Why Red Rising Is So Difficult to Adapt—and How It Could Work
Some novels resist adaptation despite appearing almost designed for the screen. Pierce Brown’s Red Rising has political intrigue, violent competition, Roman spectacle, secret identities and a conflict that expands from the mines of Mars into war across the Solar System.
The difficulty lies beneath the spectacle. The Society is not merely divided into social classes identified by colour. It has engineered hierarchy into the human body. Golds must not simply dress better or occupy higher offices; they must appear built to rule. Reds should seem shaped by labour, and Obsidians should alter the atmosphere of a room before they have done anything at all.
Most difficult of all, Darrow must cross that physical boundary while remaining recognisably the same person. His transformation is not a disguise placed over an unchanged body. The body itself becomes the instrument through which he enters, understands and begins to inhabit the ruling class.
The production problem is no longer entirely hypothetical. In March 2026, Pierce Brown said that the long-running television project was no longer moving forward, while suggesting that a separate live-action effort might eventually be announced. Whatever form a future adaptation takes, it will face the same question: how can the screen make biological hierarchy visible without allowing the machinery used to create the illusion to overwhelm the story?
The Hierarchy Has a Body
In Red Rising, the Color system is biological as well as political. Golds have been engineered for strength, height, speed and command. Reds are smaller and adapted to punishing labour. Obsidians possess the size and force of a population designed to serve as both weapon and warning.
These differences are not decorative world-building. They form part of the Society’s argument for itself. Each Color is said to occupy its proper place because different bodies have been made for different purposes. Political inequality is presented as natural order after the ruling class has manufactured the nature required to justify it.
A screen adaptation therefore cannot reduce the Colors to ordinary actors distinguished mainly by hair, costumes and contact lenses. If the bodies appear interchangeable, the Society’s central fiction becomes weaker. Gold authority should seem embodied before it is explained; the viewer should feel that the room has been arranged around one kind of person and against another.
This does not require every actor to match a measurement taken from the novels. Film communicates dominance through posture, movement, blocking, camera height, sound, costume and architecture as well as literal scale. The requirement is not biological bookkeeping. It is a persistent asymmetry that makes hierarchy visible before dialogue names it.
Darrow Is the Adaptation Problem in One Body
The most important body would not be the largest. It would be Darrow’s. The Carving reconstructs his bones, muscles, eyes, nervous system and proportions until a Red can pass among Golds. Treating that process as an elaborate makeover would miss the story’s most important visual idea.
Using two actors could make the physical difference convincing but weaken emotional continuity between the boy from Lykos and the student entering the Institute. Using one actor would preserve that continuity while risking a transformation too modest to explain why Darrow can suddenly survive Gold society. Continuous digital alteration might bridge the difference, but it would turn the protagonist into a visual-effects problem in nearly every scene.
The adaptation has to persuade us of two apparently contradictory things: this is unquestionably the same person, and this is no longer the body in which that person began. The contradiction is the point. As the Journal’s review of Red Rising argues, the bodily transformation is also ideological. Darrow does not merely learn to perform Gold behaviour; Gold abilities, assumptions and ambitions become available to him from inside the body built to sustain them.
That body allows him to challenge the Society, but it also makes the Society intelligible and occasionally seductive. The film or series would need to preserve both the continuity of the person and the destabilising effect of the new physical life. Darrow must never look as though he has simply put on the correct uniform.
Live Action Would Pay for Scale in Every Scene
A prestige live-action series remains the obvious commercial route. It offers recognisable performers, physical environments and the emotional immediacy of photographed faces. It is also the medium in which the Color hierarchy becomes a recurring production expense rather than a one-time effect.
A production could combine casting, footwear, costume, body doubles, forced perspective, altered sets and digital resizing. None of those techniques is unusual by itself. The difficulty is that Red Rising would need them in dining rooms, classrooms, corridors, battlefields, spacecraft and intimate conversations. Several engineered human categories would share frames while fighting, touching one another and interacting with the same objects.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy demonstrates both the possibilities and the burden. The films used scale doubles, differently sized sets, forced perspective, bluescreen compositing and motion-control photography. Some moving-camera shots required scaled props to move in synchronisation with the lens so that performers of ordinary size could occupy apparently unequal spaces.
That toolkit proves that convincing scale can survive across a large production. It also shows how thoroughly the shared space must be designed around the illusion. Middle-earth primarily maintained a limited set of recurring relationships among Hobbits, humans, elves, wizards and Dwarves. Red Rising would need a more graduated hierarchy whose proportions do not collapse into one stable ratio.
