For me it’s definitely the Dark Tower, but the Golden Compas was also a huge letdown.
- Dune (the old one, not the new one)
- Dark Tower
- Eragon
- Ender’s Game
- The Witcher (a real shame, it could have been such a good IP for Netflix)
Most adaptations suck, these are just some from the top of my head.
What about the middle Dune adaptation?
The mini series is fantastic. It’s a lot closer to the book and handles the pacing extremely well.
I like at least the first season of Witcher, though it could’ve been more linear
The old Dune was just lol what the fuck
What’s so bad about enders game. I don’t remember that being a bad adaptation, but it’s been a while.
Honestly, I fucking hate the new Dune. The old Dune at least has charm for how goofy it can get. The characters and editing choices I have huge problems with. It’s a very pretty movie and most scenes made it in but the characters just aren’t there. Also the world isn’t established properly. They don’t even mention the Landsraad until the tailend of the movie but they’re important to know about because they are why the Emperor takes the strategy he does.
Oh God, I remember how disappointed I was when seeing the Eragon movie. After having read the trilogy I was having such high hopes, it could’ve been a LOTR alike trilogy, but instead we got this half baked… Stuff. At least the actors gave their best.
Kind of in the same line with the golden compass I guess?
I really enjoyed the Eragon books as a kid but they aren’t great themselves. It’s a mediocre book series adapted to a bad film.
Oh yeah for sure, they were great to child me, I haven’t read them in years.
I just thought of another example to the theme: I also really enjoyed the vampires assistant thirteenology or so, but the movie was horrendous!
Honestly, it’d be easier to say which books have GOOD adaptations, since the norm is poor adaptations and it’s hard to choose which one is the worst since so many suck in different ways.
The Princess Bride is the best movie adaptation I can think of off the top of my head. I fact, I’d argue that it was better than the book.
Have you seen His Dark Materials on HBO? From what my wife tells me it’s a lot closer to the books than the movie.
I haven’t, but I will
Haven’t read it but I hear Eragon was absolutely shat on. Without reading it, the movie was pretty ehh for me, great acting but weird plot
The movie isn’t anywhere near the same as the book.
And it shouldn’t be thought of as the same story - it’s not an adaptation but an interpretation of the first book.
Though in doing that it ruins a few key points needed to link the sequels, which never received movie sequels because the movie was just that bad.
The only thing I can complement is some of the actor choices. Particularly the choice for Brom Murtagh, and galbatorix (though the mad king doesn’t appear in the books till the last book at the final showdown)
Not seeing Ready Player One listed here. There were some choices made in that movie that might seem fine to someone who hasn’t read the book, but the huge number of absolutely unnecessary discrepancies was just gross.
Wwz. Still salty. It would have been spectacular if done along the same line as Supervolcano - the after fact interviews intercut with events as they happened was practically made to order for it - instead we get another shitty paint by numbers grab.
The best rendition of wwz is the full-cast audiobook
Mandatory The Witcher mention. They simply started to make shit up because they didn’t like nor repect the books.
Damn shame, a faithful adaptation would’ve been amazing. Hope we get one one day
Starship Troopers. The book is great, but the movie is like if someone wrote a short summary of the cliffs notes of the book. I guess they both had bugs.
Funny you say that- that isn’t far from how it was made. Someone wrote a spec script about a human war with space bugs, independent of starship troopers. When one of the production people read the script they brought up the point that there was a book that they remembered that was kind of like it. When they checked, no one had the film rights to it so they bought it for cheap. They then did a quick rewrite to slap in the character names and basic/cheap/easy things from the book to make more of an appeal to the book fans. Then when the director came on board he was a fan if the book but also wanted to do his own thing. So you now had at least 3 different directions the story was going and it was simply held together by the loose premise of starship troopers.
Given the background of those involved, it’s a downright savage pastiche.
World War Z is barely at all like the book, and does a lot of really fucking stupid shit instead of having some of the really fucking cool shit from the book.
Like instead of a blind martial arts master surviving the zombies, we get to see one of the main characters slip on a ramp and break his neck. 😬
I still hate how Max Brooks said “Now, it’s a little unlike my book, but still good in it’s own right!” Because it wasn’t.
I honestly forgot that there was ever a movie made about the book because that movie just took the name and wasn’t about to book. Fantastic book. Let’s forget about the movie.
I still hate how Max Brooks said “Now, it’s a little unlike my book, but still good in it’s own right!” Because it wasn’t.
Yeah. It really bugs me when people are like “it’s still a good zombie movie.”
It is a bad movie. Regardless of genre.
