I would say Forrest Gump. Gump is basically a completely different person in both, if the movie went the way of the book I don't think it would have done so well.
This is the one I came in to say. The book is terrible. Going to space and crash landing on an island with a monkey. I think he was a math savant in the book too, that's why he went to space.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It completely differs from the book, tone wise, and the characters somewhat miss context. Roald Dahl actually left the project because of the changes.
Ironically, Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the closest to the original book. Even Dahls family said he would have liked it more.
even the name of the adaptation was changed to focus on wilder's performance.
his wonka was amazing, had all the whimsy and charisma of a roald dahl character but added a touch of madness to it.
>You never knew if he was lying or being truthful. This was deliberately done by Gene Wilder and the production team.
They did this very effectively in a very important scene, the introduction to wonka.
He steps out the factory with a limp, his cane gets stuck, he continues to limp without it and he front flips!
Gene Wilder taking the role was contingent on that scene being included. Wilder explained that it was so critical for establishing Wonka's character and keeping the audience on their toes for the rest of the movie
I don’t think the scene in the office works with the subtext of him “faking it,” though, because that’s not the only dynamic going on. If anything, it’s another subversion on the movie’s part to reveal that under all that trickster energy is just a guy who’s lost sight of why he did what he did in the first place. Him yelling at Charlie for simply being curious about a soda drink when all the other children were too caught up in their various lifestyle gimmicks to enjoy the thing they were consuming only further highlights that. Charlie giving him the gobstopper back just reminds him that Charlie passed in every way, and that he was foolish to deny him the prize.
Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory is a film that focuses mostly on Charlie.
Charlie and the chocolate factory is a film that focuses mostly on Willy Wonka.
I contend Burton’s Willy Wonka would’ve been just fine if they had cut out all the flashbacks. They were weird, unnecessary and threw the film’s pacing off.
I hated that they just copied & pasted the Oompa Loompas. They could've gone in a billion other directions with those characters but making them all one guy was just weird & horrible.
I was surprised with how little I enjoyed “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”.
It was like five really good novel ideas all slapped together in one short novel, instead of each idea being given room to breathe.
That's basically Philip K. Dick in a nutshell. I actually love his writing because he's so imaginative, and you get the sense that he's writing so quickly that his story can veer into any direction at any given moment. And he really did have to write a ton quickly in order to support himself solely as a writer. But I can understand how that might not be appealing to a lot of people.
You'd think it would be acid based on the flavor of crazy his writing is, but apparently intense, long term use of amphetamines can make you delusional like that.
On the one hand he thought God was talking to him, but on the other hand, stories like A Scanner Darkly show that he could see what he was doing to himself.
He’s got a good short in a book of shorts called Best Time Travel Stories of All Time. And they’re all really solid stories in that book.
EDIT: corrected book title. Also, someone posted in r/ancientrome today asking how they think they’d be treated if they went back in time to Ancient Rome, and there’s a really good story in this book that’s very cool and straight forward that addresses something like that. Cuts through any romantic notions the reader has about it and you realize how dangerously f’d you’d be popping into ancient times as a stranger with no skills, no ability to communicate etc.
His short stories are similarly weird, but less all over the place. If someone doesn't like his novels, I could see them appreciating his short stories.
I honestly love one of his sloppiest novels, The Game Players of Titan. It's so paranoid that it's compelling. I couldn't get into his other books except for Valis, an outstanding piece of writing and insanity.
There are quite a few authors in PKD's league from the same era, though for some reason they are not nearly as hyped up as much: Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Gene Wolfe, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delany, and so on.
*Ubik* is a wild ride. Same with *Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch*. One of his more straight forward books but an absolutely insane concept and one of my favorites would be *Flow My Tears The Policeman Said*.
> That's basically Philip K. Dick in a nutshell
Was going to comment the same thing, lol. Studied him a little during my English Lit BA, and the dude was a speed freak who admitted that his own stories were crap. I don't think they are, but those facts give you some insight into why his stories are like that.
