Stephen King - Dreamcatcher
In the book the character Duddits had the shining, yes that motherfucking shining.
In the movie they made him an undercover alien. Man what a let down.
The book Annihilation centered on a “tower” that was a mysterious, fleshy, downward spiraling tunnel with creepy writing on the walls. The imagery was so unsettling.
For some reason it is entirely absent from the movie. Like… that was half of the point of the book - a “tower” that climbed down into the earth instead of towards the sky. Why would you cut that?
Ready Player One. So much about the movie adaptation of this book infuriates me, but the fact they replaced Wargames with the Shining is a crime against humanity!!!
The Navidson Record
Dune.
Turning the Bene Gesserit power of Voice into some weird gun was fucking stupid.
I know we’re not into Harry Potter now, but the past is the past and I can’t forget how annoyed I was when the movie based on the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, came out. I was a very disappointed teenager.
It was a whirlwind story to me at the time. I remember exactly where I was when I read it, as the moment that revealed the friendship between Harry’s father James, Professor Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, and the alleged-murderer, Sirius Black, became seared into my brain. It was such a pivotal part of the overall story to me, that that twist alone made it my favorite in the series. So when the movie came out, I expected the use and development of The Marauder’s Map to be a key highlight. It was a huge deal in the books, after all.
Yet in the movie, the map is just a neat thing Harry gets to use. Nobody mentions that Harry’s own father helped create it. The movie never even tells who the Marauders are, even though the reveal of their backstory was the key emotional crux of the Shrieking Shack scene. To omit their story entirely felt like a gut-punch.
I didn’t understand at the time why the director (Alfonso Cuaron) decided to straight-up change everything that made that story so compelling to me and my friends. To this day, I still don’t understand.
Yet subsequent movies mentioned the nicknames Wormtail and Padfoot. A lot of things in the films must have been confusing to people who didn’t read the books. Another weird thing I’ve noticed is that in the fourth movie, Barty Crouch Jr steals from Snape to make polyjuice potion and he blames Harry. But those who only watched the movies and didn’t read the books wouldn’t have known that Harry and his friends stole from Snape to make polyjuice potion before.
The Hobbit. Like, all of it
I Am Legend. Just the whole thing.
Oh, I quite liked the film but didn’t know there was a book. What did they mess up?
In the book (short story?) the protagonist dies and the reason he is legend is that he was the last human and was like a boogeyman because of his hunting and killing them.
Going over the wikipedia article as a refresher and I totally forgot about how he (author Richard Matheson) had some cool biological explanations for the vampirism.
From Wikipedia:
Neville additionally discovers that exposing vampires to direct sunlight or inflicting wide oxygen-exposing wounds causes the bacteria to switch from being anaerobic symbionts to aerobic parasites, rapidly consuming their hosts when exposed to air and thus giving them the appearance of instantly liquefying. However, he discovers the bacteria also produce resilient “body glue” that instantaneously seals blunt or narrow wounds, explaining how the vampires are bulletproof. Lastly, he deduces now that there are in fact two differently reacting types of vampires: conscious ones who are living with a worsening infection and undead ones who have died but been partly reanimated by the bacteria.
I, Robot.
Asimov was explicitly trying to get away from the trope of “robots take over humanity”. To be clear, the first short story that became I, Robot was published in 1940. “Robots take over humanity” was already an SF trope by then. Hollywood comes along more than half a century later and dives head first right back into that trope.
Lt Cmdr Data is more what Asimov had it mind. In fact, Data’s character has direct references to Asimov, like his positronic brain.
The only thing that advertisement masquerading as a movie has in common with the Asimov work is the title.
I, Robot was about as far from the source material as you could get.
That sounds like a challenge to Hollywood. Though I’d put Starship Troopers up there too, haven’t scrolled enough to see it mentioned but I assume it is.
Edit okay I did now and it’s not mentioned. While a fun movie it doesn’t have nearly the same story that the book does. Still I’ll watch it for what it is, but doesn’t have the same tone or scenes the book does.
You’re right, Starship Troopers should be way up on the list, too.
Robots take over humanity has been around since literally the first robot story. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) is where the word robot was coined.
Shouldn’t be called an adaptation, really. They only dressed it up a tiny bit as Asimov for marketing reasons
From what I heard, they got the rights to I, Robot, grabbed some script about a robot uprising that they already had optioned, and slapped a few things on it.
This is apparently fairly common. If there’s a Hollywood movie based on something that doesn’t really align with the original, there’s a good chance that this is what happened. Starship Troopers was the same way (though that’s a whole different ballgame on whether the Hollywood version is good on its own merits).
The Hobbit
From the shitty shoehorned romance to wholesale elimination of plot points in the original story. Yeah, there was definitely some drama in the whole production of the film, but nonetheless it was crap.
