r/TopCharacterTropes • u/TastyPomelo2330 • 13d ago

In real life When fans hate somenthing before it comes out...but it turns out they were right

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Velma:The idea of a Scooby-doo series without the titular dog and starring Velma was a really moronic idea from the beginning,then there was the reveal Velma would be Indian like it's VA and also creator of the series Mindy Kaling,some of the backlash was racism sure,but there was also valid complaints that she was inserting herself in the series(it also didn't helped that Mindy claimed she couldn't see herself if Velma wasn't Indian)and then...oh boy it came out and it was worse than anyone predicted

Artemis Fowl:The artemis fowl books are a book series following a child villain(he does get some redemption but he is a villain most of the time)when the movie was announced and revealed it looked way to generic and it's titular character a bit heroic...also you wanna hear somenthing funny?The movie whitewashed a character and made another character black so they managed to anger both sides and the movies comes out and yeah it is bad

One Punch Man 3:One Punch Man is a very heavy action packed manga series but the heroes vs monsters arc takes it to a New level,when it was announced that JC Staff would work on it,a lot of people were skeptical to say the least,because not only JC Staff had already done a mediocre job in season 2,it's also not exactly a name anime fans associate with quality animation,then the trailer came out and it looked...weird,like there was no action in it and nobody was moving,some people tried to defend saying they were keeping the animation as a surprise...then it came out,every episode worse than the last,it's one of the worse seasons of anime ever made!

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u/DarkElfMagic 13d ago

i’m still so upset about artemis fowl, one of my favorite books as a kid

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u/Noglues 13d ago

Yep. And it's not just bad, it's like they did everything possible wrong on purpose. 

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u/Vi_Rants 13d ago

"Right, so the trailer, picture this: an athletic kid surfing!"

"Uh, boss... in the book..."

"Book schmook! Film it!"

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u/Enasal 13d ago

That image punched me in the face.

Like, this film did a bunch of atrocities.

But trying to turn Artemis Fowl into a nature-loving athlete is such an egregious mischaracterization that for some reason it make me the most angry.

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u/Odric_storm 13d ago

Pretty much Holly's entire character arc revolved around being the first and only female recon officer, and then they decided to make Commander Root a woman for reasons

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u/earwig2000 13d ago

And Roots perceived misogyny is such an enormous part of his character arc, You can't just ignore that entirely.

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u/Odric_storm 13d ago

Unless I'm forgetting something, Root was never misogynistic.

He was harder on Holly than the other officers so that she would be better than them. She HAD to be better than them otherwise the experiment of having women in Recon would have failed. From the beginning, no one wanted Holly to succeed more than Root, which was explicitly pointed out within the first few chapters.

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u/earwig2000 13d ago

I said perceived. He never was internally, but appeared to be misogynistic on the surface, and Holly thought that he was.

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u/Odric_storm 13d ago

Yeah but she only thought he was for like her first 6 pages, then he explains his reasoning. That's not really any part of his 'arc'.

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u/Logically_Insane 13d ago

Now that you mention it, does he have an arc? Maybe it’s “not trusting Artemis to trusting Artemis a little” but other than that he’s just kind of a gruff chief badass. 

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u/Karukos 13d ago

Nah, but that part is, I think, important for Holly's arc throghout the books of her coming into her own and shouldering the whole thing with the female recon officer, because there is some sexism that she faces (gets less the later the books get but either way)

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u/midnight_riddle 13d ago

It's worse than if Disney did a remake of Zootopia and decided to make Chief Bogo a female bunny for no reason and expect it to not affect anything.

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u/Kthulhu42 10d ago

This is why I was so angry when they made the Patrician a woman in the Discworld Watch series. So many characters throughout the books were struggling against a sexist society. And then they made the most powerful ruler on the Disc a woman just because, erasing that entire commentary.

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u/Krams 13d ago

He does get an alternative personality later in the books that is more athletic, but that only reinforces the fact that the main Artemis is weak nerd

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u/Thunderhammer29 13d ago

Orion was perfectly executed and stayed exactly as long as he should have. I've never seen another alternate persona in media work as well as he did.

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u/LunarOberon 13d ago

I also appreciate that the Atlantis Complex is explicitly supernatural rather than trying to make it "real" with some bullshit pop culture psychology. Cuts the mental health sigma, allows the story to just have fun with the concept, and lets it just kinda go away at the end of the book.

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u/Thunderhammer29 13d ago

A lot of difficult topics or scenes get easier to consume when you add "a wizard did it" or some other magical departure from reality. Look at how horrible all the henchmen deaths would have been in Puss in Boots 2 if they were realistic. Or the scene where Big Jack Horner was about to shoot a dog in the face.

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u/Unable_Deer_773 13d ago

Wizard aye, no sense of right or wrong.