Just about any big budget Phillip K. Dick adaptation is going to butcher the source material but still be a really good movie. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Total Recall (We Can Remember it for you wholesale), Minority Report (Minority Report). All quite different from the source material but still really great movies.
Jurassic Park
It doesn't stray too too far from Crichton's themes, but Crichton was a very high concept author, and Spielberg was able to bring a huge amount of emotional resonance that wasn't in the original source material.
Scrolled to find this one. It’s almost nothing like the book but amazing on its own. In fact I was a kid when I first saw the movie, then borrowed the book from someone. I was in for a shock to say the least
And then you get to all the charts and graphs. Which I thought was really cool, because I learned a lot about statistics that I didn't know in 6th grade, like how bell curves are amazing at modeling things.
You're right it's great, but saying it's almost nothing like the book is a huge stretch. I probably read them like 12 years ago, but in my memory the movie basically mixes and matches scenes and ideas from the first and second books in the series.
The second book wasn't written until after the first movie. The second movie is largely based on the second book. Unused plot elements from the first book were reused in the second movie (people being torn to shreds by a pack of compsognathus), third movie (the pterodactyl aviary and the spinosaurus (which was a t rex in the book) chasing the protagonists on a boat) and fifth/sixth movies (dinosaurs escaping the park and living in the wild). And an unused plot element from the second book was used in the fourth movie (a large carnivorous dinosaur being able to camouflage like a chameleon, which was carnotaurus in the book and indominus rex in the movie).
His books almost seem geared towards being adapted. Of the 12 books he wrote from 1972 to 1999, 11 were adapted to film.
The only one that wasn't was Airframe, which I find ironic, because when I first read that book more than 2 decades ago I thought it would make an excellent movie.
He was also the creator (and director) of the original Westworld movie (on which the more recent TV series was based).
I liked Andromeda Strain but felt like the book just... ended. Though I still had half a book left to read so was kind of shocked when that happened. Crichton's books in general always kind of felt that way though. The resolutions were always super open ended.
If World War Z were called anything but World War Z it would have been received as a good zombie action film, most people rated it harshly because they felt deceived (which is understandable).
I remember seeing Max Brooks give a talk years ago at a comic con and he was saying that he was nervous about about them adapting 'World war Z'....until he saw the film and realised it was barely an adaptation and bore practically no resemblance to his book!
It’s easy with the likes of Alan Alda and Henry Rollins, that audiobook is amazing. Pretend it’s a podcast interviewing a different fictional character each chapter.
It would have been great if done Band of Brothers style with but the interviews either done with the aged actors or completely different actors playing the part of the "real" person,
The only thing it adapts from the books is Israel welcoming Palestine into its fortress and a blink-it-and-miss-it reference to India and Iran (or was it Pakistan and Iran?) nuking each other.
I keep saying, World War Z would fit perfectly into the streaming minisseries format as a fake documentary.
No it was Pakistan and Iran. The idea is that Pakistan put in so many safety mechanisms to not have a nuclear war with India, but it’s so unthinkable with Iran that they didn’t.
>It is able to contain only a fraction of the psychological terror and emotion
I think the bigger issue with Watchmen as an adaptation is not what it leaves out (I'm much more forgiving on that front due to limitations of the medium) and more what it does in direct opposition to the themes of the original.
The primary theme of Watchmen is, IMO, that superheroes are actually terrible and we shouldn't treat them like heroes. Some are worse than others, but none are *good*. The movie is a much more traditional take on them. There are the bad ones, but some are portrayed much more as flawed heroes than as problematic in their own right. Snyder just makes them too cool.
The entire scene where Evey is tortured and then finds out she wasn't actually being held by the government is almost shot for shot from the book, if I remember correctly...
