Sometimes, taking a different approach from your source material isn’t such a bad thing.
The Umbrella Academy Season 1: « We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals » Netflix
Adapting a piece of writing and illustration, especially a comic book, for film or television is never an easy task. You can have the biggest special effects budget in the world, but it’s still a question of how you can make the content on the page believable on the screen. This is doubly true if you’re working in live-action format because no matter how hard you try, certain things just don’t translate well into to our reality.
Think of Zack Snyder’s 2009 film version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. Many fans were upset that the climax didn’t feature the giant, tentacled “alien” fabricated by Ozymandius to bring about world peace.
For one thing, explaining the backstory of the exploding alien would have taken too long. For another, it ran the risk of looking silly and unbelievable, thus taking viewers out of the fantasy. By making Doctor Manhattan the impetus for bringing the world together, the film played on what was already established earlier, so as not to fall into that storytelling pitfall of shattering the illusion.
Netflix understood this concept when making The Umbrella Academy, a new superhero series based on the two graphic novel collections by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá. Within seconds, the first episode of the first season grounds us right into the action by deviating in a big way from its source material. That’s not always what the fans want or like, but in this case, it works incredibly well.
