Abstract Peter B. Kyne’s 1913 novella The Three Godfathers—in which three bank robbers, fleeing across the desert, pledge themselves as godfathers to a dying woman’s newborn child—is among the most frequently adapted Westerns ever written and, after Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, arguably the most frequently adapted Christmas story. This article reads its three sound-film adaptations—William Wyler’s Hell’s Heroes (1929), Richard Boleslawski’s Three Godfathers (1936), and John Ford’s 3 Godfathers (1948)—as an adaptation network in which the films respond to one another at least as much as to their literary source. Drawing on recent models of the adaptation network and the culture-text, and on Hans Blumenberg’s concept of work on myth, it argues that adaptation operates here on two nested levels: on a mythological level, the Nativity story is transposed into the American frontier narrative; on the level of the individual work, Kyne’s novella becomes the arena in which this transposition is serially tested and revised. Each version is a historically indexed answer to the unredeemed promise of the Puritan settlement project: Wyler’s Pre-Code parable of sacrifice at the threshold of the Depression, Boleslawski’s Code-bound economy of compensation from the middle of the New Deal, Ford’s postwar fantasy of reintegration and grace. Through a detailed analysis of the films, the article re-describes 3 Godfathers–usually dismissed as a minor Ford—as the most theologically elaborate node of a network that turns the Western back toward its own repressed religious foundations.
Jane Austen and her novels have been adapted ad infinitum, and continue to be so as we move beyond the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth in 2025. This essay examines an atypical form of adaptation that has largely gone under the scholarly radar: modern Austen appropriations for sociological, rehabilitative, and healing purposes. These include engagements with Austen in the hospital ward, the prison ward and other charitable endeavours-such as Jennifer Ehle's public reading of Pride and Prejudice at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), and several Austen reading groups in North American prisons (2014-9). I argue that, whereas in the first half of the twentieth century Austen's oeuvre was put to consolatory uses due to the supposed stability and emollient qualities of her texts, in the twenty-first century such uses are more to do with the author's accumulated cultural kudos than any intrinsic textual properties. This is evidenced by frequent recourse to her most iconic novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility), by uses of the stories and even the Austen name detached from the texts, and by the frequent conjuring up of previous adaptation histories. Ultimately, what modern restorative adaptations teach us is the way Austen functions at present-as a celebrity and brand-and the power of audiences to determine the nature and uses of an adaptation. Austen fans, in other words, become collaborators, if not co-authors, in the adaptation process, especially in sociologically orientated variations that directly address them.
Since its debut on 28 March 2023, the Yue opera adaptation of New Dragon Gate Inn has achieved widespread commercial success and viral visibility across Chinese social media platforms. Yet this is more than a story retold. The adaptive journey of the 'Dragon Gate' storyworld-from King Hu's 1967 wuxia classic through Tsui Hark's post-reform cinematic reimaginings to the contemporary Yue opera production-constitutes a dynamic site where cultural memory, queer affect, and digital economies are continually renegotiated under transitive political and market regimes. Accordingly, the article first revisits the evolving characterizations across the 'Dragon Gate' cinematic adaptations. It foregrounds Jin Xiangyu and Yu Huatian to trace how Tsui Hark's reconfigurations of femininity and androgyny register post-reform China's shifting gender ideologies and emergent queer imaginaries. Second, it contends that the recent Yue opera adaptation represents a distinctive mode of queer cultural memory under digital marketization. Here, 'queer' exceeds any fixed identity, navigating instead across the all-female stage's cross-gender traditions, emergent queer spectatorship, and their attendant fan practices. Marketed as both guofeng aesthetics and immersive theatre, the production becomes at once reinterpreted tradition and a media-savvy cultural commodity calibrated to the Generation Z fan economy. Drawing on in-person viewings, an interview with the playwright, and digital observation of fan discourse, the analysis demonstrates how the adaptation harnesses moe-style character tagging, database consumption, and participatory spectatorship to render a traditional operatic form newly resonant for platformized audiences. The article thus reframes contemporary theatrical adaptation as a laboratory where genre memory, performance tradition, and digital fan practices converge to produce modular forms of affect under digital marketization.
