What's the worst change made in a movie adaptation of a book?
What's the worst change made in a movie adaptation of a book?
317 comments
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vaguely gestures at World War Z
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WTF was that movie? Did they buy the rights to the title, but not the content?
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Pretty much how that stuff happens.
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yup
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And the tenth expert bit!
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Ruined by Zionist propaganda
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Can you imagine a mockumentary with photos, reenactments, Redeker interview, military helicopters recording a supply drop following the redeker plan and thankful survivors, a historian explaining the Pakistan India war, live head cam footage of the Battle of Yonkers as that soldier retells his experince. It ends with some Drill Instructor explaining the box formation and taking your time with shots. Cuts to a drone going up and showing survivors in formation and hundreds of zombies in a large circle around them.
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Much like there has been no Dark Tower movie, there has also been no World War Z movie.
They don't count.
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I thought it was an entertaining movie, but I haven’t read the book. Ima go download it right now.
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When they announced a movie with Brad Pitt, I knew it would be bad. The book reads like a multi épisode TV show without a main character (and it could be a great adaptation).
When I pirated the movie version... It was so bad I regretted wasting bandwidth for that
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Loved the book. When I first watched the movie I hated it. as a movie by itself it's ok, sort of free on me. But then I thought the movie works if you treat it as a prequel
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Oooo as someone who has seen the movie and never read the book, any sales pitch for me for the book?
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The book is wonderfully written, and actually fairly insightful from a disaster preparedness and policy standpoint. It's been a while since a read it so forgive me if the details aren't exactly correct. Its written from the viewpoint of a journalist traveling the world post zombie apocalypse. He is collecting stories from survivors of various major events that happened during the zombie outbreak. Each chapter details a different event conveyed by a different witness, so it's not a cohesive single plot story. More like working notes of someone preparing to write a history of a major global disaster. It highlights some of the mistakes made and lessons learned as events unfolded.
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Imagine the book as almost a Ken Burns style documentary made after the zombie war, going back and interviewing the people who were there and lived through it collecting their stories.
It's been a while since I read it, but each chapter is a different person being interviewed telling their story, more or less in chronological order. The stories don't really overlap directly with each other, but together they paint a great overall picture of the war from start to finish.
And it's a good cross section of different people, soldiers, scientists, ordinary people, an astronaut who was stranded on the ISS for the duration of the war, etc.
I think everyone who read the book really wants it to be picked up as a mockumentary miniseries in that sort of style with "archival" footage with people being interviewed giving voiceovers and all the other usual documentary trappings.
And the Zombie Survival Guide is also a fantastic companion to it that is basically done as a, well, survival guide, that was distributed during the war, and is referenced once or twice throughout WWZ
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You already got great responses. I'll add that World War Z is a direct ripoff of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. And I mean that in a good way.
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I think they would have gotten away with that movie if it wasn't for the ending. Like yeah they completely destroyed the source material, but at least it's possible to have an interesting movie. Except like the last freaking third of the movie is just boring. Crushingly boring.
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I should reread the book. It was hyped as a good book. It was a good book.
Then I went to see the movie. Came out of the cinema and muttered "well that was a bunch of unrelated nonsense". Went home.
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All the adaptations of I Am Legend are bad, but 2007 movie was insulting. It gave the illusion of following the book, but then did a u-tutn and completely changed the meaning of the story and the title itself.
In the movie the protagonist becomes a legend because he sacrifices himself to cure vampirism.
In the book he is the last man in a world of vampires, he kills vampires, and understands that he is like a legendary monster that kills people in their sleep. He is then executed.
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Yeah, the book vampires were much more fleshed out. In the movie they were just barely-sentient beasts, primarily running off of instinct. They only seemingly had some basic higher-level reasoning. His primary struggle was surviving while surrounded by bloodthirsty animals.
In the book, they were a full blown society with their own culture. When the people around him changed, he was suddenly a stranger in a brand new culture. The point was that in the old society, vampires were the thing that went bump in the night. But in the new society, he was the monster that parents told their kids to watch out for.
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In case you haven't seen the alternate ending for I am Legend, it puts a very different perspective on the whole movie. Apparently it was the original, but didn't screen well with viewers.
The most telling moment for me is the infected slaps their hand on the glass and draws a butterfly as the last words the protagonist's daughter ever said to him, "Daddy, look a the butterfly!" echo is his head and he realizes that the infected he has captured has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. He even makes a note of it in the capture and experimentation scene claiming that the infected exposing himself to sunlight is a sign that "social de-evolution is complete." when instead the infected just witnessed a monster kidnap his daughter and drag her into a dangerous area that he cannot follow to do unknown experiments on her to change her into something else.
Instead the ending negates everything built up to the point and ends with a boring action-movie cliche.
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It gave the illusion of following the book.
Have you actually read the short story? Because I am baffled as to how anyone who has read the story would say that.
The movie was in no way an adaptation of the short story at all. It never even pretended to follow the short story.
Just like iRobot the only thing I Am Legend has in common with it’s written work is the title.
He is then executed.
No he wasn’t. He committed suicide.
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Have you actually read the short story?
Yes I did, probably 10 years before that 2007 movie. Let me recommend you to check an encyclopaedia if you want precision instead of reading a random forum online.
He is then executed.
No he wasn’t. He committed suicide.
For what I remember he was in a jail cell ready to be executed and they offered him a pill. Anyway, that was not the point of the story.
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As I recall it, he is locked in a room awaiting execution at the end of the book and while he is there he observes the vampires creating a spectacle out of his death which causes him to realize that he has been the boogeyman of their society - that he has become the stuff of legends.
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Seek the truth, always.
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They might not qualify as "crimes against mankind", but they definitely felt like it.