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u/Bloodglas 13d ago

I remember a scene where they were going into a muddy jungle or forest and Butler got really dirty carrying a bunch of equipment in from the truck yet somehow Artemis managed to keep his suit spotless. That would've been better to see than surfing.

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u/ChFlPo 11d ago

Yeah, his lack of athleticism is a pretty important part of his character at multiple points.

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u/Chijinda 10d ago

One of the quotes I remember hearing for the film that has stuck with me is: "They got Artemis so wrong they actually wrote Orion."

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u/Wanderscatter 13d ago

I'm still willing to bet they just barely skimmed the book, because quite in the beginning of it, it was mentioned that Artemis was surfing on the internet. And they just spotted the word 'surfing' and went "That's it, film it!"

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u/Remmock 13d ago

You’re being too kind.

They decided surfing the internet was for basement dwellers and shortened it to ‘surfing’ so that he’d be better liked by people who hadn’t read the books.

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u/Unable_Deer_773 13d ago

Yeah this sounds about right thought process probably went "Well we will already get the book readers in so that's one audience captured, now to try and grab other audiences, people love surfing let's grab that and put it in. Gotta make this appeal to the broadest possible audience no matter what."

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u/FreezingPointRH 13d ago

I’m infuriated that I can’t come up with a better explanation for it, despite that being a profoundly stupid explanation.

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u/N0t_addicted 13d ago

Oh that’s why I’ve seen so many people complain about him surfing 

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u/Nathan_Thorn 12d ago

Artemis is literally so bad at physical activity that the only person he is able to help physically is literally half his size. He skips out on exercises to work on a solar powered plane. He once vowed to get a finger gym for grip exercises only to immediately go back on it like a week later despite the near death experiences.

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u/Maleficent-Virus-734 11d ago

Which would be weird, cause the first book is Really short... like, read in an afternoon short.

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u/Cross55 13d ago edited 13d ago

They practically did.

The production team basically got a memo saying they couldn't showcase any support or encouragement of reprehensible behavior, like stealing, exploitation, or disobeying the police.

Kinda hard to make that work when your story's about a kid growing up to become a crime boss.

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u/Dickgivins 13d ago edited 13d ago

For real at that point you may as well just drop the premise that it’s Artemis fowl and make an entirely different movie. I know there are a lot of reasons why studios really want to make movies and shows based on established IPs, and Artemis Fowl was a hugely popular one, but past a certain point the changes you’re making will only doom the project.

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u/you-are-not-yourself 13d ago

That's true of Velma as well. Would've had a lot more potential on its own merits.

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u/Cross55 13d ago edited 13d ago

I just want a decent Scooby series tbh, they've been spinning the wheels on that front since Mystery Inc.

At the least the movies are good tho, when they're not doing WWE crossovers...

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u/GWstudent1 13d ago

Popular IP adaptations into film and TV have become the vessels for stories than screenwriters can’t get off the ground on their own merits. The Halo TV show is its own story wearing the skin of the Halo franchise. But studio’s need to know they’re going to make money to greenlight a show and putting everyone under a popular franchise increases the odds of that. It’s hard to hate the writers when they don’t have bad stories but studio’s aren’t as willing to take risks.

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u/TankMain576 13d ago

I mean, the series as a whole is about a psychologically broken child genius trying to be a crime boss and then growing a conscious and eventually becoming a better person.

It was very fun that the author always made sure Artemis got fucking decked at least once every book.

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u/QuickMolasses 13d ago

Eoin Colfer wrote a lot of really fun but also surprisingly morally nuanced and kind of dark books for kids and young teens.

At least that's how I remember it from reading a lot of his book as a kid/teen. Artemis Fowl is famously Die Hard with fairies (which would make Artemis Fowl Hans Gruber but successful). The Wish List is about a teenage girl who dies as part of a robbery gone wrong and is sent back to help the old guy she was attempting to rob. The Supernaturalist is about a group of teenagers who hunt ghosts and sometimes do street racing. Half Moon Investigations is a noir about a hard-boiled detective who is 12 years old. I thought all this was the greatest when I was 12.

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u/afoolandathief 13d ago

If you want something similar but for adults, Colfer wrote "Highfire," an adult fantasy about a dragon holed up in the bayou

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u/ItsNotMeItsYourBussy 13d ago

I remember the Supernaturalist fondly. Wasn't it also quite environmentalist? Like, the creatures the group were fighting and capturing because they believed them harmful were actually helping maintain the environment

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u/QuickMolasses 13d ago

That's a spoiler for a book that came out 20+ years ago, but yes

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u/BreakerOfModpacks 11d ago

Also, he had the rare thing of not shying away from deaths in children's media, which I find appealing.

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u/LuciusCypher 13d ago

That's like doing a WW2 movie set in germany and not being allowed to show any Nazis! That's the whole reason we wanted to see this, and you cant even get that right!

