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The audience did not buy into "A Dream of Red Mansions", which Hu Mei spent 18 years of hard work on.

According to Maoyan Professional Edition data, on the first day of its release, "A Dream of Red Mansions: A Perfect Match" only earned 1.6954 million yuan at the box office, less than "Decryption", which has been released for 14 days. Compared with the 200 million yuan cost rumored online, the film is expected to have a final box office of only 7.6 million yuan, far from breaking even.

(Photo source: Maoyan Professional Edition)

Poor box office performance is nothing new this summer, but Dream of Red Mansions is not only facing a box office that cannot be recovered, but also a rock-bottom bad word-of-mouth. In the Douban review area, the front row is almost entirely one-star bad reviews, and the audience is generally dissatisfied with the rough adaptation of the plot and the actors who do not meet expectations.

In fact, when the act of adaptation is applied to any work, the public will look at the difference between the original work and the film and television work with a magnifying glass, but for famous works, this requirement is even more stringent. Not only must the original work be restored, but it must also meet the established image standards in the minds of the audience, which makes the adaptation space of famous works more narrow than that of other works.

Stills from "A Dream of Red Mansions: A Marriage of Gold and Jade" (Source: Douban)

Looking back at past film and television adaptations, it is not difficult to find that classic works have been adapted many times, such as Jin Yong's martial arts novels, Qiong Yao and Yi Shu's romance novels, but the adaptation of famous works has been in a "window state" for a long time. Since 2010, the adaptations of the four great classics have generally entered a "decline period."

On the one hand, the content of classics is open to interpretation, and faces more severe creation risks in the current content market. On the other hand, the IP boom brought by online novels has changed the direction of the content market, and classics that are more difficult to create are no longer the first choice for production.

Even though famous works face many difficulties in adaptation, it does not mean that they are destined to be shelved. Overseas adaptations of famous works are still in full swing, and they try to give new content to the adaptations of famous works in the new era. What can we learn from overseas experience? Maybe it is that we will fail again and again, but we will keep fighting.

The richness of famous works IP

It may be difficult for people today to imagine that famous works were once the absolute main force in the content market.

In the 1920s, the film market was monopolized by foreign films. In order to seek national identity, creators created content from localized historical texts. Works such as "Journey to the West: The Women's Kingdom", "Princess Iron Fan", "Song Jiang", and "Wusong's Blood Splashing in the Yuanyang Tower" led to the rise of domestic films. Among them, "Pansi Cave" was called "an unprecedented masterpiece of costume drama in the Chinese film industry" by Shenbao, attracting thousands of people.

Stills from "Pansy Cave" (Source: Douban)

The commercial success of "Pansi Cave" confirmed the feasibility of adapting famous works, and film companies continued to explore the content of famous works. "The History of the Development of Chinese Film" once recorded that more than 20 "Journey to the West" films were produced by various film companies in Shanghai from 1926 to 1930.

At that time, the film and television market had just begun to prosper, and the speed of creating texts could not keep up with the speed of production. Because famous works were widely circulated, no additional interpretation costs were required. In addition, there were a large number of classic passages in famous works, any one of which could be extended into a new story, which made famous works the main source of inspiration for creators.

Especially for Shaw Brothers, which led the golden age of Hong Kong films, adaptations of classics are an inexhaustible source of content. After the 1966 "Journey to the West" sold well in Southeast Asia, Shaw Brothers firmly established the film and television development path of adaptations of classics. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Shaw Brothers produced a large number of adaptations of classics, such as "A Dream of Red Mansions", "Diao Chan", "Wu Song", "Water Margin", and "The Outlaws of the Marsh".

Stills from "A Dream of Red Mansions" (Source: Douban)

Although in order to focus on commercial value, Shaw Brothers Company emphasized the dramatic plots and character typing in the works, and even did not hesitate to highlight violence and erotic elements, but this reshaping of the content also opened up a loose creative space for creators. The author's expression of sexuality, such as Chang Cheh's "masculine aesthetics" and Li Hanxiang's "romantic aesthetics", were infused into the adaptations of famous works.

As a result, the adaptation of famous works has gradually changed from the early narrative habits of being completely faithful to the original works to ambiguous "parody". This quietly changing deconstruction consciousness has allowed creators to begin to take bolder challenges. In 1995, Stephen Chow's "A Chinese Odyssey" was released, which completely overturned the core of the original work and reconstructed it for the new era, causing public dissatisfaction and was denounced as "cultural garbage".