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Seek the truth, always.
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As someone who didn't read WoT, the tv series is... on average "okay" with some scenes being great.
Like idk I don't "hate" it, but certain scenes felt kinda awkward, and I'm always like "wtf is going on", I also had that with watching GoT, but that was only 40% of the time, with WoT, I feel the "wtf is going on" 75% of the time, not sure if it's a adaptation thing or just the story thing.
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I’ve been really liking Wheel of Time. I thought the books were really great world building but desperately needed some editing, and the TV provided some good editing. Sue me.
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Seek the truth, always.
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So glad it got cancelled. What Rafe did to the story was abysmal. Great casting, filming, and set work, but the writing was not great. I just hope a great animation shop can get the rights from Tor or whoever one day to do it justice.
That said, the Rhuidean episode was superb.
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Seek the truth, always.
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I, Robot.
Asimov was explicitly trying to get away from the trope of "robots take over humanity". To be clear, the first short story that became I, Robot was published in 1940. "Robots take over humanity" was already an SF trope by then. Hollywood comes along more than half a century later and dives head first right back into that trope.
Lt Cmdr Data is more what Asimov had it mind. In fact, Data's character has direct references to Asimov, like his positronic brain.
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I, Robot was about as far from the source material as you could get.
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That sounds like a challenge to Hollywood. Though I'd put Starship Troopers up there too, haven't scrolled enough to see it mentioned but I assume it is.
Edit okay I did now and it's not mentioned. While a fun movie it doesn't have nearly the same story that the book does. Still I'll watch it for what it is, but doesn't have the same tone or scenes the book does.
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The only thing that advertisement masquerading as a movie has in common with the Asimov work is the title.
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Robots take over humanity has been around since literally the first robot story. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is where the word robot was coined.
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Shouldn't be called an adaptation, really. They only dressed it up a tiny bit as Asimov for marketing reasons
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From what I heard, they got the rights to I, Robot, grabbed some script about a robot uprising that they already had optioned, and slapped a few things on it.
This is apparently fairly common. If there's a Hollywood movie based on something that doesn't really align with the original, there's a good chance that this is what happened. Starship Troopers was the same way (though that's a whole different ballgame on whether the Hollywood version is good on its own merits).
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Asimov came up with the three laws of robotics.
He then spent the rest of his life writing examples of how they don't work.
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Literally everything about World War Z. Absolute travesty. The book is a unique and genuinely thought provoking new take on the zombie genre. The movie is an insult to every bit of world building Max Brooks created.
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I say this to people and then always have to clarify:
It's not that the World War Z movie is a bad adaptation of the book, it's that it's NOT an adaptation of the book at all. Other than the name, and the fact that it has zombies, there are literally no similarities between the book and the movie.
The characters are different, the settings are different, the format is different, the plot is different, the way the zombies act is different. Literally EVERYTHING.
Calling it an adaptation is like if you took The Neverending Story and changed its title to The Lord of The Rings and called that an adaptation.
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I read somewhere that this is basically Max Brooks' take on the film.
Something about breathing a sigh of relief when he read the script, because it was such a distinct story that there was nothing left of his book to be butchered.
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Yeah, this one is the big one.
I feel like World War Z would have been better adapted as a TV show given that the book was episodic in nature.
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Very well put. I couldn't agree more.
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I thought the movie was pretty enjoyable but it shouldn't have been named after the book. It would have been a decent zombie movie on its own.
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I agree. Its a fun movie but is the literal opposite of everything in the book. My favorite chapter is where the crashed pilot outwalks the group of zombies. There's something so organic and absolutely terrifying about that. Humans are persistence predators and it was such a unique way of turning the tables on our evolutionary successes. Brilliant stuff. The movie may be fun, but its anything but brilliant.
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The Dark Tower. Good movie in its own right, especially if you like Idris Elba.
First, they took 8 Stephen King books, some of which were like 2" thick, and decided to turn it into a 90-minute PG-13 film. A single film.
Second, because the racist element was so offensive (a Black woman taken out of the 1970s, who has personally experienced racism toward her, is taken to a foreign world, an alternate reality, where she basically is led by an old white man (modeled after Clint Eastwood) and naturally she feels a certain type of way about that) they decided they were going to change it up. Make her white, and him Black. Hence casting Idris Elba as a guy based on Clint Eastwood. Then they dropped her character entirely. I will argue that Elba made a hell of a Gunslinger, but the reason they cast him was because they wanted to turn the whole racism plot on its head. For no good reason. It was fine in the books (this would be The Drawing of the Three, and The Waste Lands, the second and third books).
But for all that, it was an entertaining action flick with a bunch of Stephen King references. I quite like it. As a reader of the books and a fan of Stephen King, I shouldn't, but the movie itself was good.
Honestly that the movie exists at all is the worst change, though.
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Idris Elba was an unexpected choice, but I was all for it. Unfortunately, you’re right about the rest of the film. SO much wasted potential.
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I only read the first three or four books, but the movie didn't include a single thing I remember from thee early books that I liked. No crab taking fingers, no giant robot bear, no talking train, or anything else. It seemed to me like they had some other script and slapped a Dark Tower veneer on it.
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Idris Elba was the only good thing about that movie.
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McConaughy was fucking perfect for Walter. The casting was great. Its a shame they didn't get to make a dark tower movie, just a dark tower themed move.
LOL 19 GET IT??? There's your fan service and now back to our regularly scheduled mediocre tripe
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No, no, Dennis Haysbert was good in it as the father Roland never forgot the face of, though I don't remember his father being in the books. Seeing President Palmer teach Luther the gunslinger creed was awesome to me.
