Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-26127155-20150803235010/@comment-5547501-20150804093435

Thekillman wrote: I hope that they will do as Peter Jackson did for the Lord of the Rings: Write a story for a movie, don't just 1-on-1 adapt this stuff, because it won't work. If you've read the books (or even just flipped through them) you know what i'm talking about: the source material for LOTR is nothing even remotely close to movie material.

The same is true for Naruto. It's a Manga, which has it's own strengths and limitations. The Anime did some adaptation, and is made for a 20-minute format. A Live-action movie needs to be rewritten to make sense of the story in movie format.

To make it not suck like the Legendary Sucking Movies, it basically has to do two things:
 * Follow the story to a degree that makes sense
 * Make sure that the various elements follow their proper theme and do what they're meant to do.

E.g. ATLA had earth benders make plenty of fancy moves to throw a small rock a few meters. It changed the ethnically varied cast to white. It missed the point entirely with characters, abilities, storylines and plotpoints. e.g. Dragonball was about a lot of things, but didn't even get basic abilities right. I thought LOTR was rather close to it's source material. They only really cut things out to reduce useless stuff that didn't add to the plot (Tom Bombadil). If you meant the Hobbit I would agree but there is a major difference between adapting a book compared to an anime or manga. A book of all the events of the Pain arc in Naruto might already be as long as a LOTR book, basically one movie. In total, without cutting anything, you would need at least 5 movies (at least meaning more than). I'm interested in seeing how this movie will turn out, but I can't imagine it being anything different than those other 2.

If you want an example of an anime movie 'done right', people like to point out the Death Note movies. In those, they cut out a lot (like the entire Near character and plot) but it was still 2 movies for 37 episodes (around 30 with all the cuts). With that in mind, it's around 15 episodes per movie, so a Naruto movie series would be 45 movies long. This would of course be shorter due to filler (and cannon) cuts as well as there being a lot of fights that would be less than half an hour compared to 5 episodes, but it would still be a ridiculous amount of film to be even close to a 'faithful' adaptation.