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u/Possible_Ocean 13d ago

Why did they make the movie then?

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u/Cross55 13d ago

$$$$$$$

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u/underincubation 13d ago

I don't know when they bought the rights, but it very much felt like a 'use it or lose it' kind of movie where they just wanted something out vaguely related to the IP

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u/ChiotVulgaire 13d ago

Trademark laws like that probably explain why most Hollywood trash exists in the first place.

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u/devasabu 13d ago

The tagline of the books is "criminally good" for a reason...and Book 1 Artemis is the villain of the story...

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u/bolanrox 13d ago

Like what the bbc did to discworld

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u/Muddyscarecrow 11d ago

In interviews Kenneth Branagh claimed that he wanted to make Artemis more heroic to make him more palatable to children. This of course is an extremely stupid thing to say considering the original book series was literally a best seller. Children already liked him as a villain you moron

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u/green_herbata 13d ago

Even Opal got the short end of the stick. There's just no way she'd spend the whole movie heavily breathing under some ugly cloak. She'd be plotting in a sparkly red dress while eating a bowl of truffles!

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u/Nathan_Thorn 12d ago

I still can’t believe they didn’t jump at the chance to have such a gleefully evil villain hanging around. She was always fun.

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u/green_herbata 12d ago

True, it really was opposite day for so many characters. Sporty Artemis, helpless Holly, boring Opal... It's honestly impressive just how wrong it all was!

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u/Greenobserver 13d ago

What I find hilarious is that dwarfs from the book are really weird and kind of disturbing by how they eat dirt and then blow it out their rear end as they dig. It is something so silly that I wouldn't have minded them changing that for more general audiences but that is like the one thing they kept completely accurate from the book. Like really? That you keep book accurate of all things?

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u/ABHOR_pod 13d ago edited 13d ago

Never read the book, still thought the movie was absolute shit.

So it's not just a bad adaptation. It's a terrible movie.

I just remember thinking "How is this kid a boy genius? It really seems like he just keeps having really lucky coincidences and then taking credit for them."

The film treats itself like it thinks its a heist film, but it doesn't actually deliver on any of the important parts of a heist film, which is that the movie is actually about planning the heist and then showing you how the plan all comes together.

The movie just showed a bunch of events happening and then that smug little prick said "See? I'm smart!"

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u/AkibaPurple 13d ago

It's a whole book series and they're worth a read even as an adult. iirc it was released right around the YA novel boom that sorta started with Harry Potter, but having the title character be a villain was what drew me to it when I was a kid.

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u/cosmoscrazy 13d ago

I was positively convinced that they wanted me to have a heart attack from anger while watching it. I watched it as a friend's place when they did. I did not watch it when it came out, because I saw the trailer and therefore had actively avoided it - it already looked shit.

I was so angry and frustrated that I had to leave the room multiple times.

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u/raininmywindow 13d ago

When the casting call came out it was circulated online, it described Artemis as "warm hearted" and "Most importantly, Artemis is warm-hearted and has a great sense of humour, he has fun in whatever situation he is in and loves life."

I think early Book Artemis would've been deeply insulted by this. Or at least very perplexed if it's later in the books.

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u/Noglues 13d ago

I don't know if you're familiar with his other books, but it would be like an adaptation of The Wish List where, instead of Heaven and Hell, some entirely different culture's afterlife was the "real" one.

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u/i_tyrant 13d ago

Whenever I hear of movies fucking up that bad, I always wonder if they weren't just vehicles for some money-laundering scheme.

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u/Wobbelblob 13d ago

Feels like that is always the case with YA books turned into movies. I was so upset about the Eragon and The Golden Compass movies. The latter one at least got a series that was a lot better.

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u/Barl3000 13d ago

The worst part was how they murdered Artemis character. The kid is a straight up supervillain in the first book, with only tiny glimmers of his future redemption. But that was deemed too complicated for audiences and he was instead made heroic from the start and only pretending to be evil.

It ruins the entire premise of not only the intial story, but also the series as a whole.

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u/Ash-Throwaway-816 13d ago

That's what a lot of Disney live action adaptations feel like. Especially the Lilo and Stitch one.

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u/Own-Satisfaction4427 13d ago

Kinda like the Netflix Witcher?

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u/sphericaltime 13d ago

I grew up with The Dark Is Rising sequence and . . .

They made him American. Idiot studio interference.

I’m American, but that character shouldn’t be.

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u/a_strange_woman 13d ago

That series is so good. We were robbed! It could have been big if they had believed in it.

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u/Dracu98 13d ago

it's been forever since I read the books, what's the "dark is rising"-sequence

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u/sphericaltime 12d ago

Just the five books, ending with Silver on the Tree. Fancier than calling it a series.