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Elba was absolutely wrong as Roland but would have kicked 9 kinds of ass as Cort. :(
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I love the Dark Tower series and hadn't seen the movie yet. They dropped Susannah out ENTIRELY? Seriously???
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Please don't fuck up project hail mary.. please don't fuck up project hail mary..
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that book was practically written for tv, I think it will probably go well enough
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Shit was written to be a movie like all that guy’s books.
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The trailer shows Stratt doing karaoke soo... adjust your expectations accordingly. :)
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Honestly, I'm not even going to see it. The book was so insanely good that I cannot entertain the possibility of a movie straying even one millimeter from the source material.
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I don't know if the same people are involved in this one, but I love the movie version of the Martian - I think it's a very faithful adaptation, with acceptable changes for the medium. Slightly more grandiose and optimistic ending, possibly to be palatable to a wide audience, but nothing that ruined the experience.
If it's even close to that balance of good adaptation and good movie, it will absolutely be worth watching.
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The Hobbit. Like, all of it
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The Hobbit
From the shitty shoehorned romance to wholesale elimination of plot points in the original story. Yeah, there was definitely some drama in the whole production of the film, but nonetheless it was crap.
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I like the Bilbo edit that removes most of the crap, and keeps the story shown to be from only what Bilbo sees. Gets the 3 movies down to 4 hrs I think.
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I’ve seen that edit. Much improved, but unfortunately there are some continuity gaps that are inevitable when cutting up a film like that.
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We demand our Tom Bombadil!
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Most of David Lynch's Dune.
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From what I remember, 1984's Dune is basically the book condensed down into the highlights. If you've read the book, fine but otherwise, it must be quite confusing.
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Still better than whatever garbage Jodorowsky was going to put out. That's right, I said it.
Dude didn't even read Dune, and bragged about it. Could have made an awesome sci-fi film, but instead had to co-opt a classic novel
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Jodorowsky brags about not knowing how to make movies and still makes them. He does brings about interesting imagery but the intentionally naive cinematographic style gets stale and boring pretty quickly.
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I'd say Denis' is waaaaaaay worse, they ruined Chani and added some nonsense subplot in part two as well... it's just prettier. 😤
I loved Arrival though, and I do feel like most disruptive changes in his Dunes were studio notes because it would be more relatable to "modern audiences".
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I think it can still recover, but I felt the same way after leaving the theater for part 2. I was confused why they decided to change it that much. It's supposed to make her seem intelligent and independent or something, but honestly it just make her seem nieve. They discuss Paul needing to do something like this, and she knows his mother's position was the same, but was still his father's only love.
It's bad enough that they cut out an entire portion of their lives where they have a son together, and lose that son to the Harkonnen. Then they do what they did at the end and it's just wrong.
It's definitely the easiest to watch though, and I don't know that it's less accurate than 1984's (Paul calls in rain after he wins the battle?). The miniseries is most accurate though.
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Jurassic Park. The original was a horror/thriller that would have had to be unrated if they made it literally from the book. Instead, we got a PG-13 family film that really did not live up to the book.
In fact, it’s the first time that I read the book before seeing the movie, and I learned to never ever do that again.
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to 4yo me, JP was a horror film. I mean, the kitchen sequence alone. And the run underground in the dark in search of the fuses, only to find a severed arm.
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I’d say that’s more thriller than horror.
For example, in the book, that fuse search ends in something far more horrifying than just Arnold’s dismembered arm. If I remember correctly, they discover him in pieces. All of them, but all over the place. Not just his arm. I think one of the kids pukes.
The whole book seems like Michael Creighton really tapped his imagination for how many ways wild dinosaurs could absolutely and utterly eviscerate a person.
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Honestly? Gotta disagree. It's been a long time since I've read the book but I remember being disappointed by it after seeing the movie. Maybe I'll give it a reread and see if my opinion's changed. ETA: fuck all the movie sequels though, no one needed that shit.
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I have no idea what would’ve happened to me if I had done it in that order, but, unfortunately, for me, I read the book 1st, and based my expectations for the movie around that, rather than the other way around.
So, I’m not trying to discount your experience, I just don’t think it’s the same thing because of the order. Who knows? If I’d’ve seen the movie first, I might agree with you.
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The worst part of all these stupid spin off movies (besides how atrocious I’m assuming they are) is that they significantly reduce the likelihood we will ever get a movie that is faithful to the book.
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I think since the Jurassic World series started, all of the reboots have mostly been "remember this" from the first movie, and none could really be anything more than that. Every one has to include a scene that's a homage to the original. Honestly feels like the franchise needs to have a genre switch up to force it to be something original.
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EVERY SINGLE CHOICE made in Ready Player One. What a disappointment.
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What a disappointment.
That's my thought on both the book and the movie. Perhaps its not the book's fault. There was so much hype surrounding it when it came out I thought it must be awesome. Instead I found the same simply story I'd read in a dozen other books, except this one drowning in a sea of 80s and 90s pop culture references. If it was a simply summer read without the hype I likely would have liked it for what it was.
I had similar disappointment when I finally read Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". I read that same type of story a dozen times in other much better books but everyone was saying it was a groundbreaking book.
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I had heard nothing about it before it came out. I had a friend who was just like “you’ll like this book” so I read it. It was a simple story, but I enjoyed it. The movie, not so much.
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The people saying Davinci Code (2003) was groundbreaking never read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" from 1982:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Grail
Or the Preacher comics from 1995-2000:
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I found the book kind of insufferable, so I never bothered with the movie. Every 'puzzle' was solved by the protagonist saying something like 'fortunately, I'd memorised the entire script of War Games' or something. I started to wonder how many lifetimes it'd take to actually learn and memorise all that stuff.
