This may be unpopular but I was deeply disappointed in Shawshank Redemption when I read it. The movie is top tier.
Edit: In retrospect this doesn’t really answer your question as you asked about bad movies with a worse book and Shawshank is definitely not a bad film.
The story was a novella King wrote in the early 80s for a short story collection, and it was his first real attempt at writing genres outside of horror. He’s gotten better at that over the years.
Even so, I wouldn’t say it’s bad, just that the movie blows it out of the water.
Movie is definitely top tier, I also love the novella. Different Seasons is what I point to when people dismiss stephen king. Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and (while not on the level as the other two) Apt Pupil all in the same collection. But to each their own; pretty sure the final story is trash though haha.
Jaws doesn’t quite fit the prompt but although it’s a good movie, the book is essentially a sub-par beach read. And there was no USS Indianapolis monologue in the book.
maybe shrek? i never cared for the book though its not bad
Howl’s Moving Castle. Not that I didn’t enjoy the book, I just preferred the movie more.
Same. I remember the book being actually kind of unimpressive and wondering “Really, this is what inspired that amazing movie?”
Starship Troopers.
The movie is good though
Damn, I missed the (which was already bad) caveat in the title. Yes, the film is great.
I do wonder how many people got hoodwinked by the film and then went to read the book only to be hit with an entire textbook of lectures from a libertarian.
That’s okay. Did you know it has sequels?
I’m doing my part!
Great. Now a want to spread managed democracy some more
Fight Club, book is decent but the film seems a more complete package.
The film’s problem was casting Brad Pitt as Durden and changing the ending so that he’s successful. The movie made him attractice and charismatic. The book makes it clear the narrator is completely unhinged and fixated on his hatred of women and femininity.
The book is very clearly a story about straight men not being ok. “straight guys would rather punch each other naked Ina basement instead of go to therapy.” The movie doesn’t translate that well, so it reads more like a criticism of 90s work culture. Which is fair, but it often misses what Palahniuk intended.
To also be fair though Palahniuk seems to like the movie, but really despises young straight men admiring Durden as some antihero. He elaborates that feeling in the comic sequels.
…is Chuck Palahniuk the director of the Truman Show? The show?
Chuck Palahniuk
Not that im aware of, he wrote the fight club book and then sold the rights too it, this is him criticising David Finchers adaption and saying the Chinese censor of it is actually closer to the orginal book lol.
There was a picture of him in the link you shared, he looks almost exactly like the director guy in that movie. Wouldn’t be surprised if he was the model they based it on
Even Chuck Palahniuk agrees.
Now that I see the movie, especially when I sat down with Jim Uhls and record a commentary track for the DVD, I was sort of embarrassed of the book, because the movie had streamlined the plot and made it so much more effective and made connections that I had never thought to make.
Source: https://www.dvdtalk.com/interviews/chuck_palahniuk.html
There is a Fight Club 2 in the form of a graphic novel. I normally don’t believe a shitty sequel can ruin my opinion of a movie I enjoy, but this one really put that to the test, boy howdy.
Hunt for Red October. The book is great and for it’s time had done amazing insight into modern naval warfare but the movie irons out a bunch of this which are a bit lame.
The Akula that kills itself with its own torpedo simply blows up because it abused its engine and another sunk when the titular sub rams into it.
The titular sub is later returned to the USSR.
The movie changes those and a few other things for a more exciting and satisfying outcome.
Dine. The book is terrible, I couldn’t read it at all after trying twice… way back decades ago, the recent movie was good.
Ready player one, though to be fair I didn’t finish either version. I feel like percentage-wise I made it further through the movie, but only because the movie is less than 2 hours long. I made it to the 2nd chapter of the 2nd part and couldn’t take the masturbatory prose any more. There’s no self insertion on one side of the scale, Mary sue-ing in the middle, and ready player one sits on the far side of the scale.
