere in sight.
  • X-Men: First Class got this and yet ended up being one of the best reviewed films in the entire franchise.
• Roger Ebert made a case for why Black & White films should not be colorized pretty much saying the same thing.
  • Well, he does kinda have a point, especially the part where he says that choosing the right colors is basically Wild Mass Guessing.
  • Orson Welles allegedly exclaimed, "Tell Ted Turner to keep his crayons away from my movie!"
• This phenomenon has caused many Harry Potter fans to have the exact opposite reaction to the film adaptations as many critics do. While film critics generally agree that the films got better from Prisoner of Azkaban (largely because of Dave McKean's art direction), when they stopped being obsessively faithful to every single scene and line of dialogue in the books, a lot of fans think that Chris Columbus was doing a bang-up job and that ever since then it's been garbage, with Azkaban the worst offender ("They left out the Fidelius Charm! They left out the Marauders' backstory! Harry gets the Firebolt at the end! Nyaaaargh!!!"). Never mind that, with the length of the books spiraling out of control, something had to be cut. Even if the removed stuff gets non-readers lost.
  • Part of the problem here is likely what they chose to change and how they chose to change it. If you tell an audience that there's just not enough time to get into every subplot from the books, they'll probably understand that. If you tell the audience that and then proceed to have long, loving pans of scenery while music plays and characters have a conversation they've already had before in that movie, they're likely to call bullshit on you.
• If you need any more proof that following a book word by word isn't always a good plan compare BBC's Chronicles of Narnia and Walden Media's more recent adaptation. The former uses the exact dialogue and is excruciatingly long and dull endeavor. The latter takes a more liberal approach at the storyline but does a much better at capturing the spirit of the books.
  • Though in the process it is moving ever more steadily towards an In Name Only adaptation. They're still good, but they're becoming entirely different stories.
  • The extremeness of this trope was demonstrated by a small line at the end of the third film - "Jill Pole's stopped by for a visit". Cue dozens of purists wailing "Jill and Eustace aren't meant to be friends! Why is she coming over to his house! Ruined FOREVER!".
  • And perhaps proving that this trope does sometimes reflect reality, or at least the box office, while the BBC's version continued on for some time, Walden Media's version staggered and died after Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Apparently the changes didn't bother just the readers.
• The film versions of The Lord of the Rings have suffered from their fair share of this, notably with the removal of the last part of The Return of the King and the complete removal of Tom Bombadil (walking Deus Ex Machina, quintessential Wacky Wayside Tribe and unplayably strange person that he is) from the story.
  • Not to mention Ghan-buri-Ghan and his Wacky Wayside Tribe, but arguably they are more important to the narrative and the themes than ol' Tom.
  • The Scouring of the Shire is something best not brought up in discussion with any fan. Also, a lot of fans will go off on a tirade if you bring up Arwen or Faramir. Or the Elves at Helm's Deep. Or...yeah.
  • At first a lot of fans were furious that they would not even try to hide Dernhelm's true identity, and the battle against Angmar does lose a whole lot when Dernhelm's identity is known. But it wasn't long before the change was accepted and even seen as necessary. In the book you can hide Dernhelm's true identity (even if it does kind of give Merry the Idiot Ball) but on film it would have been very easy to tell that Dernhelm was actually Eowyn, and most fans agree that it would just have been ridiculous to expect no one to notice. In exchange for Dernhelm's identity being kept a secret, the film makers fleshed out the bond between Merry and Eowyn and depicted their friendship in a way that's true to the books, without having to add it as a separate subplot after the siege of Minas Tirith.
    • Maybe Peter Jackson should have let her wear a pair of glasses as a Take That to the people who complain about things like that.
  • One hardcore fan of the books wrote an in-depth article on her website complaining about the boats Aragorn stole from the Black Corsairs of Umbar to transport his zombie horde. The complaint was that the ships should have looked like Byzantine galleys and not Chinese junks.
  • Many Tolkien purists continue to whine about Tolkien's "precious" dialogue being altered for the screen. While the poetic language works well enough in the books, it just sounds stilted, unnatural, and excessively formal when spoken aloud, if not downright silly and hammy. Jackson's dialogue makes the characters seem more "real" on film and allows a greater emotional connection with them, which is arguably more important than copying the books word for word, with every last tiny detail included.
