Back in the day, if you were looking to make an adaptation of a literary work, or to remake a film the motivation for doing so would be love and respect for the source material. In some instances it could be considered a mere act of milking the cash-cow of a popular piece of culture, but even then the only agenda driving it was money and the success of the adaptation was hit or miss depending on the business sense of those involved in the production.
These days it seems something different is going on. Let's take the Amazon/Tolkien fiasco as an example. LOTR is a cash-cow, that's for sure. The movies were huge and the books are beloved in pop-culture. It seems to me however that the current adaptation is neither about making money, nor about love of the source material. Who can say they love a piece of literature if they think it needs to be corrected for sexism, racism, transphobia, and homophobia? You wouldn't make an movie out of love for a piece of work if you thought that it was basically evil. I don't think you can say it's a mere act of milking LOTR for money either. Whilst such motivations can certainly result in a mishandling (as can adaptations based off a love for a work) the market has shown time and time again of late that taking a beloved piece of pop-culture and injecting diversity into it in order to "correct" it results in awful ratings and a flop.
The entire enterprise is political. LOTR was chosen because people love it. The idealogues want to make a point that those who love the work are racist, homophobic, sexist, Nazis. When they "correct" the source material and the people who love the source material react negatively, they can point the finger and say "what so you have a problem with powerful female characters, sodomy, and diversity?"
That is the entire point, it's all about feeding into this agenda. If you wanted to make a boat load of money off Tolkien all you'd need to do is make a faithful adaptation. It's not about that. In my mind it can't be. It's simply about drawing a circle around a piece of culture that people like and going "people who like this are racist!" And it is entirely about these notions that everyone in society is evil, and needs correction by default.
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