Which books have the worst video adaptation?
Which books have the worst video adaptation?
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.
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 about the middle Dune adaptation?
The mini series is fantastic. It's a lot closer to the book and handles the pacing extremely well.
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?
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.
What's so bad about enders game. I don't remember that being a bad adaptation, but it's been a while.
It wasn't a bad movie, I actually liked it a lot - but the book is significantly better and the movie left out a lot. If I had read the book before watching the movie I would probably have hated the movie tbh.
Also even picking that book to make into a movie was a mistake, enders game was only written to give backstory for speaker for the dead which is much better than the enders game book but never made it to becoming a movie itself
The book Ender's Game has a psychological component that it's nigh-impossible to nail in a visual medium with child actors. The story works in book form because books are the closest thing we have to telepathy, but it's harder to do in a visual medium simply because visual storytelling is different from written storytelling.
You could probably do the movie with really good adult actors--but most of the cast are children. And really good child actors are rare to come by--you're lucky to have one, much less multiple. And when the cast is made entirely up of children who are all supposed to be geniuses, it's unlikely you'll be able to get the casting and talent you need.
The Ender's Game movie wasn't terrible--it was surprisingly watchable compared to other adaptations of other books--but it didn't come close to nailing the feel of the book.
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)
It was pretty fucking awful. But also the books really lost me around the 3rd/4th soooo xD
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.
I almost hear nothing good about the books themselves these days. Everyone liked them when I first got into them... 😥
Braid tugging and poorly written female characters aside, a very large number of the interpersonal problems in those books could be solved in anybody ever talked to each other. The nobody ever trusts anybody or talks about an issue gets kind of irritating. Even if he was going for realism it is pretty over the top.
Kind of like how a large number of Seinfeld episodes would be over in five minutes if they had cell phones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That just reminded me I need to watch the 3rd season.
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.
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").
Edit: After sleeping on it, I don't know if the movie adaptations are objectively awful or if I was just unimpressed because I read the novel first for all of them.
Except that the first Jurassic Park movie is only one small part of the book and they never let Hammond get eaten like he was supposed to.
Endless disappointment on that front, but I still love the movies.
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, but I haven’t read the book and watched the movie close enough to compare them.
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'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 think the closest you get is B5's Deconstruction of Falling Stars.
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.
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
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.
Way worse than break his neck, he outright accidentally shoots himself in the head.
And then it was insane that the zombies can magically tell if someone is specifically terminally ill and then will actively avoid them.
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.
Tbh the book does a lot of dumb shit too
Like instead of a blind martial arts master surviving the zombies
Imo like this. This is some cringy anime shit, it felt so out of place
I honestly forgot that there was ever a movie made about the book because that movie just took the name and wasn't about the book. Fantastic book. Let's forget about the movie.
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 some day
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.
That first Dune movie decades ago. Yikes.
Sting was great though
No one wears metal underwear better!
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.
True of a lot of Lynch's work. He definitely produces material aimed for a mind in an altered state
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.
Hitch hiker's Guide (movie version).... what a lost opportunity.
Some Dean Koontz and Stephen King adaptations were pretty bad. Hideaway, Phantoms, The Dark Half, Sleepwalkers.
I really enjoy the movie Phantoms, but not because it's as good as the book. It's just a fun movie if you're into that genre. But we could definitely add almost every Stephen King adaptation to this list. Don't get me wrong--some of them I very much enjoy, but that doesn't mean they're not terrible (looking at you, The Stand (first one), Storm of the Century, and Tommyknockers).
I couldn't get past the first couple chapters of Hideaway
Langoliers
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.
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.
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
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.
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
The Firm
Misery
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.
American Gods
I am legend
American gods is a breathtaking showpiece of just how fast a show can derail in every possible imaginable way
Are you referring to the Golden Compass movie or series? The movie was trash, but I thought the TV series they've been doing has been pretty good.
For me Ender's game was a massive disappointment. I also didn't like the hobbit trilogy. Huge fan of LOTR, but the hobbit movies just didn't do it for me.
The first Hobbit movie was decent in my opinion and if I recall correctly they followed the books closely enough. The rest were sub-optimal
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.
dune
DUNC
At least in the movie I could keep up with who's who