Here's the problem with making a movie out of...anything that isn't a movie: movies are 1.5-3 hours long, generally. Most books worth turning into movies take longer than that to get through, as do most games. You're going to lose a lot in translation. Even the Scott Pilgrim film had to do away with practically all signs of character development for the sake of a motion picture (sorry, Kimberly Pine, we do love you, I promise!). But here's the other thing: Scott Pilgrim's conversion to a movie was much better than Avatar: The Last Airbender's. And here's why: the script for Scott Pilgrim's movie felt like a different flavor of the same brand of ice cream, while The Last Airbender felt like twenty flavors of ice cream being mixed together into a gloriously brown pile of poo.

The Scott Pilgrim franchise ought to be teaching us all a valuable lesson - a lesson that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tried to before its time. That lesson is that the same idea can definitely be applied to different forms of media but it can't be bended into shape - it must be taken apart and reconstructed. Adam Douglas' creation saw the full multimedia treatment back in the day: TV miniseries, radio play, point-and-click adventure game, and later a movie. The most important thing they shared in common? They all had differences from the book, making each one more suitable to its format. Scott Pilgrim has a refreshing comic series, a zany and visually interesting movie, and a highly referencial and enjoyable beat-'em-up video game under his belt. All three are superb for what they are, and the game and movie intentionally remove, change, and add components and twist the formula of the comics to make them better works of media for what they are.

The key to effective movie adaptations of video games? Break apart what makes the original content engaging, then rebuild the components together into what would make an effective movie from the ground up.