books to screen

[Dioltach]

My least favourite is a tie between "Earthsea" and "The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising". They both seemed to be a case of "I've written a screenplay that nobody wants, so I'll slap the title of a famous book on it and pretend it's an adaptation." Or else the screenwriters thought their ideas were so much better than the author's.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Oooh, I forgot about the Earthsea SyFy adaptation. It really mangled some of the key themes of the original book. Even the Studio Ghibli adaptation is missing something (though it hits closer to the mark).

My least favourite is a tie between "Earthsea" and "The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising". They both seemed to be a case of "I've written a screenplay that nobody wants, so I'll slap the title of a famous book on it and pretend it's an adaptation." Or else the screenwriters thought their ideas were so much better than the author's.

 

[Richards]

Here's another contender for "worst adaptation from book to movie": World War Z.

The book was a fascinating mosaic of how the zombie outbreak started and spread to various places all over the world and what was done to fight the plague. The "central character" was a UN guy putting together a report on the outbreak after the fact, but he was more of a background narrator.

The movie, on the other hand, was "Brad Pitt Single-Handedly Saves the World From Fast-Moving Zombies." It was more a matter of slapping the title of a well-loved book onto a movie that bore little resemblance to the book at all.

Johnathan

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I don’t think the movie is terrible, when taken by itself, but yeah, it completely mangles the very identity of the book. The book could have been woven into a wonderful movie, under better guidance. While you couldn’t have fit everything in, it more-or-less has a followable story arc within the interviews.

Here's another contender for "worst adaptation from book to movie": World War Z.

 

[Mallus]

Definitely the 1st Sin City. Also...

Trainspotting
A Clockwork Orange
The Princess Bride
Watership Down
Breakfast At Tiffany's
Sabotage
Apocalypse Now
West Side Story
Forbidden Planet
M*A*S*H
Blade Runner
Fight Club
Lolita
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Inherent Vice
L.A. Confindential
Jackson's LotR (but not his Hobbit)

The Expanse (if book-to-small-screen is okay)

The trick with this is: does a good adaptation need to be accurate w/r/t/ to the source? Or merely a good film? For me, accuracy is only one criteria, and nowhere near the top of the list.

 

[Blue]

My old go-to for horrible conversions was The Beast Master / The Beastmaster. They are both the stories of a heroic man with telepathic connection to a big cat, a bird of prey, and two ferret-likes.

But the former, the book by Andre Norton, was a SF book taking place with a soldier retiring after the end of an interstellar war where his home planet (Earth) had been destroyed. The movie was a fantasy sword and sorcery that didn't cover any of the same themes of discovery about the planet, the nature of his foes, and himself that the book did.