Films and source material.

[WickyWoo]

Well for one, JRR Tolkien can't give much permission...he dead (to quote Con Air). I am a fan of books, I just have never read the LoTR stuff. I have spent most of the past few years doing academic reading [Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars" and John Rawls "Principles of Justice" and Machiavelli's "The Prince" are some of my favorites], not a whole lot of personal reading time. And inorder to attach the name, characters, story, likenesses, ect. the production studio has to procurr the rights to make the film. If the person who owns the rights to the books sells them to a studio, they gave permission to make the movie, however it turns out.

If the author is dead, well tough. When you fall back on the legal right to do something, that says that whatever you're doing is morally dubious. Yes you have the legal right as owner of the property to raize that orphanage for a new Super Wal-Mart etc etc. While morals are subjective, just wait until someone does that to something you've created.

Movies and tv series never follow the way the stories written, or the books. take spidey 3 for example. a coalition with sandman and venom, didn't occur the way the film showed it to be. Mary Jane was the supposed to die when Venom entered the comic book story. take all the harry potter films, they all missed certain details that contribute to the story. as a matter of fact i don't i have ever seen a film that follows comic book, or a story to the T.

Umm, Mary Jane was still very much alive in Web of Spider-Man 1 and Amazing SPider-Man 300....

You're thinking of Gwen Stacy. In the first movie they did a composite character with Gwen and MJ, and all 3 Spidey films are Stan Lee approved. No idea what Ditko, or whoevever was writing ASM at the time and McFarlane thought.

You can be faithful, and adapt to the limitations/strengths of the medium. The problem is there are too many people out there who are so hardcore on "making it their own" that they lose sight of the real goal- Making a movie from their source material.