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Personally, I'm still irritated at the end of Hannibal (the 2001 movie). Spoilers for the end of the film and book ahead:
In the book, Clarice Starling has gone as far as she can in her FBI career. She became famous for solving big cases, moved up the corporate ladder, but that glass ceiling kept her from advancing. Too many misogynistic "good ol' boys" at the top, who not only prevent her from excelling in her career, but take every tiny mistake and blow it up into a potentially career-ending scenario.
Enter Hannibal Lecter; the suave and highly intelligent cannibal serial killer. He's outraged that Clarice's coworkers and bosses are actively objectifying her and ruining her career.
Long story short, at the end of the book, Hannibal rescues Clarice and gives her misogynistic boss an impromptu (and tasty!) lobotomy. Clarice ends up running away with Hannibal, because she realized he's the only person who respects her as an intelligent human being and not a piece of ass.
The movie chose to keep her loyal to the FBI and combative against Hannibal, even though the FBI actively tried to destroy her life. Hannibal escapes alone and the film just kind of ends. It was a complete non-ending.
The whole point of Silence of the Lambs and its sequel, Hannibal, was that Clarice was a woman trying to survive in a "man's job," yet proved she could belong - and excel - through her own skill and intellect. Silence of the Lambs did a pretty good job showing that on the big screen, but Hannibal didn't get the point of the story and decided the hero shouldn't end up with a cannibal, period. They treated him as more of an irredeemable monster.
It's kind of the "man vs. bear" meme, except replace the bear with a cannibal serial killer, and the girl still chose the cannibal as the safer choice to her co-workers.
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FFS, my unread list is long enough. Now I gotta add this series too. Thanks op
(but actually, thank you, that sounds interesting)
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If you want to read the books, it's 4 novels: Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising.
You can skip that fourth book if you want. It's a prequel story that shows how Hannibal grew up and what turned him to cannibalism. The author (Thomas Harris) wanted to keep him a mysterious character, but Hannibal was so popular, people kept demanding to know his backstory and Harris knew that if he didn't tell the story, someone else would. So he begrudgingly wrote an origin story.
You can tell he didn't want to write it. The writing style is completely different than his other books. It's very direct, like he's just dictating information instead of weaving a tale.
Red Dragon follows Hannibal in prison and the detective who caught him, using Hannibal's intellect to help catch a psychotic killer on the loose.
Silence of the Lambs is basically the same story as Red Dragon, except replace the brilliant veteran detective with an amateur FBI trainee, whom Hannibal takes an interest in.
Hannibal is a direct sequel to Silence of the Lambs, showing the FBI trainee's exceptional career and eventual downfall, thanks to the patriarchy.
The Hannibal quadrilogy is one of my favorite book series. I'm sad that the movie version of Hannibal didn't understand the point the books were telling. And the Hannibal Rising movie was a terrible B-movie plot about a young psychotic kid getting a taste for murder. Didn't really feel like a Hannibal movie at all.
I haven't seen the Hannibal TV series, although I hear it's pretty good. But it's an original story, so may not be very loyal to the book series.
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The most egregious that i remember must be Artemis Fowl.
I remember liking the book quite a lot for making fairies into the opposite of pushovers. It also had a mean edge to it that other teen fantasy lacked.
The movie is just... Not that.
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I hated the fact that the movie steered away from the fact that Artemis Fowl was a frigging criminal mastermind and instead made him a mid rebel with a relatable motivation... Have the same grouse about Ender's Game too
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I watched the movie first. The only good thing about it is it inspired me to read the book to see what the movie missed. Upon reading all the books, I think the vest way to adapt them to screen would be an animated series that is beat for beat faithful to the books.
My biggest issue with the film is, if they didn't want a villain protagonist, why adapt a book with a villain protagonist?
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Not a movie, but a show. "Foundation".
Look, I get it, if you want to tell your own sci fi story that has nothing to do with Asimov, great! Good for you!
But don't pretend it's Foundation.
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Eh. I've been watching it, and I think it's a decent adaptation. Entirely faithful to the original? No. But the core trilogy of was written in the 1950s, and it's absolutely a product of its time. I for one am glad they left the misogyny back in the 1950s where it belongs. Also, the original books were very much in the "our friend the atom" era of nuclear power, the era where they were predicting power too cheap to meter and no one had ever heard of a nuclear plant meltdown. The inclusion of the genetic dynasty was an inspired choice. And frankly, I'm glad we're not depicting a far future where everybody is white.
But I think the TV series is faithful to the core themes of the books. It still explores the contrast between the "trends and forces" and "great man" theories of history. It still explores the fascinating concept of predicting the future mathematically. It still shows the slow and inexorable decline of a great galactic empire. And the Mule in the show is every bit a force of malevolent evil as the Mule in the novels.
Overall, is it a perfect one-to-one adaption? No, but that was never going to happen for a book like Foundation. It was long considered unfilmable. But some minor adaptations have allowed them to create a good series that explores the core themes of Asimov's work.
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The core concept of the books was, that Hari could predict the future of societies in really broad strokes. Essentially how masses behave in certain situations. In order to actually make the gamble, he forced a situation where he put a group of people that could only behave in a certain way because they were lacking resources.
But, in all of the books it's quite clear that Hari couldn't make predictions for single people within a group, because there're too many variables (Asimov even created an example where Hari deliberately predicted the choices of a single person that exists in the present, and why that doesn't work for other purposes).
In the books, Hari cannot make any decisions for other people, because the solution can only come from those people (though because he setup the foundation colony like he did, the outcome was always predestined).
