The New Yorker's Tyler Foggatt reviewed the new Resident Evil film this week and landed on a precise and uncomfortable verdict: Zach Cregger made a great video game movie in part by leaving out everything that makes a Zach Cregger movie great. The adaptation works by subtraction. The source material's rules become the director's constraints. What emerges is competent, enjoyable, and hollow. Separately, The Atlantic flagged an overlooked DOJ document arguing that copyright suits against AI companies should be widely dismissed, on the grounds that training on existing work is transformative. Both cases are making the same argument: that consuming an original to produce something derivative should be protected. The question is who gets to make that claim and who absorbs the cost.
Adaptation as Extraction
Video game adaptations have been having a moment. The conventional wisdom is that fidelity to source material is now a virtue after decades of embarrassing departures. What Foggatt's review reveals is that fidelity is its own kind of erasure: you preserve the game's logic and lose the filmmaker's. The DOJ document extends this logic further. AI training on copyrighted work is framed as transformative use, which in copyright law means the output is sufficiently different from the input that the original creator has no claim. The creator's 'soul,' to use Foggatt's word, is extracted, transformed, and then legally unavailable to them.
The America's Hypocritical IP Moment
The Atlantic's headline, 'America's Hypocritical Take on Intellectual Property,' is doing a lot of work. The US has historically weaponized IP law internationally to protect American cultural exports. A domestic carve-out for AI training would represent a structural reversal: IP protection for the distributor, not the creator. The Armory Show is selling work this week. Christie's just launched a pop culture department. The market for original human creative work is expanding at exactly the moment the legal infrastructure that underpins its value is being quietly hollowed out from underneath it. The game adaptation metaphor is almost too clean: keep the recognizable shape, remove the thing that made it worth adapting.