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Notes -
There is something about the original material that makes it good, some special sauce.
The die-hard fans are not necessarily right about what that is. But it is something. With a book series, there is solid world-building that took place completely out-of-sight and you can just feel as you watch, never being taken out of the experience. That is probably sufficient for the secret sauce but it is usually a necessary for it.
But there is still work for the person doing the adapting! The first Harry Potter movie sucked because it was mostly just reading out the book. By the third the people making the movies learned how to adapt the very strong source material, leaving things out and changing things as needed. By the sixth Rowling had taken back control because who is going to tell her no, and it started to wear again.
IMHO the big reason the Fantastic Beasts movies are so clumsy is that Rowling is writing them directly. She is very good at writing books but not good at writing movies, but again no one can say no. If she wrote source material and then someone else made it into a movie we would get something better, but there would still be too much Dumbledore and too little Fantastic Beasts.
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