In the show, they don't care about the core concept. In the first season they show how psycho history is supposed to work, and partially adhere to it, but soon ignore all the limitations that it should have. It's like Hari plays those 1000 years on a musical instrument, manipulating people and situations. He tell's people the solution to the problem. He (because he's an AI) constantly interferes. That's not the idea of the core story.
Imagine it like this, in the books, a "creator" setup the world in a way where people can still make individual decisions, but only in a way that leads to a predestined outcome. Personal choices may lead to a different way to the outcome (see the mule), but in the end, it'll always come to the intended solution.
The show just has an omnipotent god that is reborn and moves people like chess pieces, constantly adapting to changing situations.
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Couldn't agree more, it's not exactly a faithful adaptation, but I feel they did a damn good job conveying the overall message and story.
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It’s three shows intertwined into one, and it feels as if three teams wrote them independently. They are completely different, the only thing in common is reusing Asomov’s Foundation names. It totally sucks.
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The coolest part of the show is the genetic dynasty stuff that wasn't even in the series
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Legitimately, if they had just done a "A Foundation Story: Empire" and then just did the genetic dynasty stuff, I don't think any of us would be mad.
But I don't think general audiences have read much Foundation these days so they would have struggled to set it in that universe without an established Foundation Cinematic Universe.
Anyways, I'm super excited for Tue Foundation super cut that's just Empire.
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Cleon in the books was a random emperor who got shanked by a gardener he promoted into peter principle. Which was beautifully referenced in a s1 plotline.
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My thoughts exactly before I gave up on it. It felt like all the good writers on the team had shuffled over to write the dynasty stuff, and the difference in quality when the show bounced between the dynasty and foundation stories was something of a whiplash.
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Foundation is getting a pass because they're being extremely clear on one thing - in fact the entire serias is predicated on it, which is in and of itself a solid book callback:
A single person can throw the whole damned thing into chaos
that aside, you can't claim the series has "nothing to do with asimov" when it absolutely bloody does
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OK, here's the thing. Overall, Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy is extremely good. I think it's the best Tolkien adaptation we're likely to ever get.
HOWEVER.
The random "Arwen is dying!" subplot was incredibly fucking stupid and while it didn't ruin the movies for me, it did dampen my enjoyment of them. There had to be a better way to get more screentime for Liv Tyler, surely.
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For me it's elves at Helm's Deep. Totally unnecessary.
Although I always laugh out loud when Sam says "We shouldn't even be here" in Osgiliath.
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My devil's advocate argument for the elves being there is that there were a bunch of battles in the north that didn't make it into the movie and only get mentioned a little in the books, and one of the important themes of LOTR is that all these disparate groups had to band together to fight Sauron. So having elves be at Helm's Deep is a way to show the different people fighting together in a movie series that was already pressed for time. Necessary? Maybe not. But it doesn't bother me as much as some of the other changes, because I can at least see a rationale for it.
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I love the lotr movies but even the extended editions can't fit in the nuances of all the supporting characters. this gets worse the later you get in the trilogy, the biggest victims probably being the ents, faramir, denethor and pippin.
my own personal pick is probably one flew over the cuckoo's nest, where they change McMurphy's crime from battery and gambling to statutory rape. that did not engender sympathy
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That's when Aragorn rode back to Rivendell when they were almost at Mordor, and then back to Mordor again, right?
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Just pick a scene from The Hobbit movies and there's your answer. Any scene.
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Nononono, the singing dwarfes were absolutely true to the book. And Gandalph looking at Galadriel like a Schoolboy with a crush on his friends older Sister was definitely not in the books, but I loved it.
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You don't remember in the book when Gandalf did a kick-flip 720 to a backside rail slide down the goblin king's decapitated body?
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Can I flip the script? Black Hawk Down was the most faithful adaptation of a book I've ever seen. As to the book, the author wanted to tell the story of the Battle of Mogadishu, faithfully. He had unprecedented, at the time, access to Defense Department files, interviewed everyone involved, strived for perfect accuracy.
When those guys are on that street corner, that's what happened.
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I wouldn't call it a bad change, quite the opposite but when I read Fight Club, I was amazed how faithful the film was to the book. There are just two major changes I can remember.
In the book, Tyler Durden meets the narrator on a (nude?) beach where Tyler is erecting driftwood into the sand so that the shadow looks like a hand. (It's been a very long time since I read it, I think that's right.)
Secondly, the narrator struggles all through the story to remember the correct formula for the home made explosive. If he doesn't know, then Tyler doesn't know. Which means the explosives at the end don't go off. The buildings stay standing.
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Didn't the author end up preferring the movie?
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The ending is different as well.
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Literally every single detail of the Eragon movie. God I hope someone actually adapts it well some day. Not that it's the world's best prose or anything but I truly believe it would be a great series with the proper director and cast. You know, where literally any of them had read and appreciated the source material.
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Eragon producers:
Looks at book cover, shuffles pages absentmindedly.
Okay, so dragons. Great! So what's for lunch? -
Loved the books, the movie is an abomination. Like they literally cut out the best and most important parts
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I don't know if it'll be better but there is an Eragon series in development for Disney+
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And then some. It was mostly an ugly film that didn't portray Alagaesia in any way that I had imagined. About the only thing I liked about it was the design of Saphira.
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Maybe not the worst, but this one's personal: Edge of Tomorrow's take on the fantastic All You Need Is Kill (spoilers ahead).
- Making the movie PG-13. In chapter 2 of the manga, there is a brutal death scene showing how Keiji can't escape the Mimics wherever he goes. The series was quite bloody, and used that to its advantage.
- Casting Emily Blunt as "Rita Vrataski". One of her defining character traits was that she was unassuming, and that you wouldn't expect that level of combat skill from her appearance.