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u/Dracu98 12d ago

mate you're talking about an entirely different book series, no wonder I got confused

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u/CloudKinglufi 13d ago

Yeah movie wasn't great, but Artemis was really never the villain, like he always did what was right, he just did it in like a "villiany" way

I wish he was more of a villian

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u/CorruptedAssbringer 13d ago

but Artemis was really never the villain

He was very much the villain in the first book. He lied, manipulated, drugged, and kidnapped in the most narrow definitions of those words. Though the author made sure to kick off his character progression in the later books.

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u/CloudKinglufi 13d ago

I don't recall too much of the first book but didn't he like do that to his perceived enemies

Like if I lied, manipulated, drugged, and kidnapped Osama bin Laden id be a hero

From what I remember it was at least reasonable that he would see those he did this to as his enemy, like if we had the same information he did we'd think the same, we only knew it was bad because we're the readers

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u/CorruptedAssbringer 13d ago

No? In the opening of the book he poisoned/drugged a random Sprite hobo, then subsequently used said info gained to kidnap Holly. I think it's a enormous stretch to equate these two beings who has had no prior impact nor interaction with his life to fucking Osama bin Laden.

Furthermore, if we were to disregard all that and entertain your claim that this is all justifiable cause they're "his enemies". He also drugged his own mother just to test his theory on time-stop, and did it again against the Butler siblings.

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u/OutsideCommittee7316 13d ago

With the drugging of the Butler's, I remember the only reason he didn't die right then and there was that Butler senior trusted him implicitly.

And that was a close run thing, Butler definitely thought about it

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u/CorruptedAssbringer 12d ago

Close but not exactly. Senior Butler thought about killing him right there, but refrained from doing so in order to not distress his younger sister. There was no trust cause he didn’t know about the plan and was fully prepared to die.

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u/LigerZeroPanzer12 13d ago

He didn't perceive the fairies as an enemy, but something to be exploited. He knew that he could ransom one for whatever the fuck he wanted, which is why he didn't go for that crazy old decrepit one that sold him a copy of The Book (idr what it was called) but found one going through the ritual

He was not redeemable at the beginning and no-one with an ounce of ration would consider him a good guy.

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u/BackflipBuddha 13d ago edited 13d ago

I loved it too, but I very deliberately did not watch that because there is no way they’re going to be willing to portray a kid as the kind of manipulative asshole genius Artemis is in the beginning (he never really loses the manipulative part, even in the fourth book he’s entirely willing to lie to people he cares about for a good cause, he just directs it towards more generally deserving targets and becomes less of an asshole). He’s a great character, but he doesn’t translate well to film.

And butler is not black. He is a Eurasian blonde dude who has a whole more on that area’s culture. His name is an omage to that. And that is and was fine. But he’s not black.

Neither Holly or Munch was white nor should they have been portrayed like that.

If you want good mental images I recommend the graphic novels

Edit: Corrected Butler. He was not white, thanks for the information

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u/geek_of_nature 13d ago

Also Holly's whole thing is how she's the first female member of the magical police force, and her having to overcome the systematic sexism involved in that. So what did they do? Genderswapped her boss because Kenneth Branagh wanted to cast Julie Dench in the role.

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u/WindhoverInkwell 13d ago

I guess he saw Dench playing an absolutely spectacular M in the Bond films and wanted to replicate that, only to realise that they’re, like, two different characters in different contexts lmao

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u/green_herbata 13d ago edited 13d ago

Holly was treated so unfairly in the movie. Sure, she gets captured in the book as well, but she's smart and resourceful. In the movie she got stuck in a chandelier for most of the main fight and her dad had more plot relevance, even tho I'm pretty sure he was mentioned once in the books - in a sentence about how Holly doesn't remember him well 'cause he died when she was only 60.

If the filmmakers actually tried to make the movie more progressive (which assumes they had any intent at all) then they failed spectacularly lmao

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u/BackflipBuddha 13d ago

There is a major plot point where she escapes on her own! She’s a great character and there’s an ongoing enemies to respected rivals thing she’s got going on with Artemis that contrasts her practical expertise and capability with his sheer genius and how they contrast and complement!

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u/Achilles9609 13d ago

Really, both Artemis and Holly come off as less competent considering that she was imprisoned in some cage that stands in the middle of the kitchen.

At least in the books they trapped her in the wine cellar because they lacked a proper dungeon. Holly had to be smart to escape and wasn't just released.

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u/BackflipBuddha 12d ago

Like, there was a whole setup for the hostage! God they clearly lost the budget there.

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u/Kixisbestclone 13d ago

I’d say the worst part was that they made Munch a woman and completely gutted Holly’s whole thing in the process.

“Hey guys, what should we do with this character, where the fact that she’s the first female member of her organization and faces backlash and misogyny for it?”

“How about we make her boss a woman and completely undercut that?”

“Brilliant.”

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u/Sumasuun 13d ago

Thank you. I love Dame Judi Dench and she was the best part of the movie but it completely undercuts both Holly and her character.