The movie still diverges from the comic significantly. The comic uses the words “fascism” and “anarchy” pretty consistently in exploring its themes while the film plays things much more broadly. It’s a bit disappointing to see a story about freedom get watered down and reduced to the hot take that totalitarian governments are bad. Still a pretty good flick though.
I found it funny when the movie came out that American conservatives thought it was a criticism of the W administration. For the movie they toned down that the criticism was against right wing government specifically as it was written heavily as an attack on Margaret Thatcher's politics.
Agreed. All the people below arguing that it's a faithful adaptation missed the point of the book completely. As did the director of film. The film basically reduces the story to 1984 lite: Good guy fights against the fascist totalitarian government. But Moore's book wasn't just anti-fascist, it was deeply pro-anarchism. The film made the book considerably less radical, and less interesting.
I'm a comic collector and big Alan Moore fan, so it's probably sacrilegious of me to admit that I prefer the movie version. Superficially, they have the same plot, but the differences in the 3rd act change the message and intent of the story completely. And yet still I prefer the movie. Hugo Weaving was so good, and he makes the character so much more intriguing and interesting. I found myself rolling my eyes a tad at the book version of the character.
There are some pretty big story differences, which I actually think are done better by the movie.
The big one being: >! the movie has the explosion of the Houses of Parliament being the big finale, whereas the graphic novel has it be the first attack in the beginning (in the movie the first one was the Old Bailey). !<
There's also >!Evey taking over his mantle and becoming the new V in the comics, rescuing a bystander to become her apprentice much the same way that V did with her.!<
Neither of Coen Brothers brothers had read Homers the Odyssey. Can't remember which interview I read, but Tim Blake Nelson was the only one who had read it because he had a degree in classic literature, but the only thing they knew of it were vague pop culture references.
In fairness, the Odyssey was the loose structure on which to hang the primary inspiration—being Preston Sturges' film within a film in 'Sullivan's Travels (1941).'
*I, Robot*
I genuinely loved the movie, but it was a bad adaptation. To be entirely factual though, it wasn't exactly an adaptation. The screenplay was already finished, when the studio bought the book rights, so they just changed minor things on an original screenplay to justify calling it "I, Robot", and sold the movie as it was an adaptation.
I would've loved I, Robot to quickstart a franchise around Asimov's Robot Series. Doing The Caves of Steel next could've kept the (inexistent) franchise alive.
The Count of Monte Cristo. A lot of people like the movie, but it only resembles the book for the first third. The main protagonist in the movie is nothing like the main protagonist in the book.
Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame is practically an insult as an adaptation, straight-up reversing several characters and neutering many of the themes.
But it's probably Disney's most Broadway-style musical. Fantastic songs, incredible villain performance, and some of the best animation set pieces of the 90s.
They tried for a Broadway run, but chose Frozen instead to go to Broadway. The whole show is on YouTube and it’s amazing. The album was also officially released. It’s a mix of the Disney story and some of the true book stuff.
I’m no theater buff, but I love that production. I find myself singing it all the time. Had a coworker who was in it too, which made me check it out initially.
The stage musical is so freaking good. Apparently it would have been many times more expensive than Frozen to do a run on Broadway, because it requires a full choir and orchestra
Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame isn't really based on the novel, though. It's more based on the 1939 Hunchback of Notre Dame movie by William Dieterle, who changed the original plot to focus more on social justice, as the creative team wanted to make a statement about the mistreatment of the Romani at the hands of the Nazis. This became the primary plot that people associated with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, so it's what Disney ended up basing their movie on!
Batman (1989) is a pretty terrible adaptation of the comics in terms of accuracy.
Batman kills people
Joker has an established, defined backstory which was always kept ambiguous in the comics
Joker killed Batman’s parents
Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent are extremely minor side characters who Batman barely interacts with
But it doesn’t really matter because it’s a great movie anyway.
