It finally clicked for me. Hollywood gets ahold of a popular franchise like The Witcher and seemingly uses it as a medium to educate rather than entertain. They try to flip the script and push a message, often straying far from the source material.
Anime, on the other hand, usually has the manga releasing weekly or monthly. The fanbase is essentially “voting with their wallet” on which series they want to see adapted. When a studio picks it up, they just adapt it pretty faithfully. You get exactly what you paid for—the story you already love, just animated. It’s refreshing to watch a medium where the priority is giving the people what they actually want.
‘Voting with your wallet’ is an odd way of putting it though.
I’m no expert on manga publishing by any means, but you still have to get noticed by the industry before getting published. The difference I suspect has more to do with artists being able to present an individual, cohesive vision, and ‘trialling’ manga being relatively cheap and low-risk for the publisher when it’s just a way to pad out a magazine which will sell regardless. Meaning there’s more original, creative ideas presented to the audience, but it’s not really a consumer issue until it consequently reaches a certain level of popularity.
You’re probably right on the faithful adaptation though, the manga basically gives the producers a storyboard to work off of. Hollywood suffers from the exact opposite issue to being ideological I think, they’re often produced by committee without a cohesive vision. A show’s good because of a clear, purposeful narrative, which hinges on the author’s messaging.