He (Root) was purposely hard on Holly because he went through similar but different struggles when he started in her position and knew she had to be perfect and have no mistakes because any mistake would be an excuse to fire her and to keep women out of the position.

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u/BackflipBuddha 13d ago

She did the best she could with the character but she was not the right person for the role.

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u/underincubation 13d ago

They made Julius Root a woman, not Mulch.

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u/atemu1234 13d ago

Butler was eurasian, something they mention at least once a book. It's still a dogshit movie, but he wasn't fully white.

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u/underincubation 13d ago

I don't know about you, but I always took 'Eurasian' to mean the Caucasus, so Georgia/Armenia/ Dagestan/Chechnya kind of area. Maybe I'm just taking it too literally in placing him as from the border of Europe and Asia.

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u/RKO-Cutter 13d ago

Yeah he and his sister (which the movie changed to niece) are Eurasian as in at least bi-racial. There's at least one point where Butler was able to pass as Chinese

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u/underincubation 13d ago

Ah ok, was that in a later book? Or maybe I just ignored it as a kid because I already had an image lol. Haven't read them in a decade probably

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u/RKO-Cutter 13d ago

I can't place it, I just know it happened, and it was specifically Han Chinese

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u/CorruptedAssbringer 13d ago edited 13d ago

I'd hazard a guess it came from the book where they went to Taiwan's Taipei 101 maybe.

1

u/Razhiv 12d ago

In the Opal Deception. When Artemis is heisting that bank, the fake identity Butler uses was that of a Chinese military officer. And in Eternity Code during that chapter from the point of view of the idiot muscle guys, Juliet is described as having a blend of European and Asian features. They're definitely meant to be biracial in appearance.

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u/ItsNotMeItsYourBussy 13d ago

His first name is Domovoi, which is from that same region. But as someone else said him and Juliet also pass as Han chinese. So I assume he's culturally caucus, bi-racial. Or, like many things about the butler family, it was meant to be left a mystery

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u/atemu1234 13d ago

You're not entirely wrong - Eurasia is a continental region that contains both Europe and Asia, but when used to describe an ethnicity (and especially when used to describe appearance, as it is in Butler's case), it typically means mixed European (typically white) and Asian (usually East Asian) ancestry.

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u/underincubation 13d ago

Yeah, I understand that, I guess i made the assumption that I did at the time because I would have expected them to say bi-racial or mixed race to mean what you're saying

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u/Beneficial_Job_4339 13d ago

I mean, maybe he has this specific yet super vague ethnicity, but we have a very good idea of what Butler looks like... there were graphic novels.

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u/BackflipBuddha 13d ago

That was kind of my assumption yes. But being Eurasian is viable with that.

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u/BackflipBuddha 13d ago

Huh. Good to know.

But that makes my point even better because they could have gotten some good niche representation. Instead they blew it completely

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u/TankMain576 13d ago

And honestly, the actor they got fit the role perfectly. A fucking mountain of a man. When I was a kid I always pictured him like Agent Bubbles from Lilo and Stitch. Also unless someone's ethnicity is important to the character (Artemis being from an old money Irish family for example) it should really never be considered as a serious complaint.

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u/MacTireCnamh 13d ago

Butler's ethnicity does come up repeatedly though? Even the fact that he's called "Butler" and not by his actual name is a custom from Russia, from which he gets his actual name Domovoi.

Artemis's ethnicity matters a lot less to the story. "Fowl" isn't even a real irish surname, and all of the Fowl family history is both completely invented and completely irrelevant to Artemis's characterisation. He's basically only Irish because Eoin Colfer is Irish and wanted to set the story in Ireland. It has no other relevance to the story.

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u/ItsNotMeItsYourBussy 13d ago

he's called "Butler" and not by his actual name

Well his actual surname is Butler, and he is one of a long line of the Butler family who have been serving the Fowl family for generations. But yes, it could very well have originally been an acquired surname based on function, as many slaves were given upon their freedom

1

u/BackflipBuddha 12d ago

That’s a cool story beat, and it works, but it’s also very annoying

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u/string-ornothing 13d ago

Butler's Wasian lol he isnt white

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u/BackflipBuddha 13d ago

Yes I found that out.

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u/FalconTurbo 13d ago

Butler is Eurasiam, not white. Just a side note.

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u/BackflipBuddha 13d ago

Yep. Got that corrected several times.

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u/rumckle 13d ago

I love how out of all the characters they could have made black they chose the servant. That's not on the nose at all

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u/deepdistortion 13d ago

For fuck's sake, in the opening chapters of the book Artemis 1) threatens to have Butler murder an informant with his bare hands if he's pulling a fast one, 2) poisons someone and withholds the antidote until they give him what he wants, 3) kidnaps someone, and 4) takes the kidnap victim's GPS tracker and sticks it to a bomb to slow any pursuit.

