I think mine’s Z for Zachariah. The book is insane. A psychological survivalist thriller between a 14 year old girl and a strange man with unknown intent. The movie is… not this. They changed everything meaningful about the characters and lost all the tension. Hope someone does it properly one day. What’s your adaptation peeve?
You must log in or register to comment.
Masters of the Universe, not that the source material was any good (in my defense I was a toddler when I liked it) but the movie is batshit insane in a totally different way and may as well have been it’s own thing.
Eragon. Sooo much changed, cut etc, removed so much depth and story
I’ll say one thing for the movie: they cut off the sequel hook. So I don’t think they expected it to do will enough to adapted book 2, which is a level of honesty most badly adapted kids movies lack
I saw the film before reading the books, I was so furious afterward reading them. To be fair though, I think a film was a mistake. So much depth to the world it would be better served as a series. Could have got 8-10 solid seasons.
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series was adapted into such a god awful movie a few years ago that most King fans pretend like it never happened.
We are all holding out hope that Mike Flanagan will save us.
In Flanagan We Trust
Only thing I’ve ever seen of his that didn’t pay off was Midnight Club, and that was Netflix’s fault. I’ve read his outline for where the story was supposed to go, and it would have been incredible.
The Dark Tower is my favorite book series. I’ve read it 7 times. I actually really like the movie.
The Maze Runner series, specifically The Scorch Trials. The first movie changed a lot (the WCKD instead of WICKED really irked me) but the second movie completely deviated from the plot of the second book, it was unrecognizable.
Watership Down - the Netflix/BBC adaptation. Significant changes to plot that invalidate half the story, and animation from 90s PlayStation games.
As someone who’s read the book several times I turned off the show halfway through the 1st episode and never returned. One of the big problems in the show was making Hazel the leader from the beginning. The point of the book was Hazel never thought of himself as the leader; he always deferred to smarter (Blackberry), stronger (Bigwig) and more insightful (Fiver) rabbits, to make decisions. The big payoff is when Bigwig stands up to General Woundwart [“My Chief rabbit told me to guard this run”] and you realize they all would risk their lives for Hazel.
Ready Player One
The book was so good!
City of ember
The Dark Tower and it’s not remotely close.
You’re wrong. There’s no movie adaptation of DT.
Every Jane Eyre. They can’t translate all that subversive, complicated and problematic intellect and passion into a visual format. The costumes and settings get better and more accurate in the iterations over time and Jane and Rochester might actually BE truly ugly as written (psychologically and physically) but the astonishing beauty of the words is gone.
You’re left with a compressed, edited, compromised mess when compared to the book.
Eragon. It wasn’t even a decent movie. They skipped so much and it was such garbage. I loved the books as a teen, and was excited for the movie. But god that movie was trash.
The shining. Story was completely changed and all the characters were 1 dimensional
I feel like Queen of the Damned would be a bit of a throwaway answer for anyone who’s familiar.
I fell in love with the Vampire Chronicles series when I was an introverted, socially isolated teenager dealing with an abusive family situation (a little cliché, I know.) But, I immediately fell in love with Anne Rice’s writing style, and how her take on vampires wasn’t the old “good versus evil” and “road to hell, paved with good intentions” that I’d seen in any other vampire novel.
Even her origin story for them was unique to me, and I loved that so many of the vampire characters were forced to take an in-depth look at their life and destructive behaviors, especially now that they were immortal.
Everything from the poor casting, to the music, to the absolute removal of vital plot points made the movie literally unwatchable. I was kind of excited when I learned Aaliyah was cast as Akasha, since she was a well known talent at the time, very lovely, and at least visually perfect for the role.
…then she spent the entire film writhing and hissing at strangers, and teasing a man I kept forgetting was Lestat because they’d cast someone with exactly 0% of Lestat’s physical traits.
I was going to answer Queen of the Damned as well…one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and those books are great!
I love Korn, so I like the music on its own, but definitely not the best fit for the movie.
I loved that movie mainly because I was hitting puberty around that time so I mainly rewatched the movie for Lestat lol. Now I have the Interview with a Vampire series Lestat to drool over.
The Dark Tower. Eragon (but the books weren’t great anyway). Where the Wild Things Are. The Lorax. The Cat in the Hat. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Shining. Several versions of A Christmas Carol. King Soloman’s Mines.
Night watch/Day watch. This books were amazing and dear God the movie was absolutely awful.
Without Remorse the book is about a guy who lost his wife and child in a car wreck after a career as a Navy Seal. He falls into depression and lives on a boat drinking himself to death. He meets a hooker, falls in love, helps her get clean, and befriends a doctor and his wife. The girlfriend dies because her pimps find her and torture her. He spends the rest of the book avenging her in increasingly inventive deaths. And running Navy Seal ops on the side.
The book is fantastic. I think I’ve read it 8-10 times.
The movie is not that. Typical spy craft movie, CIA bad no wait good, Russian are trying to start a war, etc etc etc.
Very disappointing.