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?
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Ready player 1 only had the same character names. Everything else was different from the book.
The Dark Tower and it’s not remotely close.
You’re wrong. There’s no movie adaptation of DT.
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.
Oh, also, basically every adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel other than Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park wasn’t exactly faithful, but it’s an entertaining movie if you take it on its own terms.
Eaters of the Dead is a quirky faux-academic tale complete with fake footnotes, but 1999’s The 13th Warrior lost all of that tone and felt like a standard action flick.
And 1998’s Sphere was pretty forgettable.
Night watch/Day watch. This books were amazing and dear God the movie was absolutely awful.
The shining. Story was completely changed and all the characters were 1 dimensional
Life of Pi. Not to defend the book (apparently everyone hates it and I get it, even though I LOVED it as a child) but they left out some of the most critically important parts of the story. It’s almost pointless without the deadly algae island and the end with the interview. The movie wasn’t even entertaining in its own right, imo. Like at least Howl’s Moving Castle was beautiful and entertaining despite barely following the source material.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Bad as in so different from the book I would say The Lovely Bones but I think it was much better than the book, which I never say but it tricked me into reading the book which I immensely did not enjoy at all and as an adaptation goes it really was so so different than the book.
As far as bad as in like bad movie and bad adaptation I have to echo I, Robot
Lords Of Discipline. The movie left out most of what was beautiful about the book. I saw the movie first and thought what was the point of the movie. When I later read the book and was very angry about what had been done to such an amazing book.
World War Z. Took the title from the book and nothing else. The book is amazing. The movie is generic as hell.
Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time. It was a mishmash of the original and completely off mark. It did become a young black power girl movie, which is fine, but it wasn’t A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L’Engle.
The hobbit movies failed in every way as a movie or an adaptation. So horrible.