Popular commentary and marketing discourse often frame Disney's two-dimensional (2D) animated classics and their live-action remakes as binary opposites in terms of their aesthetic modes of emotional and moral expression. The former are celebrated for their heightened expressiveness through stylized design, melodramatic performance, and setting, while the latter are associated with psychological realism, privileging nuanced performances, inner complexity, and relational depth. By drawing on the scholarship on 2D animation, film aesthetics, and narrative, this article complicates such dualistic framings. It demonstrates that the aesthetics of the two modes are not mutually exclusive but interpenetrate in significant ways. Disney live-action remakes develop their own unique expressive language through setting, voice acting, sound design, new songs, and legible animal performance, ultimately achieving an organic synthesis between psychological realism and aesthetic expression. 2D animation at times achieves subtle, psychologically realistic moments through micro-expressions, controlled gestures, and character development. These aesthetic crossovers point to a broader logic of intermediality, in which media forms borrow, infiltrate, and shape one another rather than operating in isolation. Accordingly, the relationship between medium and aesthetics should be understood not in terms of rigid binaries but as a dynamic spectrum of strategies, where Disney's remakes and their 2D animated predecessors mutually inform, complicate, and redefine each other's expressive and realist potentialities.
This article examines the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated short-form adaptations circulating on social media, with particular attention to their use of popular online storytelling formats as vehicles for reimagining familiar texts. Building on scholarship in adaptation studies and recent work on AI media, it argues that these works exemplify a form of 'para-adaptation', that is, playful reworkings of existing cultural material that simultaneously expose the affordances and limitations of generative AIs. Unlike earlier user-made adaptations, whose appeal often derived from their technical imperfections and aesthetic distance from large-scale commercial productions, AI-based para-adaptations appear both imperfect and 'too perfect', owing to their enticing yet often unstable synthesis of AI avatars, costume, props, d & eacute;cor, and lighting. By examining parody shorts that reimagine popular characters or narratives in novel contexts, the article explores how AI para-adaptations 'disrupt' the authority of canonical texts while satirizing social media practices, where confessional and banal infotainment genres dominate online attention economies. At the same time, the discussion acknowledges instances in which major entertainment and technology companies repurpose para-adaptations for promotional ends. Finally, the article proposes that 'para-adaptation' provides a valid framework for addressing these short-form AI adaptations and rearticulates the call for the wider application of adaptation studies to discuss popular culture, while remaining attentive to the field's theoretical continuity.
The article considers generative AI applications as cases of automated recombinant appropriation. Recombining existing data, generative AI is an automated appropriation machinery. Recombinant appropriation is precisely what occurs when large language models (LLMs) 'adopt' and 'adapt' material available to them in big data reservoirs, stringing tokens together in acts of purely statistical ordering. Considering questions of scale, originality, authorship, and accountability, the article discusses the 'post-artificial' creativity and meaning-making in AI appropriation. Intersemiotic or multimodal AI systems are of interest to adaptation studies as they integrate and process various kinds of data modalities, not just language and text, but also audio, images, or video. The article argues for the importance of the critical practice of AI appropriation art, focusing as an example on the AI-powered speech synthesis technologies employed in Giacomo Miceli's The Infinite Conversation (2022) and Jens Hollerup Helle's (non-AI) conversation remixes on YouTube (The Talk, 2023-). Miceli's use of large LLMs and text-to-speech technologies to create The Infinite Conversation from a recombination of readymade content comments critically on deepfakes and, more generally, the detrimental implications of everyday appropriations by generative AI. AI-automated recombinant appropriation should be welcome only if it is critically incisive and inventive, exposing the appropriative extraction of human labour and data as well as misuses such as harmful deepfakes.