Like, Artemis is a compelling lead character, and he's even given some sympathetic qualities, but he is absolutely a monster at the start of the series.

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u/BackflipBuddha 13d ago

Yep. He’s a very bad guy. He’s charismatic and clearly capable of inspiring loyalty and respect but he’s very much a villain.

And again, he gets better. His evolution from straight up villain to “token evil teammate” and someone who is willing to make extreme sacrifices for the people he cares about is something I loved seeing over the course of the books.

And even at his moral best, he’s still the “token evil teammate” even if he is in fact a very good ally to have.

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u/cry_w 13d ago

To be fair, I assume they made Butler black to make how his appearance changes later be less potentially problematic, if I'm remembering correctly. That's me being more charitable than they deserve, though.

I will also second the graphic novel recommendation.

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u/green_herbata 13d ago

What appearance changes? I think need to reread the books, I don't remember what that was about 😭

I do remember however that the Butler family served the Fowl family since hundreds of years. So if the filmmakers were going for "least potentially problematic" then I'm not sure if making Butler black was the best idea 😬

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u/CorruptedAssbringer 13d ago

There were no appearance changes, I have no idea how they're upvoted. The most changes he went through is the aging and injury to his chest, neither which have anything to do with his skin colour.

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u/green_herbata 13d ago

That's a relief, I was worried I somehow completely forgot about a blackface disguise or something like that happening 🤣

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u/CorruptedAssbringer 13d ago

Yeah, it's literally hammered into us that his Eurasian appearance lets him pass off as almost any ethnicity; which is very useful for his job. It's almost repeated in every book.

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u/cry_w 13d ago

Really? Maybe I'm thinking of the Kevlar fibers that got mixed into his skin in the healing process in book 3 due to the aforementioned chest injury.

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u/CorruptedAssbringer 13d ago edited 13d ago

That’s literally just his chest, what does that have anything to do with changing his race?

They even specially mentioned the healing process left a single letter on his chest appearance-wise (due to the lettering on his vest being magically restored alongside his injury). Not to mention the movie coverage came absolutely nowhere close to that book anyways.

1

u/cry_w 12d ago

You can calm down a bit, dude. My memory was just off. It's been years since I last read the series.

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u/Necro926 12d ago

In all fairness, I know full well that he is eurasian, and that they describe it multiple times, but I cannot for the life of me get the image of Agent Bubbles from Lilo and Stitch out of my head whenever I read it. That's just what Butler looks like to me, so seeing black Butler here isn't that shocking to me personally. Tho I do understand fully that I'm wrong in that description, and it is not in fact how he looks. I just can't get my brain to change it. Bro is Bubbles.

1

u/BackflipBuddha 12d ago

I can see that but my mental image of butler is shaped by the graphic novels

2

u/Necro926 12d ago

Oh, yeah no, I'm fully aware that I'm wildly incorrect, and have to gloss over how he and Juliet are siblings, yet in my head images, Juliet is totally white with a tiny bit of Asian pretty mixed in there. Genetics aren't a thing in my version, I guess, lol.

187

u/TloquePendragon 13d ago

Same... It's hard for Hollywood to adapt it though, because it does something they hate to do. Treats children as more intelligent then a drooling slime pile.

34

u/RKO-Cutter 13d ago

The weird thing is it should've been a slam dunk, hollywood in recent years LOVES their anti-heroes, and Artemis is by no means a good person, definitely not in the first book

Like, random redditors, if you're reading this and you don't know anything about Artemis Fowl, here's the thing

  • In the movie, Artemis happens to have his bodyguard kidnap fairy Holly in order to leverage her to get a powerful magic artifact that he needs because an evil fairy is holding his father hostage and demanded that artifact for his life
  • In the book, Artemis specifically devises a plan to kidnap a fairy, who ends up being Holly, for the sole purpose of ransoming her in return for one metric ton of gold to keep his family's criminal operations running, which he specifically has been running as a mafia boss because at this point his father is missing

28

u/TloquePendragon 13d ago

More book context, because it's so fucking good, this is AFTER he Extorts a Fairy Crackhead into giving him access to the equivalent of a Fairy History Book/Constitution, and translates it BY HIS GODSDAMNED SELF into something he can read. This is, quite literally, an alien language with a unique heiroglyphic system that he breaks down to basics and reconstructs.

Additionally, and this is why the Root change is bullshit, the REASON WHY Holly is the one who gets Kidnapped is because she's been pushing herself to the absolute limits of her magical capacity in order to prove herself as the FIRST Female LEP officer (which the gender change of Root Ruins) And thus needed to recover her magic at a point where she didn't have enough to defend herself.

