A lot of very old stories continue to be adapted into films. Many adaptations make changes that seem fairly arbitrary, but are there films where changes were made to correct errors in the original story now that new information is available that might not have been known when the novel was written? I expect the most likely targets of possible corrections would be scientific, historical, or biographical in nature.
If so, what stories/movies?
Hollywood cares about accuracy?
in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the book and film version were developed concurrently but the book was published after the film was released. One change between the book and the film was that the book had the destination as Saturn, whereas the movie used Jupiter. The change wasn’t due to a technical inaccuracy in the book, but because the movie makers couldn’t create a convincing special effects model of Saturn’s rings. So I think this example fits the OP, because the change was done to make the movie look more scientifically accurate.
1.) Isaac Asimov insisted upon making changes to Fantastic Voyage when he wrote the novelization. Changes included descriptions of miniturized fluids NOT behaving like regular waves and ripples, and having the micronaurs dragging thesubmarine out with them. Apparently Asimov feared it would expand inside the Scientists’ head, even after being eaten by Leukocytes, and tear him apart.
2.) The movie Goldfinger famously changed the plot. In the book, Auric Goldfinger was a Soviet spy paymaster who really DID want to rob Fort Knox. The movie changed him to a private enthusiast who wanted to detonate a “dirty” bomb at Fort Knox and both explode and irradiate the US Gold supply, since the logistics (as Bond points out in the film) are ridiculoyus – at most, Goldfinger would only be able to abscond with a fraction of the gold in the vaults.
it’s always bothered me, by the way, that he didm’t at least TRY. One or two bars of gold from Fort Knox would be the Ultimate Souvenir, after the rest had been at ground zero. It’s completely out of character that Goldfinger, surrounded by all that tantalizing lucre, didn’t help himself to a sample.
I have seen a claim that some changes were made to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos before release of a DVD series some years later, to reflect newer information than he had available. I watched those DVDs, and I don’t recall new footage, but they might have cut out claims or speculations he made that turned out wrong.
They went back and improved a lot of the special effects for the DVD release, IIRC, but I don’t know if they changed any of the material.
Well, now that we know Han was a good guy, they re-shot the scene so Greedo shot first.
Possibly. But I did see a claim that the there were corrections for new scientific knowledge, but I heard no additional narrative. I didn’t consider simply changing the graphics as the way it would be done, but maybe. I thought it likely that they eliminated any of the narrative that turned out to be wrong, but perhaps I am wrong about how it was done.
Ok, according to Wiki, the series has been updated twice, once ten years after the original production, and Sagan personally participated in the update, and apparently whole new episodes were added.
Then in 2005, The Science Channel rebroadcast it “… with updated computer graphics, film footage, digital sound and updated scientific knowledge that had occurred in the past 25 years.” Still, with all that, they reduced the length of the programs by 25% to accommodate commercials.
They were probably able to shave some time off by not having to include scenes which discussed the planet Pluto.
Or maybe they just cut the long psychedelia shots accompanied by whiny music from the hearts of space…