Why Douglas Adams & Terry Pratchett don't work on the big screen

When done well they can absolutely work. The 1981 TV adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a delight. The third of the TV adaptations of Pratchett - Going Postal - finally more or less nailed if after a shaky start (so, of course, the series of adaptations was axed just when it started to work. Ten years have passed but I still hope to one day see further Discworld adaptations.

I certainly agree that this kind of fiction is hard to get right - but as well as great satirists, Adams and Pratchett were novelists who created intricate and involving plots with rich characterisations. It can be screwed up royally, but it can also succeed when done right.

Terry Pratchett's works have low stakes? I seem to recall several where the world is ending. The ones where the Disc itself isn't in peril usually concern themselves with either the fates of kingdoms or at the very least the possible undoing of the threads of Time Itself.

Besides which: stakes aren't just about the macrocosmic events unfolding across the universe, they're also just about how important something is for one character. Annie Hall is about a relationship, but I still care deeply about those two people over the course of the movie. The stakes are still high (real) for them because the relationship is their world.

The stakes are real for Arthur Dent because his world has been destroyed, he's in bodily peril, and he needs to find himself in a universe that is so massive it's like searching for a needle in a haystack which might be in any pocket dimension across billions of worlds.

It's hard to make anything work on screen, let alone trying to get inside the head of a different person (geniuses, no less) and reinvent their work for a new medium.

Adam's prose was responsible for at least half the humor. Film cannot capture that. I loved all of his books (and the one Pratchett book I have read) but could not really get into this show. It was OK.