More importantly, the effect has to communicate politics rather than species difference alone. A viewer must not merely register that a Gold is larger than a Red. The image must suggest that an entire civilisation has been built to make the larger body look entitled to command. The visual effect would have to carry ideology in every ordinary encounter, not only in spectacular reveals.
Digital Bodies Solve Anatomy, Not Presence
Performance capture offers another route. Actors could perform together while artists translate their movement and expression into bodies with consistent differences in height, musculature, skin and proportion. Golds and Obsidians could be designed without forcing every shot to conceal the limitations of the cast’s real anatomy.
That freedom comes with its own costs. Performance capture is not a mechanical transfer from actor to finished avatar. It is a collaboration among performers, directors, animators, visual-effects artists and technical systems, with the captured work interpreted and refined throughout production. A large cast of persistent digital bodies across intimate drama and complex action would require a pipeline closer to effects-heavy blockbuster filmmaking than ordinary television.
The greater artistic risk is distance. Red Rising is brutal, tactile and frequently intimate. The viewer must believe that these bodies can tire, bleed, desire and terrify, not merely that their proportions have been rendered accurately. If the bodies appear frictionless or conspicuously manufactured, the violence may lose the physical weight that makes the Society’s cruelty credible.
Digital work would therefore be most convincing as part of a hybrid method rather than a universal replacement. It could reinforce scale in wide compositions, difficult contact and extreme Color differences while leaving performers physically present wherever faces and bodies need to share an immediate human space.
Animation Can Make Hierarchy a Grammar
Animation does not eliminate the adaptation problem, but it changes its nature. Live action begins with human bodies and repeatedly alters their relationships. Animation begins with design, allowing anatomy, architecture and movement to express the Color system from the first frame.
Golds could move with an economy that makes ordinary humans appear hurried. Obsidians could possess a heaviness that changes framing, timing and sound. Reds could look compressed not only by their stature but by industrial spaces built with no interest in their comfort. Scale would no longer be an effect applied to selected scenes; it would become part of the visual grammar.
Contemporary animation has shown that stylisation can preserve emotional nuance, make size itself frightening and stage cinematic action without the logistical limits of photographed bodies. It would also give Darrow’s transformation a medium in which the same voice, face and movement could persist while the visible anatomy changes radically.
The compromises remain substantial. High-end adult animation is expensive and slow, and some audiences still treat it as narrower than prestige live action. A style heightened enough to express the Society’s bodies could also make its brutality feel ornamental if beauty overtakes texture and pain.
Animation is therefore not the easy answer. Its advantage is that the production can decide openly what bodily difference means instead of spending every episode disguising how the illusion was constructed.
What the Adaptation Must Preserve
The challenge is interpretive before it is technical. An adaptation does not need to reproduce every measurement, but it must preserve the relationships those measurements create.
Power has to be visible before it is explained. The body has to remain political rather than becoming ordinary genre spectacle. Violence must retain the weight of a world where people are engineered, disciplined, reconstructed and used. Above all, Darrow’s identity must remain unstable.
His journey is not simple upward mobility. It is impersonation, bodily replacement and psychological fracture. As the Journal’s essay on how an assumed identity can begin to rewrite the person performing it argues, a successful role does not remain external once it changes habits, relationships and the range of imaginable choices.
Darrow must appear capable of becoming Gold without allowing the audience—or himself—to forget that he was made into one. If that tension survives, the production can compromise on exact scale. If it disappears, faithful costumes and expensive effects will preserve the books’ surface while losing their central metaphor.
A future live-action project would probably need a hybrid approach: casting, blocking and set design for most scenes; restrained digital augmentation where hierarchy matters most; doubles or digital bodies for extreme differences and combat; and a specialised mixture of performance, prosthetics and visual effects for Darrow before and after the Carving.
The Screen Has to Decide
Books possess one advantage that film never will: they can be precise without becoming fully concrete. A novel can say that a Gold towers over a Red and allow each reader to imagine the exact relationship. It can enlarge an Obsidian towards the mythic without deciding how the body fits through a doorway. It can preserve Darrow’s inner continuity while describing a body destroyed and rebuilt around him.
The screen must choose the performer, dimensions, movement, texture and shared physical space. Every solution makes one interpretation visible while closing off others. That is why Red Rising is difficult to adapt—not because the technology is unavailable, and not because the novels require literal fidelity.
It is difficult because their most important metaphor has a body. A successful adaptation will not be the one that reproduces every physical specification. It will be the one that makes the viewer understand what those bodies were built to mean.
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