    • To compare, take a good look at the 1980s cartoon of Return of the King. Especially the duel between Eowyn and the Witch King. It's the best scene in the horrific movie, and the lines are 100% to the letter from the book. It feels like you're watching a Shakespearean play (if they had kept it up, the film might have been watchable). Then, watch Jackson's version, which removes 90% of the dialog from that fight, and adequately conveys both the power of the Witch King and all the emotion of the book without the soliloquies.
  • FoxTrot responded to this trend with a fictional conversation between two main characters and Peter Jackson, in which he said a faithful adaptation would be 40 hours long "and no one wants that, right?" One character's response, some time later: "Figures our mouths would be too full of drool to answer." (Humor notwithstanding, this is a transparent strawman argument.)
  • At least one online fan was seen complaining that Aragorn having a stubbly beard was an outrage because descendants of Numenor don't grow facial hair.
  • This is the instant reaction to the introduction of the possible character of the elf Itaril for The Hobbit film.
    • Of course, studios lie in casting calls to prevent fans and media from finding out details of the production. All the casting call actually says is that they need a female between 15 and 30 able to learn fighting and acrobatics while wearing contacts and a wig, able to portray a previously dedicated character who's life has taken an unexpected turn.
    • The extra scenes with Arwen in general got a lot of hate. Essentially the adaptation took a lot of scenes that were handled by various "one-shot" elves and gave them to Arwen, in an attempt to give her more character development.
• Batman Begins is commonly agreed to be the second best Batman film adaptation so far, but some die-hard fans are very, very angry that Scarecrow ran Arkham Asylum instead of teaching psychiatry and was more concerned about making money than obsessively studying fear, while others just accepted the Rule of Scary. Others disparage the new tank-like appearance of the Batmobile... despite the fact that it's Batman Begins and it's a prototype vehicle he hasn't had any time to modify into something more "battish". And that he loses it in the sequel and shows he's quite adept with high-performance sports cars, too....
  • Likewise, many hardcore fans decry Burton's decision to have the Joker be the murderer of Bruce's parents in the 1989 film adaptation. More reasonably when the sequel rolled around, many fans were outraged at the Penguin's change from an eccentric professional criminal that was only slightly penguin-like in appearance (The origin of his nickname? He wears a penguin tuxedo) to a deformed subhuman that ate raw fish, had flippers, spewed black blood, and otherwise looked exactly like Dr. Caligari.
  • Don't get anyone started on Batman being a cold-blooded killer in the 1989 and 1992 movies (he dispatches criminals and blows up buildings and such with reckless abandon). Although the early Bat-Man did kill, with a gun. Maybe this trope applies to the standard non-killing Batman.
  • There were some real geniuses who complained when the murderer of Bruce's parents wasn't the Joker in Batman Begins. Sometimes you just can't win.
  • There were also the changes to the character of Ra's al Ghul and the total omission of his daughter Talia. Ra's convoluted (to say the least) backstory would have been very hard to fit into the movie, of course.
  • On a similar note, certain fansites had some ongoing - and utterly hilarious - flame wars about whether The Dark Knight was going to suck... based on the fact that the Joker's appearance is from make-up rather than being "permawhite" due to falling into a vat of chemicals.
  • There has been some backlash over the casting of Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, with some people upset that a white Englishman is playing a Latino supervillain. And if the rumors are true and Marion Cotillard is playing Arabic villainess Talia al Ghul, that just compounds the problem....
• It's amazing to see how much criticism the Watchmen movie received before its release. It seems people couldn't even wait to see it to start complaining. This is, of course, because the movie is based on an Alan Moore comic. Moore himself is quite vocal about how much he thinks the previous movies based on his works suck, which doesn't help matters. Furthermore, Watchmen especially has been long considered a work that any adaptation would struggle with effectively bringing to the screen whilst remaining faithful to the source material. However, this doesn't prevent the complaining from being very premature.
  • Moore has said that even though he's seen one script (the David Hayter one) and can't imagine a better film adaptation, Watchmen is a graphic novel, not a film, and so something will be lost in the translation no matter how good it is, which is perhaps the ultimate example of the They Changed It, Now It Sucks mindset.
