For me it’s definitely the Dark Tower, but the Golden Compas was also a huge letdown.
I hated the two made for TV Terry Pratchett adaptations of Colour of Magic and Going Postal. Like, they pissed me off so hard I couldn’t sleep. Particularly Going Postal (my favorite Pratchett book), they couldn’t have missed the point of it any harder even if they tried.
Hogfather as well it just became nonsensical once they stripped all the evolution of folk imagery out
Hitch hiker’s Guide (movie version)… what a lost opportunity.
American Gods
I am legend
American gods is a breathtaking showpiece of just how fast a show can derail in every possible imaginable way
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.
The movie totally went against the novel and sucked hardcore because of it.
It was and will always be impossible to turn RPO into a movie, first there are the copyright issues and second the challenges are really boring to watch.
That doesn’t excuse swapping Wade’s deliberate-servitude-to-hack-the-system with Art3mis’s damsel-in-distress-happening-to-save-the-day-by-chance sequence, nor Wade’s decision at the end to shut off the Oasis two days of the week (what about people who rely on the Oasis for their livelihood or for self-worth, like severely disabled people? Hello), nor him saying his friends are his “clan,” something they are vehemently against in the book.
That first Dune movie decades ago. Yikes.
I’m a huge David Lynch fan, but yeah, that movie is insane. Has some good moments, but not many!
Sting was great though
No one wears metal underwear better!
This movie slaps if you watch it high. Like really high.
True of a lot of Lynch’s work. He definitely produces material aimed for a mind in an altered state
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
It was pretty fucking awful. But also the books really lost me around the 3rd/4th soooo xD
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)
Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Especially the second movie, Sea of Monsters.
Thank goodness the TV show is coming in December. Rick Riordan, the author, has personally been overseeing the production. I have high confidence the tv series will be much closer to the books. Hopefully this will do well enough that future seasons will be funded and we’ll get seasons that adapt the rest of the books.
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
That just reminded me I need to watch the 3rd season.
Was going to say the same, the BBC/HBO Dark Materials series is really excellent, beautifully made.
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.
That’s sad. I liked the TV version of Good Omens better than the book, and I was hoping American Gods would be similarly good.
Aww. I was planning on watching that one
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.
1996 Matilda was faithful to Roald Dahl and brought the trunchbull to life in a way only movies can. Rest of cast was great but Trunchbull aces it, one of my favorite cinema villains of all time.
I don’t know if it’s the worst, but I am very disappointed with the movie adaptation of Mortal Engines. The series has such a rich world to explore and very good plot points that would have been amazing to see on the big screen.
The movie ruined any possibility to see a sequel or even a reboot in a very long time (similar to what happened with His Dark Materials), although the fandom now prefers that if there is another attempt at an adaptation it has to be a TV series and animated.
Dark Tower - But I don’t think it can be done. I think the reason a lot of Stephen King’s adaptations fail as movies is because his books spend a lot time describing his character’s inner monologue.
Ender’s Game - I was so excited for this movie. But if you are a fan of the books then you saw a lot of discrepancies between the movie and the book. So it ended up being a decent general sci-fi movie.
That’s the reason most books can’t be adapted exactly as written. Unless the writing is so horribly stilted (X went to Y, X said Z to α, X had β happen to him because of α…) that you wouldn’t want to read it in the first place, you’ll need a large amount of narration and/or characters speaking their thoughts out loud, which doesn’t work most of the time and gets worse if they’re doing it solely for the purpose of the viewer getting into their headspace.
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.
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 really thought he would make an excellent Roland. And he probably still would, if he were given a decent script and director.
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 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.
I tried to watch Foundation, mostly because Asimov is one of those writers whose style I can’t stand in his actual books (his characterization is really flat–you could tell he was far more interested in his ideas and the characters were just pawns on a stage), and I’ve had a few cases where books I couldn’t finish were very watchable on screen. Also, I was following Jared Harris from the Expanse to Foundation in the hopes of seeing something awesome.
But what I saw, and what I remembered from the books, didn’t add up. Nor did it suck me in on its own merits, like some other adaptations have.
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.
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.
Did some good stuff with Riose as well.
Not looking forward to them fucking up The Mule tho :/
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.
I think the closest you get is B5’s Deconstruction of Falling Stars.
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.
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
From the first season I thought the Trantor stuff was awesome but the Terminus stuff sucked. Never have I had a show where I was more divided.
I was this close to skipping the Terminus stuff, I just couldn’t give a shit about it and was constantly waiting to see Trantor and the beefcake to do some boss shit
i mean lee pace fighting ninjas completely naked is a helluva plus, ya gotta admit.
Even by itself, the show makes no sense.