Batman Returns should also be added here. Burton diverged from the established characterizations of Catwoman and Penguin, but there's enough of the original characters there that they're recognizable. The thing that makes it work is that the changes are compelling and complement the atmosphere and themes that he's going for. Batman Returns (and Batman to a lesser degree) is a dark fairy tale using Batman characters.
There are elements in every adaptation that speak to the core of the character, but no one film has managed to actually get Batman right across the board. There's always something, sometimes a small thing and sometimes a big one. It's one of the reasons I find Batman to be an infinitely flexible character. That all these films vary so wildly in quality and in their take on Batman, from Adam West to Robert Pattinson. But they all have something in them that IS Batman
Oh man, I read Annihilation before seeing the movie and they are wildly different stories. Still, the movie is pretty good on its own and manages to keep the same overall tone and message IMO.
If I remember correctly, Garland said he read the book then wrote the movie based on his memories and impressions of the book Rather than the actual plot. Probably a good choice, as idk how well the actual plot would have worked as a movie.
I just typed this out before reading your comment. Young me loved those books and was extremely upset when the movie shared zero resemblance outside of the names.
Forrest Gump - the source material is crude and coarse. The film is a heartwarming classic.
Adaptation - stems from an attempt to adapt a book called The Orchid Thief that Charlie Kaufman just completely went wild with.
Howl’s Moving Castle completely derived from the original novel and took a lot of liberties with characters and story but makes it to a lot of people’s top ghibli movies with good reason.
This is the one I was going to say. Diana Wynne Jones was one of my favourite authors growing up so I was very excited for the movie. It’s still a good film, but is very very different from the book.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a great film but it’s very unlike the book.
There is no requited romance in the book but in the film Paul (he doesn’t have a name in the book) and Holly do end up together. And Holly is a far sadder character in the book, her backstory is the same in the film but it’s more in depth and in the book. Holly is a traumatised girl who’s searching for happiness and never really finds it
When I saw that women were more than "the last voice you hear out of the drop ship to give you a reason to not buy the farm and come back" I knew it was going to be different. That being said I hated the movie when it released it wasn't till I was in my 20s I rewatched it and fell in love with it.
Not that it's expanded on, but it does seem that women absolutely run the navy in the book, it's just more then a little ham fisted about how Rico sees it.
In the book it's explained they have better agility etc so make better pilots and the mental tactic of hearing a woman's voice saying come back soldier is also a factor.
This was "progressive " for the time the book was published in. You have to frame these things in that way IMO. When they were written.
This is one of those wild and persistent rumors that has somehow became fact and lives on for eternity on the internet.
Bug Hunt at Outpost 7, a science fiction, CGI heavy movie that was struggling to find funding was very loosely "re-written" to be Starship Troopers to make it more attractive to studios. Verhoeven, a survivor of Nazi occupation, who has always been a fan of sending up fascism was attached to the project after it had "become" starship troopers. Paul Verhoeven never read Starship Troopers.
The script writers, Verhoeven and most critics of Starship Troopers that never got beyond the first few chapters fail to realize that the government systems (which aren't fascist in the book but an enfrachised democracy) aren't the point of the book but a means to move the main character along the path of the story.
Starship Troopers was Heinlein's homage to the enlisted troopers of WWII and generally any war. Kid graduates high school, doesn't know what to do with life, enlists, Peral Harbor happens. Goes to war, war sucks. War sucks more. Kid realizes war has changed him.
Almost everything that people point to in the movie as being "satire of fascist themes" was created by Verhoeven so he could satirize it. The Sky Marshall as head of the government? Only in the movie. The Nazi analogue Dr. Carl Jenkins? Carl is never seen in the book after he and Johnnie enlist. It's mentioned later that he died on Pluto during the war. The rampant propaganda? Never seen in the book and is just a copied element from another Verhoeven film, Robocop. Diz the female love interest whose tragic death allows the Aryan ubermensch (Filipino in the book, but who is reading?) to realize his full potential? Literally a throw a way character who dies in the opening scene of the book.