  • An interview with the director had him say something to the effect of "I would think the fans would be more grateful to know that the storyline and moral ambiguity was kept intact than the fact that there is a giant squid at the end." Of course, the replies for the remark had the fans arguing back and forth on if the squid or the story was important.
  • Like the Genshiken example elsewhere, this movie also appears to have experienced something of a "They Didn't Change It Enough So It Sucks" reaction from several critics, who have argued that the fact that the movie largely sticks very closely to the original work (to the extent that many scenes are taken and film as if they were straight from the book come to life) means that the movie doesn't have enough space to develop as a work in its own right, as opposed to a faithful adaptation.
  • Bizarrely, fans of the comic even complained about the character of Dr. Manhattan himself - specifically, the rumor that he might be wearing a G-string to cover his glowing blue penis. Disregarding that male full frontal nudity is very hard to portray on film without getting an X rating, it was only ever a rumor, and he's portrayed as wearing something similar several times in the comic itself.
  • Things didn't help much when they trimmed out the supporting characters in order to fit the story in a 3 hour movie. Thankfully, the Directors cut adds much more of the minor recurring characters.
• The new Dragon Ball movie has already had fans starting to complain about the fact that Goku now goes to school, even though it's a minor plot point. Then the animal characters were taken out, which is a bit more understandable, although still pretty minor. (It makes you wonder if they'd have been able to make them believable though.) And of course far too many were complaining that Emperor Pilaf wasn't the villain because "he is the first Big Bad."
  • People were in an uproar when the first brief images of Piccolo showed him to be a pale white. (Note that these early images did not give a very close look of his face.) Later images showed him to be a pale green, symbolic of how long it had been since he saw sunlight. When trailers appeared, it seemed like they did some color correction to make him more green, possibly to placate the fans.
  • Lots of people have also been complaining about the hair. Goku doesn't have his distinctive hairstyle, Bulma's hair only has a blue streak, and Roshi actually has hair and no beard. Apparently the filmmakers considered making both Roshi bald and Bulma with bright blue hair, but why get Chow Yun Fat in a major role and have him unrecognizable and Bulma's hair looked just as goofy as Goku's original hair style.
  • Now that the movie is out, it is safe to say that this trope has been averted. It doesn't suck because they changed it, it sucks because it is a bad movie. Unless you like that sort of thing.
  • More like a Justified Trope. The changes weren't minor and the movie seemed like a "safe" adaptation that got rid of what made the series original and replacing it with cliched ideas and just pain bad writing/acting
• Way before the 2009 Star Trek film came out, a segment of fans were already frothing at the mouth that the producers aren't exactly re-creating the crappy cardboard sets and cheesy 60's costumes of the original series (and I'm saying this as a Trekkie). Although it could also be down to the recasting of the original characters, even though the cast are in their seventies and DeForest Kelley and James Doohan are dead, not to mention Kirk was trapped in the Nexus for decades in Star Trek Generations, even before his bridge dropping.
  • • This Onion News Network video pretty accurately reflects the attitudes of longtime Star Trek fans towards the new movie.
  • Every Star Trek movie has attracted this trope for some reason or another.

Harry S. Plinkett: Star Trek: Generations is the stupidest movie ever made. It ruined everything; and not just Star Trek movies, but everything.

• Most of the criticism of the Beowulf movie was based on this. The DVD includes an interview with Neil Gaiman explaining why he made these alterations, and they're pretty decent reasons.
• The Resident Evil movie series. Never mind that it's not meant to take place in the same world as the games, or that it might actually be GOOD in its own right, as soon as they added a character that didn't exist in the games and a backstory for Nemesis, people wanted to kill ANYONE involved in this movie for taking a new story and plastering the Resident Evil name on it. Although to be fair, they may be more pissed about the God Mode Black Hole Sue Alice.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Since the period of the film shifted from the 30s to the 50s, the villains (Nazis > Communists) and film influence (old Republic Film Serials > science fiction) changed, and some fans weren't happy.
  • Not to mention the serious Fan Wank about CGI gophers. Goddamn CGI gophers.
• The upcoming remake of The Warriors has fans in an uproar, even though almost no details about the film have been released. It's worth noting that the original movie was an adaptation of a novel, and not a particularly faithful one at that.