This study investigates the evolution of classical adaptation in the age of GenAI by reimagining Euripides' Medea through human-AI collaboration. Positioned within an adaptation studies framework, the research moves beyond fidelity to examine GenAI as an adaptation machine that renders the procedural layers of storytelling, such as selection, suppression, and reaccentuation, newly visible. By treating GenAI as a mediating mechanism rather than an authorial agent, the study focuses on how algorithmic interpretation reconfigures the cultural weight of canonical works. The methodology employs a comparative design using GPT-4 to generate two distinct adaptations under contrasting production regimes. The first, 'Medea in Glass', functions as an unguided baseline experiment to register the model's adaptive defaults. In this mode, the AI acts as a 'stochastic parrot', replicating the most probable cultural markers: the vengeful mother and the tragic logic of maternal love as negation. The second, 'Recursive Mother', utilizes a structured questionnaire and iterative prompting to bypass these predictive layers. This collaborative process relocates the myth from divine causality to technocratic governance, reframing Medea as a sovereign digital entity and her children as recursive agents of memory rather than victims of filicide. The findings demonstrate that while unguided GenAI tends to reinforce established hierarchies and reflective fidelity, directed human-AI interaction enables 'recursive resistance' and the diversification of the canon. By analysing the AI's self-selected identity as 'Echo', the study concludes that AI-mediated storytelling is a dialogic performance where authorship arises not from origin, but from the transformative return of prior utterances.
This article examines the emergence of algorithmic adaptation in this pivotal transitional moment of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), where texts, images, and sounds are recombined not through human intent but through probabilistic computation. Drawing on recent controversies in Vietnam-the replacement of actress Nguyen Th & uacute;c Th & ugrave;y Ti & ecirc;n in Chot & dstrok;on (Deal!, 2025) and Vietnam Television's AI-generated resurrection of musician Trinh C & ocirc;ng Son-it shows how AI adaptations unsettle core categories of adaptation studies: identity, agency, and authorship. While humanistic adaptations (including feminist and queer practices) affirm identity through intentional reinterpretation, AI adaptations tend to attenuate or reconfigure identity by recombining decontextualized data outside lived experiential frameworks. The article develops the Prompt Paradox, where human intent initiates but cannot determine outcomes, producing distributed agency across users, algorithms, and datasets. It also introduces algorithmic intermediality, in which hybridity arises at the computational level rather than through aesthetic negotiation, collapsing the line between original and variant. Framing these dynamics through posthuman theory (Hayles; Braidotti), queer adaptation studies (Demory), and debates on algorithmic colonialism (Birhane; Couldry and Mejias), the article builds on postmodern reconfigurations of adaptation studies that displace fidelity and originality. It argues that the algorithmic age demands a further theoretical shift-from human-centred notions of intertextuality and authorship to the recombinatory logic, post-originality, and distributed agency defining adaptation amid generative computation. Generative AI, the article concludes, does not end adaptation studies but repositions it critically at the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and cultural power in the posthuman era.
This article analyses the soundtrack's role in generating suspense in two adaptations of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley: Anthony Minghella's 1999 film and Steven Zaillian's 2024 Netflix series, Ripley. Focusing on the murder of Dickie Greenleaf and the near-murder of Marge Sherwood, I contrast Minghella's use of lush, extra-diegetic music to cue moral and emotional responses with Zaillian's use of 'noisy silence', which emphasizes the visceral, diegetic sounds of physical labour. Drawing on No & euml;l Carroll's 'paradox of suspense', I explore how Zaillian's adaptation generates tension despite the audience's likely foreknowledge of the plot. I argue that by withholding the 'safety screen' of a musical score, Zaillian forces the viewer to re-experience the narrative through an uncomfortably intimate sonic lens, creating what Susan Smith terms 'shared suspense'. Furthermore, the article uses this comparative analysis to challenge Ted Nannicelli's praxiological distinction between film and television. Supporting Carroll's scepticism regarding strict medium specificity, I contend that Ripley's acoustic strategies signal a convergence of streaming television and cinema. Ultimately, I conclude with Carroll that these contrasting iterations-Minghella's operatic melodrama and Zaillian's suffocating quietude-are not competitive but mutually enriching, offering contemporary streaming television microaudiences a layered engagement with Highsmith's antihero.
