Industry · film
Garfield Alone Explains a Fifth of the Times an Adaptation's Source Read More
In 14 of 51 comic-to-screen adaptations we measured, the original comic reads more on English Wikipedia than the film or show made from it. Three of those 14 are different Garfield adaptations — all losing to the same original.
The table this is written from: /what-moves-english-reading
Our earlier count of 51 comic-to-screen adaptation pairs found that Korean webtoon adaptations read a median 14 times more than their source comic, and non-Korean adaptations read 3.7 times more. That piece was about the 37 pairs where the adaptation won. This one is about the 14 where it didn’t — and one franchise accounts for three of them.
The 14 times the source won
| Adaptation | Source | Source read more by |
|---|---|---|
| Garfield’s Fun Fest | Garfield | 18.6× |
| Liar Game | Liar Game (manga) | 11.8× |
| Garfield’s Pet Force | Garfield | 11.6× |
| Garfield Gets Real | Garfield | 6.8× |
| Cantabile Tomorrow | Nodame Cantabile | 5.0× |
| To the Beautiful You | Hana-Kimi | 3.8× |
| Late Night Restaurant | Shin’ya Shokudō | 2.7× |
| Blade of the Immortal | Blade of the Immortal | 2.1× |
| You’re My Pet | Tramps Like Us | 2.1× |
| City Hunter | City Hunter | 1.9× |
| Yumi’s Cells: The Movie | Yumi’s Cells (webtoon) | 1.6× |
| Parasyte: The Grey | Parasyte | 1.6× |
| Antique | Antique Bakery | 1.3× |
| Sweet Combat | Girls of the Wild’s | 1.1× |
Three of the 14 rows are Garfield. All three are lower-profile spin-off specials (Gets Real, Pet Force, Fun Fest), and all three lose to the long-running original comic strip by wide margins — 6.8x, 11.6x and 18.6x.
What this adds to the earlier finding
The earlier piece’s medians (14x for Korean pairs, 3.7x for others) describe the typical case, not every case. Fourteen of 51 pairs — including 2 of the 18 Korean-original pairs, Sweet Combat and Yumi’s Cells: The Movie — went the other way. A single long-running, widely recognized source franchise like Garfield can supply a disproportionate share of those exceptions, because a newer or lower-profile adaptation of a famous original has more room to read below its source than a newer adaptation of a lesser-known one does.
More single-cause and multi-day spikes are tracked on our what-moves-english-reading hub.
These are statistics, not you. This is not investment advice.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Wikidata — P144 (based on), matched to comics via P31/P279* under Q1004 (comic), joined to their film or TV adaptations. · https://www.wikidata.org/
- Wikimedia Foundation — Pageviews API — 30-day English Wikipedia pageviews, 8 August-6 September 2026, human traffic only, for each adaptation and its source comic. · https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
What we checked
- 51 adaptation-source pairs measured with both sides having recorded reading. In 37, the adaptation read more (median 14.05x for Korean-original pairs, 3.7x for others, per our earlier piece). In 14, the source comic read more than its adaptation.
- Of those 14 source-wins, 3 are Garfield: Garfield Gets Real (source read 6.8x more), Garfield's Pet Force (11.6x more), and Garfield's Fun Fest (18.6x more) — three separate, lower-profile adaptations all losing to the same long-running original.
- The other 11 source-wins include City Hunter (1.9x), Liar Game (11.8x), and two Korean-original pairs: Sweet Combat vs. Girls of the Wild's (1.1x) and Yumi's Cells: The Movie vs. Yumi's Cells (1.6x).
- Two of the 14 source-wins are Korean-original pairs — meaning even in the direction where Korean webtoons usually lose to their own adaptations by a wide median margin, 2 of 18 Korean-original pairs still went the other way.
What we left out, and why
- Any claim about adaptation quality. Reading counts do not measure how good an adaptation is, only how many people looked up its Wikipedia page.
- A ranking of comic franchises. This set was built from a Wikidata SPARQL query for adaptations with both sides measurable — it is not a survey of all comic-to-screen adaptations.
- Why Garfield's spin-off specials specifically underperform their source. We can see the reading gap, not the reason for it.
The data behind this
Written from the same data
If you work in this business
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