• Wanted may or may not be this trope. The original comic of the story presents all the characters as former super-villains who finally joined forces, kill all the superheroes, made humanity forget about them and rule the world from behind the scenes. The film adaptation is about a league of assassins killing people who could possibly become the next Hitler.
• The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy film adaptation was based on a new script written by Douglas Adams before his death, as opposed to direct adaptation of the original text. As a result of this, the film contained many differences in plot from the original radio/book/TV stories (each of which also had rewrites between adaptations; one joke in the fandom goes that there is no canon, only suggestions), which annoyed some long-time fans of the series.
  • Adams was a merciless self-editor. During the radio show, one of the producers said that Adams would start the day with a full page of script and after working on it all day he would have half a page. He would rework a joke until it was razor sharp. It's pretty much a given that while he did write (at least some of) the film script, it was far from finished by his standards. Furthermore, the concept of the Hitchhiker's universe having anything that could legitimately be called Original Text is laughable at best.
    • First it was a series of radio shows, then the record came out, this was actually a re-recording of some of the radio show with a different script. Then some of the books came out which changed things again. Then there was the TV show which was an adaption of the first two books. There was a game realeased at about this time which was roughly based on the first book. Then some more books came out which somewhat contradicted some things established in previous books. Then there was an illustrated version of the first book which had one extra sentence added, making Zaphod black (despite him being blonde in earlier editions) All of this was done either directly by Adams or under his supervision, some say that the movie would never have come out if he was still alive as he would still be re-writing it.
  • In-universe example is poet Lallafa, whose work was re-discovered long after his death and was subsequently, through time travel, brought to future. This resulted in him not being actually able to write the poems, which is why he was sent back to past to copy them so they could be discovered. Some argue that this makes his poems worse, while other argue they're the same.
    • Actually, what I believe happened is that Lallafa was so popular that his fans went back in time and found him, brought him to the "present" for chat-shows, interviews and such. Lallafa became such a celebrity that he never got around to writing his original poems so they had to lock him in a room one weekend with a later edition book of his work with some leaf-parchment so he could write his own poems that made him famous in the first place. These poems they sent back in time to be discovered. Also ironic was that Lallafa was a bitter poet ala Catullus (unrequited love, poverty, etc) but after being brought to the future to become a celebrity, he wasn't bitter at all. This was what caused the "poems don't mean as much now" argument.
      • They also gave him some correcting fluid to use while working on the poems, which was another contributor to saying it was changed and now sucks.
• Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining is quite different from the book, and gets a lot of Stephen King fans saying how much it sucks. Even Stephen King himself considers it the worst adaptation of one of his movies. Outside of them, it's considered one of the best horror movies ever made.
  • Admittedly it is a pretty bad adaptation as it ignores pretty much completely the source material. This, however, doesn't mean that it is not an amazing movie.
  • And then King got Kubrick to let him direct a TV miniseries version that's far more faithful to the novel. King hasn't complained about Kubrick's version since then. Nor have the fans.
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe fandom suffers from this every time someone dies, even when a single character that wasn't even in the original movies was killed off. In recent years, the universe has dipped more into Anyone Can Die territory, leading to this happening frequently.
  • Perhaps most shockingly of all, Chewbacca was killed during the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. (At least he got a Heroic Sacrifice.)
• Many Lion King fans disliked the fact that they put "The Morning Report" a song that isn't even 2 minutes long, into the Special Edition DVD. Oddly, many like the musical version, and some complainers might have overlooked the DVD's option to replace "The Morning Report" with the original scene of Mufasa teaching Simba how to pounce. Outcry proved so negative, Disney eventually made the Blu-Ray relegate "The Morning Report" into a bonus short, with no option to branch it into the movie.
  • Yet more fans complain that the DVD's "Original" version of The Lion King still has some differences from the version presented in 1994, such as an updated Disney logo, redrawn crocodiles during "I Just Can't Wait to Be King", and a reanimated pollen cloud that no longer looks anything like the word "sex". Even though none of these changes affect the plot, some fans have accused Disney of "false advertising" for not telling them about the changes sooner.