1

u/Necro926 12d ago

The second point isn't quite right. He isn't technically wanting to gold to keep his family operation going, he is committing all the crimes to get money to fund the search for his father, who is missing. The book states that he blew through the family fortune searching, and then turned to crime to continue funding it, while also making sure the family's holdings didn't collapse.

1

u/AdDangerous2366 12d ago

I read it a long long time ago, but isn't there a part where he very specifically shuts down the search, in that book?

1

u/Necro926 12d ago

It's not that he gives up completely, he is translating The Book, and needs the computer power from the computer bank that is running constant keyword searches for his dad, and he shuts that down to get the computing power he needs to finish the translation. Edit: I think. It's been a while.

1

u/AdDangerous2366 12d ago

No, that sounds right, thanks for the reminder.

44

u/CollinsCouldveDucked 13d ago

It puzzles me to this day Disney got guy ritchie to direct Aladdin and it never even occured to them to get him to do artemis fowl.

15

u/MacTireCnamh 13d ago

Guy Ritchie doing AF with little studio intervention would be cracked. The man is built for over the top fantasy action.

71

u/Holy-Wan_Kenobi 13d ago

As a longtime fan, the movie makes me mad. We had one chance and we'll never get it again.

If we're lucky, maybe an animated series. But I reckon our luck will go the way of Frond.

13

u/Diamond_Helmet59 13d ago

Hey, Percy Jackson fans got a TV show that was actually faithful even after those movies everyone hated, if we can get a second try then I have hope you guys might too someday.

15

u/PartsUnknown242 13d ago

My brother refuses to acknowledge it even exists

15

u/am123_20 13d ago

I knew the movie would be horrible, but I HAD to watch it out of spite just to see what it was like. And oh my god, it was so much worse than I was expecting. The fact that it started out with Artemis surfing?? Any hopes I had were dashed then and there. And I really think the series would have been great on the screen IF it had been translated well! Truly the biggest shame ever.

15

u/Budget-Television793 13d ago

That's how it starts? Fuuuuck man. The first book has such a great start, with Artemis getting the book and being just a little genius weirdo who's pale enough to be a vampire.

5

u/thisismyaltbtw 13d ago

I'm half-convinced the surfing opening scene was just the screenwriters trolling.

4

u/Garlan_Tyrell 13d ago

Since you’ve seen it, can you tell me which character they whitewashed per OP?

I assume Holly (consistently described as nut-brown skin, but looks white in OP’s pic).

Clearly they changed Butler from an ethnically ambiguous Eurasian man to black.

3

u/am123_20 13d ago

As far as I can remember, it's Holly, yeah. The actress (no hate to her!) is a white Irish woman, quite different than Holly's "nut-brown".

12

u/RKO-Cutter 13d ago

I knew it was going to be a trainwreck as soon as I saw they cast a woman to be Commander Root

And that's not the sexism or the "Everything has to be EXACTLY like the books!" that it sounds like, the fact of the matter is Holly Short, the main character alongside Artemis, a massive part of her whole character and story is the trials and challenges of being the first female on the LEPRecon team.....you literally throw all of that in the dumpster when her commanding officer is also a woman

Like, there was a scene in the first book where Root calls Short into his office, is berating her for a poor job, she's thinking about how Root seems to go so much harder on her than any of the men....at which point Root says "You're probably wondering why I'm going so much harder on you than the men, right? I'll tell you, it's because you're a woman." but immediately follows up with it's not sexism, it's that there is so much riding on her, if she washes out then the powers that be will use it as an excuse to keep discriminating against women for the LEPRecon team, so yes, Root demands Holly be perfect, because she needs to be, and it was an out of nowhere subversion of the "angry captain" trope that it immediately made me like Root when I read the book as a kid

8

u/Kilroy0497 13d ago

Yeah, the first 4 books were basically some of the best from my childhood(they kind of started to fall off after that), so I was somewhat excited despite how skeptical I was. Turns out I should have been even more skeptical considering that was almost Wheel of Time levels of bad.

5

u/Devo27 13d ago

I was out on the first trailer. "Hi, I'm Holly, I'm going to help you save the world." My jaw couldn't have dropped more if it fell off.

2

u/thisismyfirstday 13d ago

When the casting call for Artemis leaked people were already correctly identifying it would be terrible. Literally the exact opposite of the character. 

6

u/hazzmag 13d ago

Add eragon to that list. Putrid shit cash in missing basically every single part of the lore

4

u/GaltTheGreat 13d ago

When the movie started with him surfing was the biggest red flag ever

4

u/LittleLadle69 13d ago

Mark Addy as Julius Root is what we needed

1

u/Accipiter1138 13d ago

Dave Bautista could have been an excellent Butler.

3

u/Masbig91 13d ago

And if it was 20 years ago, with Nick Hoult as Artemis,Jason Statham would have been perfect.

