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

  • Rikudou_Sage
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    351 year ago
    • 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.

    • @Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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      71 year ago

      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

      • Phanatik
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        31 year ago

        The mini series is fantastic. It’s a lot closer to the book and handles the pacing extremely well.

    • Phanatik
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      41 year 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.

      • @finestnothing@lemmy.world
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        71 year ago

        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

      • @IonAddis@lemmy.world
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        31 year ago

        The book Ender’s Game has a psychological component that it’s nigh-impossible to nail in a visual medium with child actors. The story works in book form because books are the closest thing we have to telepathy, but it’s harder to do in a visual medium simply because visual storytelling is different from written storytelling.

        You could probably do the movie with really good adult actors–but most of the cast are children. And really good child actors are rare to come by–you’re lucky to have one, much less multiple. And when the cast is made entirely up of children who are all supposed to be geniuses, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get the casting and talent you need.

        The Ender’s Game movie wasn’t terrible–it was surprisingly watchable compared to other adaptations of other books–but it didn’t come close to nailing the feel of the book.

    • 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?

      • Khrux
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        41 year ago

        I really enjoyed the Eragon books as a kid but they aren’t great themselves. It’s a mediocre book series adapted to a bad film.

        • Oh yeah for sure, they were great to child me, I haven’t read them in years.

          I just thought of another example to the theme: I also really enjoyed the vampires assistant thirteenology or so, but the movie was horrendous!

  • Extras
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    1 year ago

    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

    • @Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      81 year 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)

    • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      151 year ago

      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.

        • @Bitrot
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          61 year ago

          I imagine they couldn’t get the rights to The Lord of the Rings in order to adapt book 1 of Shannara.

          • What? No it’s totally different, our Gandalf is named Allanon and he’s a Druid, not a Wizard. Druids get a d8. And the Warlock Lord’s Skull Bearers are definitely not Nazgul, they fly with wings not horses.

      • CalamityBalls
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        31 year ago

        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.

          • teft
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            31 year ago

            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.

            • HubertManne
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              11 year ago

              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.

        • Zorque
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          -11 year ago

          How far did they take the teen drama aspect of it?

      • @Bitrot
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        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.

        • @Rokk@feddit.uk
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          21 year ago

          I actually find one of the interesting parts of the books being the kind of way that misinformation can spread across the country.

          Like a character does one thing and that action gets attributed to a whole bunch of different people by different characters.

          But yea, I’m on book 9 now and definitely a bit frustrated with nobody just talking about things.

    • @RBWells@lemmy.world
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      21 year ago

      I really like the second season. And did like the book series. I think a TV show has to move faster, it’s an adaptation not a recreation. So it’s a different story but it works. Not the first season, that was not good but the next one I enjoyed so much.

  • @IonAddis@lemmy.world
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    171 year ago

    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.

    • @pdxfed@lemmy.world
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      41 year ago

      1996 Matilda was faithful to Roald Dahl and brought the trunchbull to life in a way only movies can. Rest of cast was great but Trunchbull aces it, one of my favorite cinema villains of all time.

  • Drusas
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    161 year ago

    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.

    • conciselyverbose
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      31 year ago

      I don’t know how you could do HGTTG well, because the nonsense narration is pretty much the whole point, and I kind of liked what it was, but it was definitely a letdown still. Zaphod’s heads bothered the absolute shit out of me.

    • magnetosphere
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      21 year ago

      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.

      • Drusas
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        31 year ago

        I really thought he would make an excellent Roland. And he probably still would, if he were given a decent script and director.

  • @KepBen@lemmy.world
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    151 year ago

    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.

  • @morphballganon@lemmy.world
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    141 year ago

    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.

    • 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.

      • @morphballganon@lemmy.world
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        51 year 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.

  • @Taleya@aussie.zone
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    131 year ago

    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.

  • HelloThere
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    131 year ago

    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.

    • Pons_Aelius
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      61 year ago

      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.

      • HelloThere
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        1 year 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.

    • magnetosphere
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      51 year ago

      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.

      • @IonAddis@lemmy.world
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        21 year ago

        I tried to watch Foundation, mostly because Asimov is one of those writers whose style I can’t stand in his actual books (his characterization is really flat–you could tell he was far more interested in his ideas and the characters were just pawns on a stage), and I’ve had a few cases where books I couldn’t finish were very watchable on screen. Also, I was following Jared Harris from the Expanse to Foundation in the hopes of seeing something awesome.

        But what I saw, and what I remembered from the books, didn’t add up. Nor did it suck me in on its own merits, like some other adaptations have.

      • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
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        11 year ago

        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.

    • @Taleya@aussie.zone
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      41 year ago

      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.

      • HelloThere
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        21 year ago

        The Cleons is literally the only reason I continue to watch the show.

    • @abbadon420@lemm.eeOP
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      21 year ago

      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.

        • @Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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          21 year ago

          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

  • Admiral Patrick
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • @TheDoctorDonna@lemmy.world
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      81 year ago

      Except that the first Jurassic Park movie is only one small part of the book and they never let Hammond get eaten like he was supposed to.

      Endless disappointment on that front, but I still love the movies.

      • Admiral Patrick
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        21 year ago

        Oh, I didn’t mean it was perfect, just acceptable. lol

        I’m still holding out for a streaming mini-series that is a 1:1 adaptation of the book. I just can’t let that dream go.

        • @TheDoctorDonna@lemmy.world
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          21 year ago

          I agree it is acceptable, I don’t often miss an opportunity for a marathon- it just isn’t really true to the book, it’s more like bits of the book are scattered throughout the movies.

          And I’m really upset that Hammond didn’t get eaten cause that would have been awesome.

    • @Bitrot
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      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.

      • Admiral Patrick
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        11 year ago

        I enjoyed Sphere…

        The novel was great. The movie…eh, not so much (IMO, anyway). Not even the combined powers of Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L Jackson, and Queen Latifah could really make it work for me. There’s just too much subtlety in the book that didn’t make it to the screen.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • @Omnificer@lemmy.world
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      91 year 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.

    • @lingh0e@sh.itjust.works
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      71 year 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.

    • @Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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      51 year ago

      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

    • Drusas
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      I honestly forgot that there was ever a movie made about the book because that movie just took the name and wasn’t about the book. Fantastic book. Let’s forget about the movie.

  • Gyoza Power
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    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

  • YaksDC
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    91 year ago

    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.

    • @SheDiceToday@eslemmy.es
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      11 year ago

      That’s the reason most books can’t be adapted exactly as written. Unless the writing is so horribly stilted (X went to Y, X said Z to α, X had β happen to him because of α…) that you wouldn’t want to read it in the first place, you’ll need a large amount of narration and/or characters speaking their thoughts out loud, which doesn’t work most of the time and gets worse if they’re doing it solely for the purpose of the viewer getting into their headspace.

  • @CatZoomies@lemmy.world
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    61 year ago

    Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Especially the second movie, Sea of Monsters.

    Thank goodness the TV show is coming in December. Rick Riordan, the author, has personally been overseeing the production. I have high confidence the tv series will be much closer to the books. Hopefully this will do well enough that future seasons will be funded and we’ll get seasons that adapt the rest of the books.