• Fans of G.I. Joe are already complaining about the new movie and leaked plot details, going as far as to say that statements that the story is based on the comics (even coming from the comic writer Larry Hama himself) are out and out lies because: Ripcord is Black which is incompatible with stories Rip Cord had in the comics, Not everyone on the team is American, Baroness had a relationship with Duke and Cobra Commander wasn't a used car salesman but rather a former soldier and a scientist who works for Destro in the first movie. They will ignore the numerous plot elements that come from the comics story, and decry "it's not based on it at all." One review actually began with the line "If it doesn't feature the line "Cobra, retreat!" then it isn't a GI Joe movie." Naturally, the phrase "real fan" showed up within two paragraphs...
• The Silent Hill movie. Changing the main character was, among other things, met with such a reaction by the fans.
• The Sherlock Holmes film directed by Guy Ritchie has been criticized for making an action film out of the source material. This is despite the fact that there are a number of action sequences in the Sherlock Holmes adventures. Holmes is canonically a martial artist, fencer, etc. and Watson is an army veteran.
  • Point of fact, it is only in later adaptations of the beloved characters that Watson was relegated to nothing more than foil, medic and narrator. Many instances in the original series have Watson physically helping Holmes fight off the villains, and is considered a crack shot better than Holmes.
• Phantom of the Opera: Frickin' third-degree sunburn. Many other things different than that, including Erik's complete backstory.
• The trailers for The Lightning Thief are out, and already the complaints are flying, particularly about Annabeth's hair being brown and, most of all, Grover being black. Hilariously, the complainers of the latter claims they're not racist, but the fact that the actor's race bugs them suggest otherwise. Just as you think people couldn't get any dumber, there's a couple of people complaining about Percy being in an elevator - which was in the book. And note that this movie is being directed by Chris Columbus, who made the two most faithful films of the Harry Potter franchise.
  • The actors' physical appearances really don't matter. They did, however, completely skip over several major plot points, including the ones that set up the overarching plot, and make Annabeth a not-particularly-smart generic girl and give her exactly one scene in which she does something even remotely helpful. They completely ignored the real villain of book one, making Hades evil (he isn't particularly evil in Percy Jackson or Greek mythology, but anyway) as well as Luke (who was), completely ignoring THE Big Bad of the series. And they also made Percy way too powerful from the start. No, he shouldn't be able to throw huge waves at people. Nor should he be able to beat Annabeth and like ten sons of Ares the first time he ever touched a sword. There were other problems, too. So, yeah, it does kinda suck because they changed it, in my opinion anyway. Part of that is that they ruined the setup for their own sequels, which doesn't seem like the smartest move.
  • It never says what skin color Grover has in the book. He could be green, although I would think they would have mentioned that. Yet despite people's first impressions his character, being the comic relief, turned out to be the most faithful to the story. What the fans of the book berate most are not the many... MANY changes but the complete change of tone and mode from book. Instead of being clever and funny it was your typical brainless action movie.
  • And then there's Hades...
• To be expected from The Last Airbender, being based on a series that's more popular than the ability to breathe. Ignoring the claims of racism, many of the other complaints are getting ridiculous. It seems like with every new picture that's released, there is a very vocal retribution for such minor things as the color of Zuko's clothing, Katara's pulled-back loopies, Aang's grey colored arrow, Sokka not showing any sense of humor, the severity of Zuko's scar, and the size of Iroh's belly.
  • However fans quickly got over about these changes and moved on to small things like "pronouncing the main characters names wrong!"
  • Yet even these "minor things" looked absolutely pristine in comparison with the stilted dialogue, Exposition Fairy narration, wooden acting and Special Effects Failure.
• Lest we should forget the remake of The Karate Kid, in which the setting has been changed to China and the young man learns kung fu. Perhaps they should have renamed the movie The Kung Fu Kid?
  • In defense of the franchise, it was only supposed to be in America that the film would be called The Karate Kid in order to spark interest from new and old fans. Jackie Chan and supposedly the whole film crew and cast referred to it as The Kung Fu Kid while filming. Despite this, the moniker The Karate Kid was still used when the movie was released in Asia and the rest of the world.