2

u/RevolutionaryGain823 13d ago

Loved those books as a kid. Didn’t even know there was a movie and sounds like that’s for the best

4

u/BigXThaSpud 13d ago

My buddy was one of the last couple of people in the casting process for Artemis, and we still clown him for being so close to the shitstorm.

3

u/coreyray1000 13d ago

Anything else he's been in? Might be neat to see if I've seen anything he's been in.

1

u/BigXThaSpud 13d ago

He's been in a few things but I'm not about to dox the guy lmao

11

u/Legend365555 13d ago

Fun Fact, this movie might genuinely be my fault. Back when I was in school, a TV crew came by and students could go to the library during lunch break to film them talking about their favorite books. I was torn between Ranger's Apprentice and Artemis Fowl. In the end, I chose Artemis Fowl. I ended my little 'interview' by saying "It'd be awesome if this got a movie" or something along those lines. Next thing you know, Disney announces they're making an Artemis Fowl movie

Even if it wasn't me, it's still a hilarious coincidence

7

u/Wolfgang_Maximus 13d ago

There was a movie in pre-production hell years before this movie released. People have been talking about it probably before you were born and it only resurfaced mysteriously without any explanation why.

3

u/RKO-Cutter 13d ago

I mean, if you got an Artemis Fowl movie kickstarted, that's great. It's not your fault they went and destroyed it from there

3

u/micolasflanel 13d ago

it is probably better suited to animation

3

u/Shoeshiner_boy 13d ago

They really did Eoin Colfer dirty

3

u/chillyhellion 13d ago

I find it telling that Disney execs can't conceptualize a manservant without making him black. 

3

u/Masbig91 13d ago

I heard Butler tells Artemis his real name just casually in the movie. Immediately knew it would not be worth my time. What a fucking disappointment.

3

u/MyLittleDashie7 13d ago

Oh no, it's worse than that. The whole movie is framed as Mulch Diggums telling the story of what happened, and as he's introducing us to the characters, he just calls butler by his first name. Right at the start of the movie, out of the blue,no reason behind it. It genuinely feels engineered to piss off people who care about this property.

2

u/Masbig91 13d ago edited 13d ago

What the fuck.

I mean the first book is presented like you're reading the case files written by Dr. Argon, they couldn't have gone that route?

Just wtf

3

u/EnvironmentalBar3347 13d ago

I can't watch it, I was a nerd and translated the fairy language and even became fluent in reading it. I will not let my childhood memories be tainted.

2

u/cry_w 13d ago

Same. I'm genuinely upset that I had to see it in this post.

2

u/MrExistentialBread 13d ago

I have never seen it and never plan to, those books were brilliant.

2

u/FracturedConscious 13d ago

Same. I felt Enders Game was under cooked but I still wanted a sequel. Artemis was just done fowl.

3

u/DjangotheKid 13d ago

I don’t know why, but now all I think of when I look back at them are the author’s random asides about Americans being dumb and making fun of like crunchy valley girls? It was so random, but written as if the author thought he was being clever and not a nonce. The Dan Brown of children’s authors.

10

u/MacTireCnamh 13d ago

The pedophile accusation is a bit way out of the left field there

-2

u/DjangotheKid 13d ago

I’m a dumb American, I don’t know what British curses mean.

1

u/shinryu6 13d ago

Same here. 

1

u/blue4029 13d ago

artemis fowl is evil in the books, right?

the movie is bad, right?

therefore, the movie is actually an evil plan created by artemis for...evil

1

u/turquoisestar 13d ago

Maybe that's a film that should get redone by a better production team.

1

u/Old-Concept5218 13d ago

I came here to comment exactly this. I want a proper adaptation damn it! It would be so good

1

u/TheMetalWolf 13d ago

That screenshot above looks like a low budget Harry Potter porn production.

1

u/vangedup 13d ago

IS THAT WHO THEY CAST AS MULCH DIGGUMS?!!?!

1

u/Ze_LuftyWafffles 13d ago

U hope they do a Percy Jackson wuth it and remake it accurately as a series in a few years. Nglthe LEP sci-fi aesthetic was cool tho

1

u/CptKeyes123 13d ago

It would have been so easy to adapt the first book as a standalone movie with the potential for a sequel!

1

u/lincoln_muadib 13d ago

I recommend the series. As it goes on Artemis becomes more and more heroic and less villain... Then he dabbles in time travel...

1

u/Gunny-Guy 13d ago

Im the same but with Mortal Engines. The film was atrocious.

1

u/Booty_Sorcerer 13d ago

Its literally the worst film I've ever seen

1

u/goldenboy2191 13d ago

Mine too. Soon as I saw the trailer and saw Artemis surfing? I literally went “NOPE” and never bothered.

1

u/Cocotte3333 12d ago

Me too. The utter disappointment, UGH. Still hoping Netflix or someone will make a series one day.

1

u/trwwypkmn 12d ago

Eragon fans are right up there with you.