A few years ago I asked a producer about the adaptation of Escobar’s classic Zipi and Zape. How had it worked if it had nothing to do with that comic whose only reliable adaptation had been the endearing and charlomatic nonsense of Enrique Guevara? “Families know the brand”, and therefore trust what they are going to see. Inventing some characters closer to Harry Potter than to the Zapatillas would not have had the same pull in the public as this extremely free – to say the least – version of the Bruguera product. Suddenly I understood all those adaptations that had not interested me (except for some of Mortadelo and Filemón) and whose scripts I suspect were written without reading a single original page.
I had forgotten that conversation until I suffered the new Predator adventure set in the Comanchería in the year 1719.
Fantastic fanatic, reader of Western novels (don’t miss the Frontera collection from the Valdemar publishing house), and raised when the female characters had a single personality trait (“being girls”), I bluntly affirm that I am the target audience of Prey (premiered directly on Disney Plus). The face that stayed with me after seeing the delivery of “the brand” was the same as that of all the fools who went disguised with the lightsaber to see Episode I: The Phantom Menace on the day of the premiere. A Jedi ponytailed boy next to me said wryly, “Have I really waited 16 years for this?” It is agreed that between some franchises and others there are great differences in expectation and production values, but they all lack the same thing: authenticity. The industrial is the enemy of the authentic, and cinema (almost always) is industry. Good movies are mistakes on an assembly line. And those that, in addition to being good, work commercially are miracles. But some of us don’t learn and think that miracles can be cloned, as if this were that Berlanga film titled, precisely, Thursdays, a miracle.
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