• The latest Robin Hood movie has taken a lot of heat for being a history-oriented original origin story instead of a retelling of the Robin Hood story "everybody knows". The story everyone knows includes the usual setup of Prince John acting as regent in King Richard's absence, Robin being a outlawed knight, and Robin Storming the Castle to save Maid Marian. In the latest film, these plot elements are either absent ( Richard dies at the start, and John is king for the rest of the film) or given a new twist ( Robin, a commoner, poses as Marian's deceased husband, a knight), and the main plot is about setting up the legend to happen in the context of a (fictional) French invasion. The movie ends with Robin finally being outlawed by John.
  • As stated, many people were dissatisfied, to say the least, with the film for not following "the story everybody knows". But "the story everybody knows" (most probably through the combination of Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner and Disney) is itself an Adaptation Distillation of centuries of folklore, literature and previous adaptations. Most of the details in the version everyone knows were only established through the years - including all of the above familiar elements, and Robin robbing the rich and giving to the poor itself (which is in the film, but not as much as people expected)! So the film is unfairly bashed for changing and adding to the story, when that's how the legend developed in the first place.
  • A fairer point would be that in spite of trying to forgo light-heartedness of the Flynn and Disney versions in favor of being more historically accurate, a rather generous amount of liberties were used. Particularly with England and France's current relationship.
  • In addition, Roger Ebert in particular seems to dislike any film based upon Robin Hood that isn't of the "fun filled Errol Flynn-esque" variety and attempts to be Darker and Edgier. His review for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the 2010 film both have similar comments about Robin not being a joyous character and the level of violence present.
    • Ebert grew up in the 1940s and '50s, when almost all mainstream action films (especially the "historical" ones) were a bit lighter in tone that what we would expect today. That said, Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves did have some notable light moments (although, granted, some of them were unintentional, such as Costner's very poor attempt at an accent). I think what bothered people about the most recent version was not so much the perceived "darkness" as the shortage of action sequences and the lack of a truly character-driven plot; it seems more like a docudrama-like rendering of life in medieval Saxon England, which is not what most people were expecting.
• 3D technologies had a resurgence when stereoscopic 3D was used on blockbuster movies including Coraline, Avatar, and How to Train Your Dragon. However, there's a resistance forming amongst directors and users, especially among the visually impaired, mainly because 3D requires both of a person's eyes to be good, and not everyone has that luxury; not to mention the requirement of 3D glasses. Indeed this is the reason why movie theaters have still offer 2D showings and many argue that 3D cannot become the standard until this is solved.
• One of the most common criticisms of the Americanization of the French Film Le diner de cons, Dinner for Schmucks.
  • It's not so unreasonable when you think about it. The humor and pacing are completely different, as are the characters - the adaptation could almost be deemed In Name Only. Most importantly, in the French original, Brochand was a bastard, the dinner was not shown and the "cons" were utterly normal people with regular hobbies. The American version however makes the "schmucks" total freaks, invites you to point and laugh at them for half of the movie and then ends with the usual "different strokes for different folks". Oh and the Brochand counterpart was really only pushed to be mean and he's the hero. Broken Aesop, much?
• When the trailer for The a Team hit the Internet, tons of YouTube commenters started whining and freaking out about how they were going to do The A-Team without Mr. T, how it was raping their childhoods, etc. Then the film turned out to be one giant homage/updated origin story, and the cast was pretty well-received by fans.
• When James Cameron released the remastered version of The Terminator the changes made were incredibly minute, limited primarily to the opening credits, the lightning effects and the sounds of gunfire. But for a number of fans these changes weren't minute enough and apparently detracted from the overall quality of the movie.
• Hardcore crazed Tekken fans were vilifying the movie before the trailers were even released. Among such rants were whining that Christie was meant to be black/Hispanic/Asian, Kazuya isn't supposed to have facial hair and labeling it an awful film simply because their favourite character wasn't in it. Then when it came out, the fans got even worse.
• The Godzilla fandom on Godzilla: Final Wars; primarily in designs on everything from the actual giant monsters to the aliens and vehicles with Gigan arguably being the only exception.
  • To a much lesser extent the Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack version of King Ghidorah got flack because he was turned into a good guy, but in recent years it subsided.
• ET the Extraterrestrial. For the film's 20th anniversary in 2002, it saw guns replaced with walkie-talkies and changing "terrorist" to "hippie." Mercilessly lampooned in the South Park parody episode "Free Hat." Incidentally, while said episode portrays Steven Spielberg as the diabolical mastermind behind editing Raiders of the Lost Ark, with George Lucas only reluctantly following, in Real Life Spielberg himself later stated that editing the movie was a mistake.