Stills from "A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Pandora's Box" (Source: Douban)

When "parody" becomes a "magic change" in the eyes of the public, the shock to the consciousness of the masterpiece is no less than a spiritual shock to the public. However, the degree of acceptance of "parody" in the eyes of each generation is completely different. When "A Chinese Odyssey" was introduced to the mainland in the millennium, it won the wide recognition of the mainland youth group and reconstructed its aesthetic identity. This also laid the groundwork for the subsequent adaptation of "Journey to the West".

However, not all masterpieces can be as "lucky" as "Journey to the West". From the perspective of content, fictional myths have a more grand worldview, and creators are more likely to innovate content in the process of adaptation. For example, works such as "The Investiture of the Gods", "Classic of Mountains and Seas" and "Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio" do not arouse public disgust.

Stills from "The Legend of the Gods: Chaoge Storm" (Source: Douban)

For masterpieces with a certain basis in reality, because of their relevance to reality, there will be many detailed historical materials required, which will make the works face more stringent creative requirements. Even in the academic community, there are many schools of thought discussing and arguing endlessly for years. Among them, "Dream of Red Mansions" is the most typical. Several major schools of thought have studied "Dream of Red Mansions" from different angles, and the direction of the research also determines the different ways of understanding the characters and plots.

The strong interpretability of classics determines that the stories can be interpreted in different directions. When facing the public, the perspective and casting will cause a lot of controversy if they are not careful. For example, among the four classics remakes in 2010, Li Shaohong's version of "Dream of Red Mansions" encountered the most public criticism.

Against the backdrop of the proliferation of parodies and the extension of perspectives, the public needs the emergence of an authority to defend the legitimacy of classics. The CCTV versions of the Four Great Classics in the 1980s have become an unshakable foundation in the hearts of the audience because of their detailed reproduction of characters and scenery.

IP impact in the new era

In 2010, new editions of the four great classics flooded the market, attempting to re-establish the public's imagination of the classics of that era.

Although the production level has made a qualitative leap compared to 20 or 30 years ago, it still cannot satisfy the public in terms of content control, character creation, and the charm of lines. The reputation of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Water Margin" is polarized, and Douban scores can still maintain 7.8 and 8.1 points. In comparison, "Dream of Red Mansions" only has 5.8 points and "Journey to the West" only has 6.8 points.

(Photo source: Douban)

At the same time, some movies adapted from classic excerpts of famous works have also encountered public opinion crises. Works such as "The Palace of the Golden Phoenix", "The Banquet", "Guan Yunchang" and "Red Cliff" not only failed to win public recognition for the text of the play, but the character settings such as Takeshi Kaneshiro playing Zhuge Liang and Daniel Wu playing Xiang Yu became the focus of discussion, which greatly disappointed the audience.

In order to ensure the commercialization of the works, the adaptations of famous works at that time tended to invite big-name stars to help enhance the entertainment and rhythm of the story. Even if they tried to explore the complex human nature of the characters, they lacked the fine polishing of the core of the text, making the adaptations of this period basically become bad movies. "Guan Yunchang" added a love line for Guan Yu out of thin air, and Douban scored only 5.0 points.

Stills from Guan Yunchang (Source: Douban)

The unsuccessful adaptations of famous works during this period not only made the public more convinced of the CCTV version, but also caused the audience to have strong resistance to the act of adaptation.

While adaptations of famous works are gradually undermining the audience's trust in the creators, on the other hand, the trend of online novel IPs has already become a trend.

"Empresses in the Palace" and "Palace Lock and Bead Curtain", adapted from online novels, were broadcast at the same time as the new version of the Four Great Classics. However, in sharp contrast, the popularity of online novel adaptations has been rising, while the adaptation of the classics has been gradually forgotten amid doubts. This sharp contrast also foreshadows the obvious shift in the adaptation trend.

Stills from "The Legend of Zhen Huan" (Source: Douban)

Xue Jing, a scholar from Tsinghua University, mentioned in his speech "Ten Years of Changes in the Production Mechanism of IP Adaptation of Online Literature" that the Internet was in an important period of mobile transformation at that time, the overall growth of Chinese netizens was gradually slowing down, and the number of mobile netizens was increasing. At the critical moment of "the handover between Taiwan and the Internet", the emergence of online novels provided a steady stream of "ammunition" for the rise of content platforms.

(Data source: China Business Intelligence Network)

At the same time, the rise of the Internet has broadened the public's cognition, and the public has begun to question the serious and grand narrative perspective presented in previous works.

