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.
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
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
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.
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.
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 imagine they couldn’t get the rights to The Lord of the Rings in order to adapt book 1 of Shannara.
The first episode was enough for me.
I’ve hate-watched all of it. It’s not good, some things are wrenching departures the books, but there’s also been parts of it they adapted well I think.
I think anyone who has never read the books would enjoy it.
I watched the first season, loved it, read the books, watched the show again and was a bit disappointed by some of the changes. I’ll watch the whole series though and think of it as a different turn of the wheel. It’s a decent series imho it just isn’t a one to one translation.
yeah I find I can enjoy it if I just try not to think about the series. The big issue is the way gender worked in the universe (fictional universe for anyone who is going to get triggered) with magic. By having her search for boys and girls it discounts a pretty large plot point later. Not sure how they are going to deal with it when it comes up other than gloss over it.
How far did they take the teen drama aspect of it?
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.
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’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 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.
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 :/
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
Even by itself, the show makes no sense.
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
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
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”).
I’ve never read Congo, but I enjoyed the movie.
Stop eating my sesame cake.
The lost city of ZINJ
I’ve read it but never seen the movie. lol. Based on the other bad adaptations, I assumed it was one as well. Will check it out sometime!
Haha. I was hoping you could comment on the movie. Oh well - I hope you do enjoy it!
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.
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 to book. Fantastic book. Let’s forget about the movie.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The Firm
Misery