• If you want to see a fanbase metaphorically explode, just bring up any part of the live-action Transformers films that's different from the G1 show on a forum that's full of G1 fans. For starters, many fans were upset that Optimus Prime's truck mode was not a flatnose, he had flames painted on his cab because the director thought they looked cool, and his magically appearing/disappearing trailer from G1 was nowhere to be seen.
  • Believe it or not, there were even fans who complained about Megatron's alt-mode being one that was actually usable without having to depend on one of his subordinates to pull the trigger.
    • Transformers: Dark of the Moon subverts this trope somewhat. The movie had all sorts of homages to the original G1 cartoon and its various episodes. When it came out, more of the criticism concerned the actual quality of the movie rather than it being unfaithful to G1 and the Transformers brand in general.
• An article in the Hollywood Reporter interviewed several people involved with The Muppets (who were not named, of course, except for veteran Muppeteer Frank Oz) who expressed their opinion that The Muppets is not true to the characters, makes them act out of character to set up jokes, and that it seems less like a Muppet movie and more like "a Jason Segel movie that happens to have the Muppets in it." A few fans and critics still feel this way, but the vast majority do not.
• Poor Halloween III got tons of undeserved flak for the sole reason that it was not about Michael Myers anymore. The film itself is not bad (and it has received a resurgence of appreciation in later years), but people wanted Michael Myers and nothing else. Of course they got what they wanted with subsequent movies, and a really bad case of sequelitis ensued.
• Disney revised the Walt Disney Pictures Vanity Plate in 2011 so that it no longer includes Walt's first name, or the word "Pictures". Fans see this as an insult to Walt Disney. The company tried to justify the change by saying this version would look easier to read on mobile digital copies. However, the preceding version doesn't look that hard to read when shrunken to iPhone dimensions.
• A disturbing inversion came with the release of the now-blockbuster book adaptation, The Hunger Games. In it, Katniss Everdeen meets a tribute from District 11 named Rue, who later saves Katniss' life after a Mushroom Samba, and then has a heartbreaking death. Some decidedly racist fans were outraged that this beloved character was played by 13-year-old Amandla Stenberg, an African-American actress. The problem is that Rue and her male counterpart, Thresh, were always described as such. Their introduction specifically mentions them having dark brown skin. Thankfully, it seems Amandla hasn't taken this nonsense to heart. You can view an article on these idiotic complaints here.
• A number of fans (including author George R. R. Martin) have complained about founding members Ant-Man and the Wasp being left out of the Avengers live-action movie in favor of Hawkeye and Black Widow, who are portrayed as founders in the film despite not joining the team until well after it was already established in the original comic books. Other complaints range from Hawkeye not wearing purple to Captain America not having wings on his helmet.
  • And of course Captain America does have wings on his helmet; the only thing is these wings are painted on, not jutting out.
• Man of Steel already seems to be getting this. In addition to the usual complaints over the movie using a modified costume for Superman, the casting of African American actor Laurence Fishburne as Lois Lane's traditionally Caucasian boss, Perry White, has also ruffled some feathers among some less than progressive fans.
• The James Bond series is subjected to this whenever anyone brings up over who is the better actor to play as James Bond. The biggest uproar came when Daniel Craig replaced Pierce Brosnan to be the actor playing as Bond due to the fact that Daniel looked very different compared to Pierce, along with his mannerisms. The Pierce VS Daniel flame wars even boiled over to the Goldeneye video game remake when Daniel Craig's voice and likeness were used instead of Pierce Brosnan.
  • There has been another uproar over the upcoming movie, Skyfall. It was revealed that the James Bond character would not be drinking his signature martini. Instead, he would be drinking Heineken beer. This decision was made in order to help fund the movie.
• If you were a fan of the book How To Eat Fried Worms, you probably despised the movie. The only parts that were kept from the book was the worm eating, Billy, and Joe Guire. They changed the number of worms that had to be eaten, the amount of time that he has to eat them, the stakes of the bet, gave Billy a weak stomach, made Joe a bully and added a bunch of completely unnecessary characters. It's like they read the summary off the back cover and made a movie out it.