I was going to say, Ready Player One is not a great movie, but it does at least have Spielberg at the helm, and while late-career Spielberg is a shadow of his former self, the movie is directed competently and interesting enough visually.
Not least of all because you can actually see and enjoy all the various IP in action, rather than just have them name dropped like in the book. When there’s a sea of interesting or recognizable things on screen, that does a lot to help distract from how terrible the plot is.
But even at its worst, the movie is a tolerable popcorn flick. Turn your brain off and enjoy some pop culture references, then forget it all an hour later.
Because the book is just terrible. It’s an absolute slog, a lot of the dialogue is embarrassing, the prose is uninspired, it’s overloaded with explanations of UIs and unnecessary, long winded ramblings about the various pop culture references. The movie at least has the benefit of just putting a thing on the screen, the book has to describe all of this shit, and it’s tediously done.
Which is to say nothing of just how terrible the plot is in general but more than enough people have gone off about that. Twilight for nerdy boys is the best description I’ve ever heard of it.
The movie is so much better than the book because it drops a lot of cringe that the book has.
Yeah, the book felt like I was being beaten over the head with pop culture references…but then you open up VR Chat…
I feel like there was value in the predictions RPO was making, particularly at the time it came out, just before Facebook became Meta and basically made it their playbook. If the world ever gets so shitty that the friction of putting on a VR headset actually becomes preferable to doing literally anything else, I think it’s a pretty believable future.
I read the whole book twice. Its bad. The first time was fun because I was just looking for the pop-culture references, but thats the only kinda good thing the book has. The second time I focused more on the story and the characters and its just bad. There are no likeable characters, but you are supposed to like the main protagonist who is an antisocial creep. The setting makes no sense and the plot is just there to move to another place to show off more references stacked onto each other
The classic would be fight club, I think even the author has said they enjoyed some of the symbolism that was added.
The Mission, though I haven’t seen the movie yet.
The Da Vinci Code. The film and book were both utter, contemptible garbage.
I’m guessing someone with enough familiarity could say this about one of the John Green books’ movie adaptations, but I haven’t seen any (?) of the movies and haven’t read the books since I was a teen so
50 Shades of Grey.
The film is silly and mediocre but the book is next level terrible.
I’ve never consumed either media of that story. But I thoroughly enjoyed Dan Olson’s take.
Yep. This is probably the best take of showing how the movie’s writing process changed the writing for the better, then the books’ author put a stop to that.
Thank you. I ended up watching the whole trilogy (of videos).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/qzk9N7dJBec?si=zp_SQRQ3jBbOUWab
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Just so you know, everything in that link after ?si= is purely tracking information so Google can know who you send links to, and when they open them.
Thanks, forgot to delete that.
I think you could make a credible argument that some of the Harry Potter books are worse than the movies. The best example that comes to mind is making fun of Hermione for wanting to free slaves, and the other characters claiming being slaves is in their nature or something. If you had only watched the movies instead, you’d get to see the slaves are miserable, most of the good team characters don’t own slaves, and Harry Potter tricks a slave owner into freeing their slave.
and Harry Potter tricks a slave owner into freeing their slave.
That happens in the books too. He only does it because the slave owner is a mean slave owner, though, not because slavery is wrong.
The thing is that Rowling hadn’t really thought it through yet. Having the hero save a slave is pretty clearly heroic and good, and it’s a nice way to wrap up the Dobby story arc, but then the fans were all like “wait WHAT!? there’s slaves under Hogwarts!?” and she was forced to think it through, and it turns out JK’s pretty awful so the result of her thinking it through was to make it worse.
I know that I was almost an adult when Harry Potter came out, but I really tried to get into them as everyone else loved them, but the writing was flat af.
In the later books Harry gets a slave and doesn’t free him but its ok because the slave is rude.
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Kreacher really wants to be a good slave, he just wants to be a good slave for the bad guys. So it’s okay to abuse him, see?