Battlefield Earth was my favorite book as a young teenager. Ignoring everything else about the author (which I didn’t know at the time), I thought the book was brilliant (especially the first half). It touched my imagination in a way no other book had before, and I must have read it about a dozen times.
I seem to recall the book cover saying that a major motion picture was coming out soon, but I guess time is relative. For me it was about eighteen years (which was more than half my life at the time) before the movie actually came out, and that seemed like an eternity.
I wish I could say it was worth the wait. The movie was horrible – it had bad acting, a bad script, and couldn’t carry the book in only two hours.
It currently has a 3% tomatometer score at Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.5/10 at IMDB. The movie also won Worst Picture of the Decade at the 2010 Razzie Awards.
Going to have to second The Dark Tower. To say it was a letdown is nowhere near enough.
The Witcher show starts off pretty well but quickly gets worse and worse. That’s probably my number two.
I also thought The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie was pretty disappointing, though not the worst of the worst.
I could probably think of a lot more if I browsed my book collection. Rare is the adaptation that meets the quality of the book. That would be a much shorter list. If we were looking at that question, the first movie that comes to mind is The Amityville Horror because that book had some of the worst writing that I have ever subjected myself to.
The Dark Tower being such a train wreck was a real shame too, because I thought Idris Elba was an inspired, unexpected choice for Roland.
I don’t know how you could do HGTTG well, because the nonsense narration is pretty much the whole point, and I kind of liked what it was, but it was definitely a letdown still. Zaphod’s heads bothered the absolute shit out of me.
I’d say Foundation, but the show has been so far away from the books since literally episode 1 that the name might as well be a coincidence.
I agree but a direct adaptation of the books would not make a good TV show.
The books are a series of vignettes spaced decades apart with no continuing characters and each is a separate short story. While they work in the written form, they would not on the screen.
It could be done as a series of vignettes, for example, as 6 episode series, with each series centred around each crisis. That would give you 4-5 hours - or 2.5 Mrs Doubtfires - to do what Asimov does in around 60 pages (depending on crisis).
I don’t understand the argument that this is impossible to do, pretty much every film you will have ever seen will have had a shorter runtime than 5 hours, and handled all aspects of character introduction, motivation, conflict, growth, and resolution, within than time too.
I am not saying it has to be identical or a word for word adaptation - I have no issues what so ever with gender swapping Hardin - but as another poster points out, having Seldon live on (other than as recordings getting increasingly divorced from reality) directly rejects the core premise of the book, which is a refutation of the great man hypothesis.
I don’t have Apple TV, and I was irritated that I’d be missing Foundation. The more I hear about it, though, the less irritated I am.
The first two episodes are the most gorgeous sci-fi tv production I’ve ever seen. Beyond that it’s a bit shakier but it’s definitely watchable.
It feels more like an addition than an adaptation (it isn’t, but it’s the only perspective in which the show can be good). I’m a big fan of the books, and I’m also enjoying the show so far.
The show is so well done I don’t even mind that it’s not like the books
Even by itself, the show makes no sense.
They very much lampshade that with the whole outliers thing. Events spin off in wildly different directions.
If you want a direct translation of the books, no dice, but damn the shit they’ve pulled out of whole cloth with the Cleons is amazeballs.
The Cleons is literally the only reason I continue to watch the show.
Pretty much every movie based on a Crichton novel except the first Jurassic Park and the original 1971 adaptation of The Andromeda Strain. Every other one has been awful (including The Lost World which is so far from the book it shouldn’t even get to be called “based on”).
I’ve never watched Disclosure nor finished the book, but it seems like one of the few they should have been able to get right.
I enjoyed Sphere…
The novel was great. The movie…eh, not so much (IMO, anyway). Not even the combined powers of Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L Jackson, and Queen Latifah could really make it work for me. There’s just too much subtlety in the book that didn’t make it to the screen.
I’ve never read Congo, but I enjoyed the movie.
The movie but may be ridiculous, but it is also fabulous.
Stop eating my sesame cake.
The lost city of ZINJ
American Gods
The first season of the TV series is a banger, but the subsequent seasons suffer from a decline in quality. Also, the series finale is just so disappointing compared to the ending of Gaiman’s novel.
The Wrinkle in Time movie, think Oprah was in it. Haven’t seen it, heard it’s horrendous.
It’s not terrible, it’s just incredibly underwhelming. It’s a movie where occasionally things happen. Sometimes fantasy things happen. But somehow in the most boring way possible. Eventually the movie ended.
It felt like a really long maxi pad or toilet paper commercial.