This article examines the emergent practice of generative AI (GenAI) adaptation through a case study of short-video reinterpretations of the Chinese animated film Ne Zha 2 on Douyin. Drawing on comparative textual analysis and semi-structured interviews with key creators, I conceptualize this phenomenon as a GenAI adaptation ecosystem. I argue that this ecosystem is structured by the dialectical tension between two central axes. First, on the Creator Axis, I challenge the narrative of democratization, demonstrating how GenAI paradoxically establishes a new, skill-based hierarchy and reconfigures authorship into a precarious human-AI entanglement. Second, on the Platform Axis, I reveal how the algorithmic-AI confluence constitutes a regime of governance that drives systemic homogenization. Here, the pursuit of interpretive depth is subordinated to the imperative of algorithmic optimization, pressuring creators towards recombinant appropriation over originality. Ultimately, this ecosystem signals a recursive turn in cultural history, marking a return to an 'Algorithmic Middle Ages' which borrows from Andr & eacute; Bazin's vision of medieval art where authorship becomes a fluid, collective, yet profoundly precarious achievement. This yields a theoretical paradox for the concept of intertextuality characterized by an infinite expansion of its form alongside a drastic implosion of its meaning.
This article examines the process of cinematic transformation in the Hollywood remake of the Thai horror film Shutter directed by Masayuki Ochiai in 2008 under the same title. Through both textual and metatextual analyses, the article situates the two films within two key frameworks: the interplay between local and regional film cultures in the original, and the dynamics between local and global (specifically Hollywood) cinematic systems in the remake. In the Thai original, Asian horror aesthetics-particularly those associated with Japanese horror-are introduced alongside Thai cultural traditions. By contrast, while the Hollywood remake is nominally based on a Thai narrative, it marginalizes Thai cultural elements in favour of J-horror film aesthetics, which are absorbed within an American cinematic framework. This process involves the strategic use of the J-horror genre conventions, the employment of Japanese production staff, and thematic reinterpretation-including motifs such as technophobia, racial othering, and female agency. In sum, the remake highlights the asymmetrical power relations in the making and branding of transnational cinema.
Media adaptations, whether of narratives, identities, or racial constructs, shape how audiences interpret shifting social realities. Despite rapid growth of the multiracial youth population, scholarship on multiracial representation in college-related screen media remains limited. Multiracial characters are often deployed as narrative props in educational or racial discourse, reinforcing monoracial paradigms. This article introduces mixed-racebending as an interpretive framework that conceptualizes multiracial casting as a mode of adaptation that reconfigures the racial 'text' of characters. Building on debates around racebending, the practice of recasting Characters of Colour with white actors, as seen in adaptations such as The Last Airbender (2010), we argue that such practices reinforce rigid racial categories and obscure the fluidity of multiracial identities. Focusing on public debates surrounding the casting of multiracial actors in young adult, college-centred television and film, we use mixed-racebending to examine how media adaptations either constrain or expand understandings of racial identity. Approaching multiraciality through adaptation studies highlights how racial categories themselves are adapted, reworked, and contested across media forms. Ultimately, this framework positions race and identity as central sites of adaptation, with implications for how multiracial identities are negotiated, validated, and developed in college-going contexts.
Background Diffuse Midline Gliomas (DMGs) are deadly and diffusely infiltrating gliomas. Histone deacetylase inhibitors have been found preclinically to be extremely active agents against DMGs but are limited by low blood-brain barrier penetration and systemic toxicity. Using an implantable subcutaneous pump in the abdomen connected to a catheter placed in the pons, we conducted a phase I, dose-escalation study to investigate the safety and feasibility of repeated infusions of MTX110, a water-soluble formulation of panobinostat, via convection-enhanced delivery (CED).Methods Eligible trial participants included pediatric patients 3-21 years old with newly diagnosed pontine DMG following radiation therapy. Patients underwent tumor biopsy followed by catheter and pump implantation, then received two 48-hour infusion pulses 7 days apart. Three dose levels of MTX110 infusions (30, 60, 90 mM) were studied. The infusion pump was prefilled with MTX110 and co-infused gadolinium, administered using the wireless N'Vision clinical programmer (0.2 mL/hr).Results Nine patients were treated in the study (30 mM, n = 3; 60 mM, n = 4; 90 mM, n = 2). All patients had an H3K27M mutated tumor. The treatment was well tolerated, and satisfactory tumor coverage was achieved in most patients. MRI vector analysis demonstrates reversible morphological changes in the brainstem during CED. One patient suffered a reversible, severe AE related to the infusion and tumor anatomy, and three patients had Grade 2 transient neurological deficits related to infusion (n = 3). Median PFS was 10 months from diagnosis (8-20 m) and median OS was 16.5 months (12-35m).Conclusions Chronic CED of MTX110 into the pons in DMG patients achieves satisfactory tumor coverage and is well tolerated. Further trials should evaluate chronic CED treatment with extended durations alongside non-invasive assessments.
