For me it’s definitely the Dark Tower, but the Golden Compas was also a huge letdown.
I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Amazon Prime’s “Wheel of Time” adaptation.
Imagine taking a beloved classic fantasy series and handing the material off to the CW for adaptation and you’ve got the gist of Amazon’s WoT series. It’s pretty, it’s vapid and there’s a whole pile of extra teenage soap opera drama thrown into season 1 for no real reason.
Same thing that happened with the Shannara TV show. MTV wanted a kid friendly fantasy romance competitor to GoT, so they butchered a series that’s basically none of those things. They also started with book 2 for whatever reason.
I really like the second season. And did like the book series. I think a TV show has to move faster, it’s an adaptation not a recreation. So it’s a different story but it works. Not the first season, that was not good but the next one I enjoyed so much.
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.
Was going to say the same, the BBC/HBO Dark Materials series is really excellent, beautifully made.
I haven’t, but I will
deleted by creator
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
Some Dean Koontz and Stephen King adaptations were pretty bad. Hideaway, Phantoms, The Dark Half, Sleepwalkers.
I couldn’t get past the first couple chapters of Hideaway
That first Dune movie decades ago. Yikes.
Sting was great though
I’m a huge David Lynch fan, but yeah, that movie is insane. Has some good moments, but not many!
This movie slaps if you watch it high. Like really high.
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.
Hitch hiker’s Guide (movie version)… what a lost opportunity.
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.
Put a list of Ursula Le Guin works on a wall and throw a dart at one of them. Don’t know which one you threw a dart at? That’s okay, because absolutely none of them have gotten good adaptations.
The only exception, extremely ironically given I’m saying this, is Tales of Earthsea. The first half is alright but I guess they lost their train of thought during the second act (their words not mine) and it became a Legend of Zelda story. Still not terrible though, I can’t understand why people hate on it when the same people love Ponyo.
Tales From Earthsea is the 2nd worst Ghibli film after Ocean Waves (of the ones I’ve seen, which is more than half)
What was that bad about it? Most of the movies don’t even have plots.
What Ghibli films don’t have plots? Ponyo, Totoro, Arrietty, Poppy Hill and Marnie have plots. Whisper of the Heart? I don’t remember the plot of that one.
Tales From Earthsea’s problem was the predictability. The course of the story was formulaic. Ooh there’s this evil wizard who must be defeated, big deal. Ghibli characters are usually more complex. Villains should have something noble or beautiful about them to get some of the viewer’s sympathy. When the protagonist was imprisoned and then the friend came and saved him, it was just too predictable. The rescue could have been done artfully but it was not.
The villain of Castle in the Sky was similarly boring, but the colorful supporting cast made up for it.
By a plot, I mean a structural one. None of the ones you mentioned except for the last two had plots. The studio is famous for going on record saying they go out of their way to make their movies scriptless, instead preferring pure improv, though it kind of shows in how freeform and non-rule-based it feels. To be fair though, it does help to have read the book it was based on, you get the context of where exactly the movie begins to lose its identity (and appreciate it was trying to have one).
The Firm
Misery
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.
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.
To be fair, as a Sci-fi writer L.Ron was actually pretty talented. I feel like I could have actually gotten in to his writing if I hadn’t only ever known him as fucking L.Ron Hubbard the idiot father of Scientology.