- While Keiji was in love with "Rita" in the original, it was unrequited–the change felt actively detrimental to "Rita's" character.
SIDENOTE: I feel like changing this was sort of unimportant, but you'll notice I'm using quotes for "Rita". That's because, in the original, her real name is unknown. She took someone else's identity.
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To be fair, I wouldn't expect an elite combatant when I look at Emily Blunt.
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I did not know the movie was based on anything. It’s one of my favorite scifi flicks, I always viewed it as based on a game player’s grind to get through a game by trying different moves after each death to succeed.
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Surprised to see this one here, but this is also my answer. Been awhile since I read the book, but I seem to remember the other big point being the whole blood transfusions thing from the movie wasn't there, that was all made up bullshit. In fact, "Rita" had not lost her power, they were going through overlapping loops which is so much cooler, but I guess was deemed too confusing for audiences so we got that schlocky Hollywood ending instead.
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The Dark Tower by Stephen King. It was the book in name alone.
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Wanted. It's a completely different story, in the movie it's about a loser guy discovering destiny murders that are ordered to kill people by a Loom. The comic is about a loser guy discovering a secret society of super-villans because he also has a superpower.
But I would also like to present a counter-example. Watchmen, the ending is different from the comic to the movie, and I much prefer the movie ending. In the comic the plan by the villain is to make an alien-like monster appear out of thin air, because this will make humankind unite, in the movie his plan is to blow out the major cities in the world and make it look like Dr. Manhattan did it because then humanity will unite both out of fear and trying to stop Dr. Manhattan from doing it again. I never questioned the comic, but after watching the movie I got the nagging thought of "why would an alien appearing unite mankind? They don't know if the alien destroying stuff was purposeful, them thinking Dr. Manhattan did it is better because they know it was intentional and done by someone who knows who they are"
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I know we're not into Harry Potter now, but the past is the past and I can't forget how annoyed I was when the movie based on the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, came out. I was a very disappointed teenager.
It was a whirlwind story to me at the time. I remember exactly where I was when I read it, as the moment that revealed the friendship between Harry's father James, Professor Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, and the alleged-murderer, Sirius Black, became seared into my brain. It was such a pivotal part of the overall story to me, that that twist alone made it my favorite in the series. So when the movie came out, I expected the use and development of The Marauder's Map to be a key highlight. It was a huge deal in the books, after all.
Yet in the movie, the map is just a neat thing Harry gets to use. Nobody mentions that Harry's own father helped create it. The movie never even tells who the Marauders are, even though the reveal of their backstory was the key emotional crux of the Shrieking Shack scene. To omit their story entirely felt like a gut-punch.
I didn't understand at the time why the director (Alfonso Cuaron) decided to straight-up change everything that made that story so compelling to me and my friends. To this day, I still don't understand.
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Yet subsequent movies mentioned the nicknames Wormtail and Padfoot. A lot of things in the films must have been confusing to people who didn't read the books. Another weird thing I've noticed is that in the fourth movie, Barty Crouch Jr steals from Snape to make polyjuice potion and he blames Harry. But those who only watched the movies and didn't read the books wouldn't have known that Harry and his friends stole from Snape to make polyjuice potion before.
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Not a movie, but I don't know what they were thinking with that 'adaptation' of Pratchett's Night Watch books with 'The Watch'. It was wrong on every level. That said, taken on it's own merits, the production design was kind of awesome, and the guy playing Vimes was great.
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Fuck I wish someone would actually do a show about the night watch and do it justice.
Also a theif of time movie as good as the hogfather
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The sky adaption of hogfather is pretty good?
They might be hit and miss though, gone postal really clashed with my mental image and I hated it.
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Stephen King - Dreamcatcher
In the book the character Duddits had the shining, yes that motherfucking shining.
In the movie they made him an undercover alien. Man what a let down.
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After reading American Psycho, having first seen the movie, I was retroactively disappointed that they did not have every character dress like literal clowns that all looked identical, the way the book exaggerates.
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I'm a little surprised at that response because American Psycho is one of the most true to the source material movies I've ever seen. Whole passages were lifted and turned directly into dialog. Sure all of those white men were supposed to be corporate clones in the books but in a movie characters have to be visually distinct that's just the nature of the mediums
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TV adaptation of Wheel of Time was just fucking awful. Like every stupid character change and story change was done literally as stupidly as possible and seemingly with a view to ruin the actual story as it was written.
I genuinely think the showrunners hadn't read the series to the end by most of the changes they made and canned it when they caught up and realised how much they had fucked the story that was still to come.
So many stupid changes made for no conceivable reason. Not little things to make a character easier to write for TV or more relatable, but sweeping giant story changes that make great chunks of the original canon impossible.
I genuinely implore anyone who even got the slightest amount of joy out of the show to read the books. Learn the original and really very good story, and experience Jordan's writing, rather than Judkins' made-up-as-they-went-along shit erroneously accepted as passable work.
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Just finished reading the books. But i started book one and season 1 together and quickly saw they were completely different. But i watched the show first and it cemented how characters looked which is what i wanted before i read it.
After finishing all 14 and now on new spring im glad the show gave me direction to imagine a lot of them.
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Yeah the casting and costuming was pretty good for the most part with the very slight exception that I felt Rosamund Pike was a bit tall for the diminutive Moiraine. Apart from that I loved how faithful they were to the characters' descriptions even if they did go wildly off the rails with the story.
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I watched the Dresden files tv show before reading the books, and the Karen Murphy from the site is the one I hear in my head.
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I'd say Moonraker, which might be my favourite of the first books, but the movie adaptation keeps little more than the title and changes pretty much everything else (and as a result ends up being quite bad, receiving noticeably lukewarm reviews and nowadays often appearing in lists of worst Bond films ever).