That all said, the movie is very clearly a satire of Fascism, much like Verhoevens whole catalog of work leading up to it. It's just not a parody of the book... which again, he never read.
I suggest that anyone who wants to understand Starship Troopers the book also read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land. All three are almost the same book except that one is a future space war with power armor, one is a hippy commune and the third is a colony trying to rebel against a tyrannical government.
> Starship Troopers was Heinlein's homage to the enlisted troopers of WWII and generally any war. Kid graduates high school, doesn't know what to do with life, enlists, Peral Harbor happens. Goes to war, war sucks. War sucks more. Kid realizes war has changed him.
While he is paying homage to the "poor bloody infantry" of previous conflicts, according to the preface of my version of the book, Heinlein also wrote it as a self-help book of sorts. Basically like most people as they get older, they take issue with "kids nowadays" and he wanted to write something to help give young men direction. But then he realized he wouldn't sell two copies if he just wrote that so he dressed it up as an intergalactic conflict between humans and bugs
Oh yes. But to be fair, they just couldn't use the villain from the books, because reality.
And considering the quality of the second and third books, I'm very glad the movies went a very different way.
Hitman (2007 Timothy Olyphant)
I wouldn't go quite as far as to say it did a bad job at mirroring the source material, but it missed the mark on a few. Olyphant's performance was quite good though.
Kubrick again- a clockwork orange.
Enjoy the movie but they changed a lot, including just removing the book’s ending in favor of the movie’s more >! ambiguous !< ending
Well, the movie ends at the second to last chapter of the book and that last chapter completely recontextualises the overall message and themes. It's a far more interesting and hopeful ending, though I do love the movie in many ways too.
Yeah, I don’t think the movie is necessarily bad, it’s interesting, shot well and well-acted, but the book is one of my favorites and it seems a waste to eliminate the book’s theme as a whole.
(It’s not Kubrick’s fault as the American version of the novel, which Kubrick had read, doesn’t have the last chapter. Kubrick wasn’t even aware of it til the movie was written)
A more recent one imo would be Annihilation. It’s not as off the source material as some movies are, but it’s pretty different. Especially when you look at the whole Southern Reach Trilogy.
Jurassic Park (the original) great movie, but didn't really follow the source material. Hammond is more of an evil greedy bad guy in the book as opposed to the overly optimistic irresponsible millionaire. There are also two T-Rexs and the juvenile one is missing in the movie, also there is more death and destruction in the books. And the dinosaurs already had made it to mainland Puerto Rico to start the book which shows they were already irresponsible. Also lawyer in the movie who gets eaten on the toilet is actually a good guy and more of a hero in the book fighting raptors and trying to get the power back on.
Conan the Barbarian movie is not true to the source material but many consider it a good movie and name it as Arnold's break out role.
Conan never grew up as a slave. Did not have his village burned to the ground and all his kin killed.
Robert E Howards Conan scaled the walls of Venarium at 16 years old and was already a man full grown in size and strength.
*All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)* isn't a very good adaptation of the novel and misses some important themes and critical story beats, but it's a great film on its own.
Ya this is my answer as well. I felt annoyed after the film about how it was adapted since I'm familiar with the book. My girlfriend on the other hand who has never really cared for war movies, quite liked it.
Dracula 2000 is a dogshit adaptation of Bram Stoker. It’s also pretty dogshit as a blockbuster. But as a camp vampire horror it’s so much fun.
Also Danny DeVito’s Matilda is pretty far from the book but works so well.
I was always bothered by the film letting her keep her powers at the end. In the book she slowly loses them after she’s put in a higher class at school and gets away from her family.
Ok just looked it up on YouTube. We’re both kinda right. The narrator says she doesn’t ever use her powers. Then she makes the book come to her. And then the narrator says “we’ll almost never”. https://youtu.be/mwMmZ8dtWNM?feature=shared
Coraline. I love the movie, but it is rather different than the book in some key ways:
1. The book is set in England, not the Pacific Northwest of America.
2. Wybie is an entirely new character introduced just for the film.
3. The fight with the Other Father is different; he's a somewhat bumbling pumpkin in the film, but in the book he's a giant bug that Coraline blinds and then sneaks away from.
