Kick-Ass - Story & Writing

Many movies have been and continue to be adapted from literary sources. The screenwriter is faced with many considerations; among them is exactly how closely the film should try to represent the literary substance. Becoming more and more popular in the film industry today is the adaptation of comic books into film. Deciding exactly how to represent the characters and stories poses quite a challenge for screenwriters.

When comic books are adapted into film the first decision to be made must be what sort of adaptation will be made. A loose adaptation may spin off of the character and develop a plot independent of the literary source. A faithful adaptation holds true to the character and content of the literary source, trying to represent the vision of the writer as accurately as possible. Finally, literary adaptations which are usually restricted to plays, don’t usually find their way into consideration when adapting a comic for film. A loose adaptation allows freedom for the film makers to inject their own vision into the characters and the plot.

The recent reemergence of the Batman character has been successful to say the least. The first film of the series, Batman (U.S.A., 1989) was directed by Tim Burton. The characters of the film represented very literally the characters of the comic book; more abstract was the storyline and plot that was represented. With no particular plot to follow the film was able to inject a more modern day feel to the film. The imagination of the screenwriter allowed the films of the series to appear more current and relevant. These films are a good example of how the screenwriter can often blur the line between a loose and faithful adaptation. The adaptation process can become even more confusing when reviewing the film Kick-Ass (U.S.A., 2010).

The film Kick-Ass throws a monkey wrench into the traditional idea of a screenwriter adapting a film from a literary source. This screenplay and comic for this film were written at literally the same time. The comic author and the screenwriter agreed on a synopsis and carried on from there. One would expect that the storyline would remain consistent between the film and the comic; however that wasn’t exactly the case. The comic is decisively more graphic than the film, while the film also contains some minor character differences most notably in appearance. Big Daddy did however hold a different occupation in the film which seemed to better develop his motives in the film. Fulfilling readers expectations isn’t always as easy as this however.

Quite often when a book or novel becomes very popular and is well written a film adaptation lends itself to disappointment. The beauty of a written work is that many of the details are left open for the reader’s imagination to fill. A screenwriter finds it much easier to adapt lesser known or poorly developed piece of work which lends itself to improvement. With many of the most popular comic book characters having already been adapted to film, the expectation would be the development of more collaborative efforts such as the film Kick-Ass. The screenwriters of these films have little to worry about as far as disappointing the readers, primarily because there are very few before the film is released.