Disney Ruined One Of The Best Adaptations In Years And It Deserves A Second Chance
Book adaptations don’t always turn out well. Storylines get changed, the characters don’t behave quite right, and the story is left just a little lacking compared to the book. However, Artemis Fowl was one of the worst adaptations in recent history, painfully cutting out and changing huge parts of the story, and it deserves a better adaptation than what it was given.
Disney’s Artemis Fowl
In 2020, Disney adapted the first Artemis Fowl book by Eoin Colfer. Or so they claimed. However, the story was cut up and changed so much that the two can hardly be compared.
On the surface, the Artemis Fowl movie sounds similar to the book, with a young boy, named Artemis Fowl, who is a very young criminal prodigy who decides to hunt down a group of fairies to hunt down his missing father.
But where the book delves deep into the world of fairies, the mindset of the young boy, and the trouble he creates for everyone involved, the movie only covers the surface level of the characters and their story and makes up several new plot devices that are vaguely explained.
A Great Cast, But Not Much Else
The movie’s failure wasn’t due to the cast. There were some pretty good actors in Artemis Fowl, including Ferdia Shaw, Lara McDonnell (Belfast), Josh Gad (Beauty and the Beast), Colin Farrell (The Lobster), and Tamara Smart (The Worst Witch).
However, the lack of an actual plot and the shallow characters are what caused the movie to be such a catastrophic failure.
On Rotten Tomatoes, critics gave Artemis Fowl a scalding average score of eight percent. Audience members didn’t enjoy the movie much more with an average score of 20 percent.
One critic, Robbie Collin, had this to say about the film: “Lots of things happen but nothing unfolds. It’s like watching a feature-length trailer for a film that doesn’t exist.”
It Would Be Better As A TV Series
Personally, I think Artemis Fowl would be better as a TV series. We are starting to see many book series made into TV instead of movies, like the Percy Jackson series, and I think this would be best for all the Artemis Fowl books.
After all, the series includes eight main books and two additional stories. Making it into movies could be done, as has been the style in the past, but a series would allow each story to really shine. There’s plenty of material in each book to make a full season of Artemis Fowl.
Would Animated Work Better?
However, live-action might have been a mistake as well. While many of the scenes could be done live-action, I think it would miss a lot of the magical and unique aspects of the story. An animated version would be much cooler, and allow many of the main characters to shine.
Of course, neither of the two problems above was the main issue with the movie. The Artemis Fowl movie primarily failed due to its huge deviation from the source material. The story was stripped of everything from the books, made to be flat and basic, and the dialogue was weak and confusing.
Disney Won’t Even Stream It
GFR SCORE
But, if someone was going to pick up the rights for Artemis Fowl, and try and do it properly this time, then I believe the two suggestions above would make the series pretty good, so long as the team paid attention to the storyline properly.
If you really want to give this movie a try, you’ll have to pay for it. With Artemis Fowl being such an epic failure, Disney doesn’t even have it on their platform. Instead, you’ll have to rent Artemis Fowl on a platform like Amazon.