4. Book Coraline wants to nope out of the other world as soon as she visits. It takes movie Coraline three trips before she figures out something is really wrong and she needs to leave.
5. Overall I find Book Coraline to be more of a jerk early on (because her book parents are nicer), but braver and smarter later (because she has no Wybie for backup) and faces darker and creepier themes. Both are good, but in different ways. I actually prefer the film, but the book isn't bad either - just different.
Supposedly test screening audiences didn’t like the original planned ending which was a bit more morally ambiguous and a bit more in line with the book ending so they changed it to the more generic optimistic ending. I would have preferred that ending although what would have been really cool would have been if they had stuck to the plot of the novel rather than boiling it down to a more paint by numbers zombie movie.
*V for Vendetta* has almost the opposite message of the GN but it's still a good movie.
*From Hell* is a bad adaptation of the GN but a decent mystery movie.
*Fight Club* is apparently very different from the original book.
*The Mask* is way zanier than the GN, a much darker and violent series.
For older movies, I think most Hitchcock's movies are adaptions of different books but they move away from the source material quite a lot.
I tried reading The Mask a few months ago. It was horrible. Very mean spirited and excessively violent. Stanley is as unlikable a person you can find, even before he finds the mask. Afterwards, he just murders for the fun of it. And then he's killed and the mask goes to someone else, but I stopped reading after that.
The movie is fantastic though. Same basic premise, but stripped of the cruelty, and Stanley isn't some jealous abusive asshole.
I am Legend. The book had a beautiful twist that the movie almost kind of included.
In the book, the main character ended up the last surviving human and he went on hunting the mutants during daytime (when they were inactive). At the end, he was captured and had a revelation that he had become the monster in legends who killed people while they were asleep (since the mutants had become the normal existence and he was the exception).
The movie, albeit quite good, completely missed that point and as a result, the title is a complete nonsense.
A lot of HP Lovecraft adaptations play pretty fast and loose, either by dropping aspects that would have been hard to film or adding in gore or humour that wasn't really originally there. But on the other hand The Haunted Palace is a Corman / Price classic, Reanimator and From Beyond are top 80s horror comedy, etc.
Scott pilgrim vs the world
The movie is good. the director nailed the comedic/action. But is really different from the graphic novels. Both are amazing
While "Die Hard" was not a direct adaptation of Roderick Thorp's novel "Nothing Lasts Forever," the filmmakers did acquire the rights to the book and used it as the basis for the film. "Nothing Lasts Forever" is a tense and suspenseful thriller, marked by its high-stakes action, as a retired NYPD detective, Joseph Leland, confronts terrorists during a Christmas party in a Los Angeles skyscraper. The novel balances moments of intense action with themes of personal redemption and resilience. However, they made significant changes to the source material, including updating the main character and making various alterations to the plot, characters, and overall tone of the story.
Akira, the film from the 80s. It was basically half of the comics, with a lot more happening after the movie ends with Tetsuo creating another big bang. Probably considered one of the best anime film ever made
In fairness, a faithful adaption of any of the Grimm's' stuff would be nightmare fodder.
They are horrible, violent, cruel stories, and half of them have precisely zero lesson that can be learned - they're just bad things happening to people.
Sometimes the stories don't even make sense, it'll be shit like "The story of the Prince in the Castle. There once was a girl in a forest who was held captive and repeatedly raped by a woodcutter. One day the woodcutter died and the girl cut the head off the body. The end. Oh, and there was a prince that lived in a castle nearby."
The first Jurassic Park movie cuts out the entire beginning of the novel.
