No they can’t because they need to be seen as the “official adaptation”. Something similar doesn’t get the same PR/marketing blitz appeal.

I work in the industry and the above poster is mostly right. Executives buy IP for the sake of association marketing “Watch the adaptation of the best seller series”.

BUT the industry suffers from a dearth of competence. If you work in the visual arts or make creative work in some way you would be familiar with the process of ‘uglification’ where a client with no creative taste gets to destroy the work of a brilliant creative through an avalanche of notes and changes. The creative might want to protect their work but depending on your ability to protect it, they might not.

‘Uglification’ happens in the film/TV industry all the time. People with little knowledge of film history call the shots and they have terrible taste. The result is they hire bad writers, bad directors and produce poor output. And that uglification pipeline is how adaptations get destroyed.

In example:

Executive who doesn’t know anything about “Wheel of Time” owns rights. He hires a writer who doesn’t know anything either. Writer reads the book, doesn’t like it, decides to use it as a platform to write whatever he wants plus he also needs the money. He gives it “a modern spin”, executive likes it. Executive then hires hot advertising director who’s no good but is hot in LA. Director hates the books, thinks it’s dumb but sees it as his big opportunity to break through into narrative film. Everyone involved now doesn’t care about the original books at all, and thus they will do whatever they fancy.

It goes on and on and what you get at the end is mush. Unless someone at the helm - director, writer or executive - is absolutely resolute that he wants a good adaptation, nothing accurate will come out of it.