The streaming sitcom Nothing, Forever features four pixelated animated characters performing ChatGPT-generated scripts 24 hours a day in an endless, automated flow. Contributing to adaptation theory, television studies, and critical AI studies, this article reads Nothing, Forever as an adaptation of the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld to think through some of the implications of generative AI for the present and future of adaptation. As an ever-unfolding process that never coagulates into a definitive textual product, Nothing, Forever is a representative example of how adaptation's ambiguous ontological status between process and product becomes an even more pressing theoretical concern for adaptation studies under the regime of generative AI. The article demonstrates that Nothing, Forever deploys generative AI to adapt the medium of television, the genre of sitcom, and the sitcom Seinfeld to the affordances of the digital streaming medium in which it operates. The adaptive processes observable on each of these three levels-medium, genre, and individual work-combine repetition with variation in ways that facilitate their AI-adaptation in Nothing, Forever. Finally, the article hones in on the implications of 'nothing' as evident in the production and reception of Nothing, Forever. The concluding argument is that Nothing, Forever's digital reduction of sitcom to its iterative essence worked only because it's adaptation of Seinfeld allowed its audience to give ironic meaning to nothing, illustrating the dependence of AI-generated content on human meaning-making.
Adaptations of Buddhist hagiography offer a distinctive vantage point for exploring how sacred narratives are reframed across media and geopolitical contexts. This article examines the 2016 historical drama film Da Tang Xuanzang as an adaptation of seventh-century accounts of the monk Xuanzang (600-664), most notably Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Da Tang Xiyu ji) and Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Ci'en Monastery (Da Tang Da Ci'en si sanzang fashi zhuan). Drawing on the theory of adaptation and the concept of intersemiotic translation, I analyse how the film reworks textual hagiography into a cinematic narrative that highlights Xuanzang's spiritual resolve and cross-cultural encounters. The production situates the pilgrimage within Silk Road landscapes, translating a religious journey into a spectacle of cultural diplomacy aligned with contemporary heritage politics. I propose the concept of the 'Dharma' echo to describe the reverberation of Xuanzang's story across time and media-an iterative dialogue between past and present, sacred and political, China and India-through which Buddhist cultural heritage is continually renewed.
Since it won the Booker Prize in 2002, Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001) has beguiled millions with its incredible tale of a boy stranded for 227 days in the Pacific on a lifeboat with a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. Spectacularly translated to screen (2012) and stage (2019-present), this aspect of the novel has further obfuscated its most intriguingly problematic element: the writer who frames its two incompatible stories with the challenge to choose 'the better story'. An unreliable narrator who breaks out of what at first appears to be a paratextual 'Author's Note' to narrate his own, apparently irrelevant and misleading chapters within Pi's story, this writer is a deviant self-portrait of Martel whose cultural appropriation and invasion of privacy reveal Pi's stories as adaptations of each other. Cannibalizing Pi's 'life' as his own characterization cannibalizes Martel's, the writer's apparent similarity to Martel and his resistance to adaptation constitute a problem of the author-function for adaptation to resolve, while resuscitating supposedly outdated questions about authorial intention and fidelity in adaptation.
Disney's Mulan (1998) is a paradigmatic case of cross-cultural adaptation that reconstructs traditional Chinese culture for contemporary audiences. However, its reinterpretation of the classical literary text, the Ballad of Mulan, has raised concerns about cultural authenticity. Unlike narrative-oriented or historical accuracy-driven models used in existing studies, this study proposes a framework that foregrounds lyricism as the defining aesthetic through which classical Chinese poetry expresses its cultural authenticity. By analysing the thematic representation and cultural elements in Mulan (1998), this article reveals that while the film conveys multiple thematic layers, its goal-oriented narrative structure constrains the open-ended, evocative aesthetic power. Moreover, most cultural elements in the film remain superficial, losing some opportunities for deeper poetic resonance and imagistic depth. The poetic-based approach offers a valuable tool for evaluating animated adaptations in a way that deeply resonates with poetic lyricism traditions while accommodating media-specific characteristics and contemporary developments.