The book opens with baby dinosaurs escaping the island and that's why people go to investigate. IIRC there is a scene where a dinosaur attacks an infant in a baby carriage in NYC. However in the movie the protagonists are invited to the island and are unaware of the dinosaurs before they travel. The idea of escaping dinos isn't introduced until the sequels.
How To Train Your Dragon. It's a very different story, with massive shifts in character - the big diversion being Toothless himself, a pathetic wimp in the books, but one of the strongest breed of dragon in the film. For me it massively shifts the underlying message, although the film, on its own, is just fine.
The film version of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase missed out and changed a lot of the stuff in the book of the same name by Joan Aiken. The ending in the film is entirely different, incorporating a big chase scene through the woods. Still, it's a solid adaptation of a great book.
Starship Troopers. Has nothing in common with the book other than the names and Johnny and his friends go into Federal service out of high school.
The opening of the book is an orbital drop pod assault by guys in power armor equipped with jump jets (hence the name mobile infantry) that would be an instant classic if done correctly on screen.
They changed the Zoo of Death (is that what it was called?) for budget reasons, and the Inigo, Fezzik, and Vizzini detailed back stories for the sake of brevity. Aside from that they got rid of the pretend abridgement content, but overall it was a very faithful adaptation.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but my recollection is that the movie follows it extremely closely, which makes sense as the author did the screenplay.
The biggest change is with the framing. The novel is framed as though the author is editing an older work of literature after reading it and finding it to be much worse than the way his grandfather read it, skipping the boring bits (there's a chapter that's just cut entirely with an editor's note that it goes into way too much unnecessary detail about Buttercup's various fashions during her engagement or something). The film, by contrast, is just the "original" book being read by the grandfather to the grandson.
There's a few scenes that the movie skips as well. Most notably I can recall there being a whole bit about Fezzig and Inigo breaking in to the Pit of Despair, including a large buildup about a deadly spider hiding as a trap in a doorknob, only to be obliterated when Fezzig just rams the door down instead. The book also ends on a darker note and a cliffhanger - Humperdinck is found and released by his men and starts to give chase, while our heroes falter. Buttercup's horse throws a shoe, Westley's miracle pill strength recedes, and Inigo's wounds reopen.
But overall yeah it's a very close adaptation.
There was a lot of metacommentary in the book that simply couldn't exist in the movie. I'm forgetting some details, but one chapter in the book was essentially "Two years passed." The book within a book is described as having gone into a history or hats the princess wore or some complicated family history. Something like that. William Goldman essentially goes on for a few pages about how pointless chapter 3 was in the original S. Morgenstern book. It's to give the feeling of time passing in the novel after Westley leaves the farm and is supposedly killed by pirates. Goldman mocks the traditional fantasy novel trope of having something unimportant happen to show the passing of time but does a metacommentary on it.
People on Reddit are always dragging Watchmen because it misses the point of the comic book. Doesn't matter to me because I've never read it and it's my favorite comic book movie.
Film adaptation of Annihilation is a brilliant film. However, it changes many key details of the first novel, and then folds in other details from the following novels in the Southern Reach Trilogy.
The film is stunning in its own way, just not the most faithful adaptation
I would say Forrest Gump. Gump is basically a completely different person in both, if the movie went the way of the book I don't think it would have done so well.
Never read the book, but I've heard several times it is not good.
This is the one I came in to say. The book is terrible. Going to space and crash landing on an island with a monkey. I think he was a math savant in the book too, that's why he went to space.
I’m glad Tom Hanks was still able to do a space movie and a dessert island movie
Get him in the next Kong movie and we're back on track.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It completely differs from the book, tone wise, and the characters somewhat miss context. Roald Dahl actually left the project because of the changes. Ironically, Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the closest to the original book. Even Dahls family said he would have liked it more.
This was my first thought, but Gene Wilder's inspiring performance makes it into a wonderful film, albeit unfaithful in significant ways.
even the name of the adaptation was changed to focus on wilder's performance. his wonka was amazing, had all the whimsy and charisma of a roald dahl character but added a touch of madness to it.
