Bad Book to Film Adaptations - or I expected nothing and I’m still let down

[Fromtheblackdepths]

Mortal Engines. The Red-Brown Coalition shall pay for this travesty.

 

[Clockwork_PurBle]

I'm always annoyed when characters that are supposed to be 12-14 in the books are bumped up to older teens (or even 20s) in the film adaptation.

Harry Potter did it. Why can't anybody else do it?

 

[A Grey Cat]

I like the movie queen of the Damned but anyone familiar with Anne Rice's work will tell you it's a piss poor adaptation that only took the title because it sounds cool and edgy (par for the course in early 2000s) and like..20% of the actual book and the rest from the other book the vampire lestat.

The book Queen of the Damned was an epic spanning across the origins of vampirism in ancient egypt and the return of lestat awaking to a whole new world vastly different than the one he left behind.

The movie was essentially an extended stuart townsend music video that tries to cash in on the nu metal/goth crazy of the era...ok when I say I like the movie I mean as a guilty pleasure

 

[Clockwork_PurBle]

Nickelodeon, back when they helped make movies not related to their kidcoms, adapted Maniac Magee to film. It was pretty bad. They cut out a lot of it and changed a bunch of stuff.

I understand when you're making a book to film you will have to change some stuff for different legitimate reasons, but I see some adaptations that just...changed just about everything for no apparent reason. Why can't you just attempt to do it more like the book?

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

IIRC, Arnold himself opined that Conan just isn't a PG sort of guy, making every other critical take on Conan the Destroyer meaningless.

Arnold expressly states in his autobiography that the attempt to make the second Conan PG rated was what ultimately killed the franchise. He also only signed on to do a small part in Red Sonya, but due to studio maneuvering was made to fill in a much bigger role than he had wanted. A Conan spin off in everything, but name only.

 

[Slimy Time]

Off the top of my head Eragon and Percy Jackson. The former only got the 1 film, the latter got the first two, then got canned. When bestselling children/teenage fiction books similar to Harry Potter (read another book) or Twilight get only 1 or 2 films, they fucked up badly. The former is especially bad because the main antagonist doesn't die, and it's left unanswered what happens film wise. The books cover it later, but if you only watch the film, that's it.

 

[Not Really Here]

Starship Troopers
The Postman

 

[Fromtheblackdepths]

Starship Troopers
The Postman

I wished we got the advanced alien bugs from the books.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

Off the top of my head Eragon and Percy Jackson. The former only got the 1 film, the latter got the first two, then got canned. When bestselling children/teenage fiction books similar to Harry Potter (read another book) or Twilight get only 1 or 2 films, they fucked up badly. The former is especially bad because the main antagonist doesn't die, and it's left unanswered what happens film wise. The books cover it later, but if you only watch the film, that's it.

If you like look up the authors attitude towards the Percy Jackson films. He has personally disowned them because they fucked with the script so much.

 

[Not Really Here]

I wished we got the advanced alien bugs from the books.

I wish we got anything from the book (there is only one).

 

[The best and greatest]

Any adaptation of Brave New World

Seriously, take your pick they're all terrible.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

The Diary of a Wimpy kid series. I know it's a bit spergy, but I used to be a big fan of the books when I was a kid so when I was in middle school I was excited to see the movie. Long story short it was probably the worst adaptation of a kid's movie book I've seen in theaters. They got EVERYTHING wrong. The main point being that the main character is a complete asshole but the entire point of the book is that we see Greg get his ass handed to him for being an asshole but we also see their thoughts leading to their stupid decisions so it makes some sense.

Of course as a movie you're limited to what you can do. You can't tell too much or else you'll bore the audience. So there was no way they were going to get a good script out of it.

Everybody talks about how bad the fourth movie was and how great the first three movies were. The first three movies may have had better casting choices, but they were so generic for family movies. Even having "Our Rodrick" in them didn't make matters any better.

 

[neverendingmidi]

I haven't seen it, but apparently the Austen fandom on tumblr are foaming at the mouth over the Netflix Persuasion movie.

 

[🔪Cold Steel Brand Rep🔪]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN; VAMPIRE HUNTER
The book was super not what I expected it to be, there was a lot of focus on his character development over the course of his transformation into the Vampire Hunter 16th president we know him as. It was the first instance I can remember of a movie announcement that I was SURE would be compacted shit, and I was absolutely right because they made it into a PG-13 action movie that jumps around the book timeline with no context.