We demand our Tom Bombadil!
I like the Bilbo edit that removes most of the crap, and keeps the story shown to be from only what Bilbo sees. Gets the 3 movies down to 4 hrs I think.
I’ve seen that edit. Much improved, but unfortunately there are some continuity gaps that are inevitable when cutting up a film like that.
The Percy Jackson one is just terrible. They left out so much stuff, like the mist.
Edit; autocorrect
Every film of All the King’s Men inevitably fails because you can’t capture Robert Penn Warren’s amazing prose when you bring it to the screen.
The color from outer space.
It wasn’t glowing purple. It was closer to a dull grey.
I’ll give them a pass because it’s hard to film lovecraft books. How do you film a new color no one has seen before? Or monster that drives you crazy just to loook at?
I feel like Annihilation ended up feeling more like a film version of Colour Out of Space than the COoS film did.
And the synopsis of the book for Annihilation makes it sound like reading it is like looking at said monster that drives you crazy just by looking at it.
TV adaptation of Wheel of Time was just fucking awful. Like every stupid character change and story change was done literally as stupidly as possible and seemingly with a view to ruin the actual story as it was written.
I genuinely think the showrunners hadn’t read the series to the end by most of the changes they made and canned it when they caught up and realised how much they had fucked the story that was still to come.
Book and TV spoilers
Tower in exile run by Siuan mentoring Egwene who is aes sedai by virtue only of being elected Amyrlin? Nope, Siuan is dead and Egwene was made Aes Sedai so I guess that arc is dead.
Moiraine thought to be dead and later rescued from the tower of Ghenjei by Matt and Thom? Nope, she never got “killed”, and never went through the doorway.
Min, Elayne and Aviendha all accepting the situation and bonding with each other as sister wives and sharing the bond with Rand through their own connection? Nope. Min is shacking up with Matt (maybe? Either way doesn’t gaf about Rand) and Elayne and Aviendha are shacking up with each other instead.
Having Rand kill Turak with the power instead of entertaining his challenge was a little funny but completely outside of both Rand and LTT’s code of honour and especially LTT’s massive ego.
The first one that me swear out loud was killing Uno and making him Gaidal Cain. Like… I guess Uno won’t be leading armies in the last battle then, and Birgitte won’t be wondering where Gaidal was woven into the world as a young child…
Oh god I forgot they gave Perrin a wife and had him kill her for literally no reason…
So many stupid changes made for no conceivable reason. Not little things to make a character easier to write for TV or more relatable, but sweeping giant story changes that make great chunks of the original canon impossible.
I genuinely implore anyone who even got the slightest amount of joy out of the show to read the books. Learn the original and really very good story, and experience Jordan’s writing, rather than Judkins’ made-up-as-they-went-along shit erroneously accepted as passable work.
I read the books and liked the TV version. They were just different things. I am not sure I’d even enjoy a very faithful TV adaptation.
Just finished reading the books. But i started book one and season 1 together and quickly saw they were completely different. But i watched the show first and it cemented how characters looked which is what i wanted before i read it.
After finishing all 14 and now on new spring im glad the show gave me direction to imagine a lot of them.
I watched the Dresden files tv show before reading the books, and the Karen Murphy from the site is the one I hear in my head.
Literally everything about World War Z. Absolute travesty. The book is a unique and genuinely thought provoking new take on the zombie genre. The movie is an insult to every bit of world building Max Brooks created.
I say this to people and then always have to clarify:
It’s not that the World War Z movie is a bad adaptation of the book, it’s that it’s NOT an adaptation of the book at all. Other than the name, and the fact that it has zombies, there are literally no similarities between the book and the movie.
The characters are different, the settings are different, the format is different, the plot is different, the way the zombies act is different. Literally EVERYTHING.
Calling it an adaptation is like if you took The Neverending Story and changed its title to The Lord of The Rings and called that an adaptation.
I read somewhere that this is basically Max Brooks’ take on the film.
Something about breathing a sigh of relief when he read the script, because it was such a distinct story that there was nothing left of his book to be butchered.
Yeah, this one is the big one.
I feel like World War Z would have been better adapted as a TV show given that the book was episodic in nature.
Very well put. I couldn’t agree more.
I thought the movie was pretty enjoyable but it shouldn’t have been named after the book. It would have been a decent zombie movie on its own.
I agree. Its a fun movie but is the literal opposite of everything in the book. My favorite chapter is where the crashed pilot outwalks the group of zombies. There’s something so organic and absolutely terrifying about that. Humans are persistence predators and it was such a unique way of turning the tables on our evolutionary successes. Brilliant stuff. The movie may be fun, but its anything but brilliant.
