For me it's definitely the Dark Tower, but the Golden Compas was also a huge letdown.

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[–] 35 points 2 years ago (8 children)
  • 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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 29 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    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)

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    [–] 22 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    I've heard nothing but bad things about Amazon Prime's "Wheel of Time" adaptation.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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    [–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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    [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

    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.

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    [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 13 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    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.

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    [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago*

    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

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 6 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    That first Dune movie decades ago. Yikes.

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    [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    Hitch hiker's Guide (movie version).... what a lost opportunity.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Some Dean Koontz and Stephen King adaptations were pretty bad. Hideaway, Phantoms, The Dark Half, Sleepwalkers.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    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).

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    [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago*

    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.

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    [+] 5 points 2 years ago
    [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    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.

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