"Palace Lock and Bead Curtain" and "Startling by Each Step" use "time travel" to reconstruct the contemporary people's imagination of history, and "The Legend of Zhen Huan" uses "female protagonists" to retell the gender status in the power structure. Online novels provide the public with more contemporary historical stories, while classics are no longer cost-effective due to the seriousness of their texts and high production costs, and are gradually abandoned by production teams.

(Data source: China Online Literature Development Report)

Especially with the surge of online novels and the trend of content platforms actively exploring the content field, the trend of typification and segmentation has become increasingly obvious, and classics, as a popular product, are unable to reconstruct collective imagination.

The adaptation of famous works is a matter of time and fate.

Searching for the Contemporary Significance of Famous Works

While the enthusiasm for adapting famous works in China is gradually cooling down, the enthusiasm for adapting famous works overseas has remained high.

Not long ago, "The Decameron of Florence", adapted from the famous work "The Decameron" by Italian writer Boccaccio, was officially launched. After the broadcast, the effect was not as expected, with a Rotten Tomatoes index of 67%, an IMDb score of 6.3, and a Metacritic score of only 65. The San Francisco Chronicle commented, "There are many places where it could have been done better, but it was all wrong. It was terribly wrong, ridiculous, and meaningless."

Netflix added a comedic element to The Decameron, trying to win the audience's favor with a brisk pace, but this approach was obviously ineffective, and the creative logic succumbed to the big data model and did not reflect the texture of the classic. This also made many people worry about Netflix's next adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Decameron is not an isolated and tragic case. Many adaptations of famous works have suffered setbacks before this. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, adapted from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and The Man from Madison Square Garden, based on the text of Don Quixote, have made bold attempts, but without exception, they have been criticized by critics and audiences for being too eccentric, and have encountered a double crisis of word-of-mouth and box office.

Stills from The Decameron (Source: Douban)

It can be seen that the difficulties faced by domestic and foreign countries in adapting famous works are based on the same level. However, even so, Hollywood's development of adaptations of famous classics has been continuing, and its output is far greater than that of China.

On the one hand, the popularity of classics can help the platform expand its brand and recognition, and can also become a powerful tool for entering different circles of the market. For example, Disney+ developed "Journey to the West ABC" in an attempt to cater to the Asian market.

Stills (Source: Weibo)

On the other hand, it has become an industry consensus that Hollywood is facing a creative bottleneck, resulting in the driving force of well-known IPs far exceeding the influence of big-name stars. As the original power shrinks, adaptation becomes the only trump card to deal with market turmoil. Creators can only repeatedly adapt existing works.

Driven by external factors, the large number of adaptations of famous works in overseas markets seems to be a last resort, but from another perspective, this continuous advancement and renovation has also inadvertently created new contemporary significance for the famous works.

Thanks to the multi-format industry development path of Hollywood cultural works, classic masterpieces are not limited to film and television works, and content innovation has been carried out in dance dramas, operas, dramas, etc. For example, Andrew Scott's version of "Hamlet" jumped out of Shakespeare's original design and gave the female characters a more three-dimensional role space.

The development of multi-format content has, to some extent, internalized the classic itself into a cultural symbol that cannot be evaluated in a single way. The repeatedly developed "Journey to the West" has deviated from the seriousness of the classic itself. Jin Hezai's "The Legend of Wukong" and "New Gods" developed by Light Chaser Animation have maximized the cultural value of "Journey to the West". Nowadays, audiences will not feel much shock when facing any form of "Journey to the West" adaptation.

Stills from "The Legend of Wukong" (Source: Douban)

The masterpiece itself has a wealth of space for content development and can accommodate more imagination. Even the indisputable contemporary significance of the masterpiece itself determines that it is impossible for it to exist only in a certain work of a certain period and become a dusty and outdated memory. It must possess an inner vitality that is difficult to match with other works.

Audiences should be tolerant of adaptations of classics, and can comment on whether the adaptations are good or bad, but should not have resistance to the "adaptation" itself. Just like "Black Myth: Wukong" which will be released tomorrow, a cultural product that is derived from a classic but completely reconstructs the classic has the opportunity to become the pride of contemporary culture.

For creators, it is true that the adaptation of classics faces many difficulties, but all problems cannot be attributed to the difficulty of adaptation. This kind of complacency is also a kind of incompetent inertia. Faced with the high demands of the audience, creators need to further think about the contemporary significance of the adaptation of classics.

The audience will vote with their feet.