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Yeah, IIRC it was the first Bond made after Star Wars and somebody must have gone "Hey, this one has 'Moon' in the title!"
When they inevitably reboot Bond, it would be cool to see period adaptations of all the Fleming novels. The Connery films come the closest.
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When they inevitably reboot Bond, it would be cool to see period adaptations of all the Fleming novels.
That'd be very cool, and it'd make me very happy if they started with making a seriously good adaptation of Moonraker.
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Just looked it up, and the titular Moonraker was changed from a missile to a space shuttle.
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The movie version of A Clockwork Orange was based on the American version of the book, which left out the entire last chapter. In that chapter, at 18 years old Alex pretty suddenly grows out of his violent and criminal ways and wants to start a family. Some say this ending is more optimistic but I actually think it's darker, because it shows that any normal person you meet might've at some point been a wanton brute reveling in the chaos and pain they so arbitrarily inflicted. And that they can just move on and start living like a normal person.
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This is a good take although I still prefer the sinister ending of the film over the redemptive one in the book. Later editions include a foreword by Burgess lamenting the omission of the 21st chapter in part because he wrote three acts of seven chapters for the symmetry of it and the symbolism of 21 being the age of majority
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tv series rather than film but: The Dresden Files
worst change? everything
harry's staff -- carved from a lightning struck tree from the property of his mentor, iirc, and carved with various runes -- is replaced with a hockey stick
bob the skull -- a constructed sprit of intellect bound to a skull -- is now a ghost of some guy
they made lt murphy a brunette
probably more idk I didn't get more than an episode in and that was years ago
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Didn't even know it got adapted, must have been terrible if the studio didn't even bother to market it
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i regret burdening you with this knowledge
class A amnestics should be freely available from your local [redacted] should you desire
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At least I loved the series enough to start reading the novel, so that's a good thing.
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well that is an upside
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Not a movie, but everything about the wheel of time show was a travesty.
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I feel the same way about Wheel Of Fortune.
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Haaard disagree. The books are dated as hell, and they were doing interesting things with that series. tugs braid emphatically
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Every single aspect of that show is just straight garbage. It is no redeeming features. At all
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Wanted...
It was supposed to be full of knockoff versions of popular heroes like The Boys. But in a universe all the villains won and mindco controlled the heroes I to playing fictionalized versions of themselves as a joke.
The main character kind of got to keep their original power, but not really.
It was a good movie, but it desperately needs a remake that's faithful to the original comic. Probably something animated like Invincible because live action would need a crazy budget.
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Invincible just kills it. Not only is it true to the comics, but you also get additional character arcs and backstory that perfectly fit in.
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I read the Invincible comics after the latest season and I'm super excited for the next few seasons If the show.
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I want to take this opportunity to remind the audience that 2005's Sahara starring Matthew McConaughey exists. The second of two utter failures to adapt a Clive Cussler novel to the big screen.
It wasn't a good movie because of the studio and because of legal clashes with Cussler. I think you could have gotten it done.
Plot wise, I think making Dirk obsessed with the ironclad from the beginning was an unwise choice. They both made that a bigger factor in the overall plot, and yet diminished the whole point of it by removing its Very Important Passenger. They put so much shit in the runtime about the ironclad that the actual main plots of the gold mine and the waste disposal plant had to be pared down.
Also, casting. I actually think the movie is very well cast, McConaughey and Cruz were good, William Macy was an excellent Sandecker, Rainn Wilson was pretty good as Rudy Gunn, Lambert Wilson was the objectively correct choice for Massarde, and Steve Zahn was utterly incorrect for Al Giordino. I was about to say at least they didn't get Seth Rogan or Jack Black but Jack Black might actually have worked.
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This movie was the last hurrah for old school adventure movies like The Mummy, I wish it got popular enough to get good sequels
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I wish it was good enough for sequels. There were so many books that this could have turned into a franchise with James Bond proportions.
I know the books aren’t exactly high brow literature but they’re fun, and they establish a great buddy-buddy universe very similar to the real world. The move was not that
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I liked that movie. I also watched it while I was on a plane from Cleveland to Hawaii with nothing to do though so maybe it was like a stockholm syndrome thing.
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Taken on its own merit, the movie is fine I suppose as a dumb summer action flick. I actually really like Penelepe Cruz in this. If you're a fan of the book it's based on, this movie disappointed you. The movie does a mediocre job of summarizing a representative sample of the book's plot and goings on. To be fair, the book has a complicated and multi-threaded plot which might survive intact as a miniseries but not in a single film.
Going back and watching it now...I've gotten out of movies. Hollywood has lost my attention at some point in the last ten years, and watching Sahara today reminds me of the time I used to like movies.
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The color from outer space.
It wasn’t glowing purple. It was closer to a dull grey.
I’ll give them a pass because it’s hard to film lovecraft books. How do you film a new color no one has seen before? Or monster that drives you crazy just to loook at?
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A purply pinky pallette is often used for cosmic horror. I don't know if this is because of magenta 'not existing' or if it's just a coincidence but it's a good choice anyway
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I feel like Annihilation ended up feeling more like a film version of Colour Out of Space than the COoS film did.
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And the synopsis of the book for Annihilation makes it sound like reading it is like looking at said monster that drives you crazy just by looking at it.
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All the WTFery in that War of the Worlds thing Amazon just crapped out.
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That was an hours long Amazon/MS teams ad.
If stopping an alien invasion involved teams in any way the aliens would win.
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I'm not even looking at it, I really liked the old one with Tom Cruise and Garret hedlund.
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They should've checked the solenoid.
