So: Can adaptions only lose?
For me, yes, they can only lose.
As always, I am of the opinion that there are six and a half million people out there trying to write original screenplays. Use one of them.
There's a very interesting article in the latest
Vanity Fair about how American culture has been stuck for the past 20 or 30 years. At no other time in American history could you look at cars, clothes, films, literature from 20 years earlier and mistake them for current or modern. But you can now look at pictures of people from the 90s, or even the late 80s and they look just like we all look now. Music hasn't changed, fiction hasn't changed, everything is static.
The article author's take on all this is that we are in an age of such massive change that people look to the past as a kind of reassurance that everything isn't spiraling out of control. He also makes the very valid point that businesses have become bigger, and profit margins smaller, so car companies for example can't afford to restyle every year, and Starbucks can't remodel its 800 million stores every 10 years. Interesting stuff.
But it doesn't explain why creative types are so fixated on the past. That is the biggest tragedy. I don't care what kind of jeans you wear, but give me
something, man. Anything. I know I'm probably going to hate it, but I'll be so god damned glad and relieved that it's there. That we aren't just going to be stuck in a nostalgic haze until the day I die.