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The book Annihilation centered on a "tower" that was a mysterious, fleshy, downward spiraling tunnel with creepy writing on the walls. The imagery was so unsettling.
For some reason it is entirely absent from the movie. Like... that was half of the point of the book - a "tower" that climbed down into the earth instead of towards the sky. Why would you cut that?
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The Passage tv series. To be fair, I got about 10 minutes into the first episode before I decided there was no way they read more than the book blurb before they wrote the script, but maybe they pulled it back in?
Also Game of Thrones. The drift from source material started small but got pretty wild as they went on. I feel like Martin was pretty clear what the "Game of Thrones" was in the books and I don't understand how a show with him as one of the key production members was able to miss that almost in its entirety. The show didn't need a clear end, that's the game of thrones, it never ends, the same cycle happens just as it always did.
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I wouldn't even say the drift from The Source material in Game of Thrones started small. In the second season they already make at least one huge massive shift in a story plot.
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Ready Player One. So much about the movie adaptation of this book infuriates me, but the fact they replaced Wargames with the Shining is a crime against humanity!!!
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Amen! !!
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The only thing I remember about that movie was thinking mecha Godzilla looked like shit. Then the one from Godzilla vs Kong took notes...
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The Navidson Record
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As a fellow HoL fan, dig your response.
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Someone got the reference!
There's dozens of us!
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I Am Legend
The ending was completely and utterly different than the book, which destroyed the gut punch at the end of the book that was kind of the whole theme of the book.
I don't even remember the book as a whole. But I remember the ending. Then they Hollywooded it and it was awful.
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I believe they did so because people didn't like the original ending.
Not saying it's right, just that that's the reason why
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Sympathetic antagonist -> brainless monster
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The Dark Tower. Everything. An 8 book series smashed into 1 terrible movie. Who ever green lit that should be fired.
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The Lawnmower Man
In the book, an unassuming everyman stumbles upon the fact that a local landscaping company is actually a front for a demon who has an arrangement that involves making human sacrifices of those that discover his supernatural nature.
In the movie, a Cyber Virtual Reality 3D Battles ON 3D CYBERSPACE Stunning Effects 3D Internet Pierce Brosnan Warfare Nineties Futuristic VR Headset Technology BATTLE In 3D Mind Expanding Guns, and one of the characters is a man who has a lawnmower.
Edit: Shit, okay, I just read this on Wikipedia and nearly wet myself:
A feature film, The Lawnmower Man, starring Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan, was released in 1992 by New Line Cinema. This film used an original screenplay entitled "CyberGod", borrowing only the title of the short story. The film concerns a scientist, Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Brosnan), who subjects mentally challenged Jobe Smith (Fahey) to virtual reality experiments which give him superhuman abilities. The film was originally titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man. King won a lawsuit to have his name removed from the film, stating in court documents that the film "bore no meaningful resemblance" to his story. King then won further damages in 1993 after his name was included in the home video release.
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Dune.
Turning the Bene Gesserit power of Voice into some weird gun was fucking stupid.
Edit to add: first film adaptation from the 80s. The latest movies have been good.
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I assume you mean the 1984 version?
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Yes.
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Yeah, the 80s version took a lot of liberties, most of which didn't work out. The ending specifically.
But I still like the visuals and the music and the actors more than the new movies. Yeah, I know the new ones have crazy CG visuals, but the set designs from the 80s version were just more....unique in my opinion. That made the world feel more interesting. And I liked the 80s Baron way more than the new Baron, despite really respecting Stellan Skarsgard. Kenneth McMillan played a really psychotic Baron.
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As a Dune lover, I have a soft spot for the 1980s version. The thing I tell people before watching is, "this isn't Dune, this is a fever dream David Lynch had about the idea of Dune."
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That's a really good description.
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and the rain at the end
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Ugh yeah
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The Percy Jackson one is just terrible. They left out so much stuff, like the mist.
Edit; autocorrect
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Question for fans of the Russian film/books "Night Watch":
The first movie was amazing, it adapts roughly the first 1/3rd of the first book, I thought it was very well done. Went out, bought the books and caught up.
"Day Watch" comes out. I can't tell if it's legitimately a shitty movie or if it's just shitty compared to the books?
p.s. The author is now problematic because of the whole Russia/Ukraine issue, but the books were completed before even the Crimea invasion in 2014.
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I read the first three books, and saw two movies, I think. I wasn't aware that anything new had happened on that front.
Or that the author was an idiot. Disappointing, but not entirely surprising.-
Yeah, the two movies didn't even finish adapting the first book. There are 3 stories in it and the first movie does a good job with the first one, then the 2nd one kind of half-asses the 2nd story in the first book.
It also painted them into a corner narratively where a 3rd movie wouldn't be possible. 😟
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Saw the movies and liked the unique story. I hope I get my hands on the books.
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When you consider the first movie adapts the first 1/3rd of the first book, and the 2nd movie kind of fucks up adapting the 2nd 1/3rd... there's a TON more material. 6 books total and it all comes to a very satisfying conclusion.
HBO could get 6 seasons of television out of this if they wanted to and unlike Game of Thrones, it's all done!
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Every film of All the King's Men inevitably fails because you can't capture Robert Penn Warren's amazing prose when you bring it to the screen.
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I was surprised when I read heart of darkness, that, for me at least, the final gut-punch of the tale isn't a dying man thinking of the horror he had wrought and seen, but the protagonist getting back to the man's wife and lying to her, telling her his last thoughts were of her. It isnt something that would have worked for Apocalypse Now, but I didn't expect such a short novel to hide a completely different ending mood. I still think about it, years later.
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I'm surprised no one has mentioned Ghibli book "adaptations".
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Do NOT get me started on Howl's moving castle
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