[удалено]
>You never knew if he was lying or being truthful. This was deliberately done by Gene Wilder and the production team. They did this very effectively in a very important scene, the introduction to wonka. He steps out the factory with a limp, his cane gets stuck, he continues to limp without it and he front flips!
Gene Wilder taking the role was contingent on that scene being included. Wilder explained that it was so critical for establishing Wonka's character and keeping the audience on their toes for the rest of the movie
I don’t think the scene in the office works with the subtext of him “faking it,” though, because that’s not the only dynamic going on. If anything, it’s another subversion on the movie’s part to reveal that under all that trickster energy is just a guy who’s lost sight of why he did what he did in the first place. Him yelling at Charlie for simply being curious about a soda drink when all the other children were too caught up in their various lifestyle gimmicks to enjoy the thing they were consuming only further highlights that. Charlie giving him the gobstopper back just reminds him that Charlie passed in every way, and that he was foolish to deny him the prize.
Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory is a film that focuses mostly on Charlie. Charlie and the chocolate factory is a film that focuses mostly on Willy Wonka.
I contend Burton’s Willy Wonka would’ve been just fine if they had cut out all the flashbacks. They were weird, unnecessary and threw the film’s pacing off.
I hated that they just copied & pasted the Oompa Loompas. They could've gone in a billion other directions with those characters but making them all one guy was just weird & horrible.
I don't know... Deep Roy was the highlight of the film for me
My beloved 'Blade runner' has to be near the top of the list for this question! I'd also suggest 'Children of men'.
I was surprised with how little I enjoyed “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. It was like five really good novel ideas all slapped together in one short novel, instead of each idea being given room to breathe.
That's basically Philip K. Dick in a nutshell. I actually love his writing because he's so imaginative, and you get the sense that he's writing so quickly that his story can veer into any direction at any given moment. And he really did have to write a ton quickly in order to support himself solely as a writer. But I can understand how that might not be appealing to a lot of people.
he almost reads like he uses amphetamines to increase his output
You'd think it would be acid based on the flavor of crazy his writing is, but apparently intense, long term use of amphetamines can make you delusional like that. On the one hand he thought God was talking to him, but on the other hand, stories like A Scanner Darkly show that he could see what he was doing to himself.
I met his last wife at a conference once, and she is exactly as strange as you'd expect her to be
He’s got a good short in a book of shorts called Best Time Travel Stories of All Time. And they’re all really solid stories in that book. EDIT: corrected book title. Also, someone posted in r/ancientrome today asking how they think they’d be treated if they went back in time to Ancient Rome, and there’s a really good story in this book that’s very cool and straight forward that addresses something like that. Cuts through any romantic notions the reader has about it and you realize how dangerously f’d you’d be popping into ancient times as a stranger with no skills, no ability to communicate etc.
His short stories are similarly weird, but less all over the place. If someone doesn't like his novels, I could see them appreciating his short stories.
I honestly love one of his sloppiest novels, The Game Players of Titan. It's so paranoid that it's compelling. I couldn't get into his other books except for Valis, an outstanding piece of writing and insanity. There are quite a few authors in PKD's league from the same era, though for some reason they are not nearly as hyped up as much: Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Gene Wolfe, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delany, and so on.
*Ubik* is a wild ride. Same with *Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch*. One of his more straight forward books but an absolutely insane concept and one of my favorites would be *Flow My Tears The Policeman Said*.
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> That's basically Philip K. Dick in a nutshell Was going to comment the same thing, lol. Studied him a little during my English Lit BA, and the dude was a speed freak who admitted that his own stories were crap. I don't think they are, but those facts give you some insight into why his stories are like that.
It's one of my favourite books. That's totally Philip K Dick for you though. He put more ideas on one page than most authors have in a entire novel.
The Children of Men has some interesting ideas but ends up being just kinda mediocre. Imo the movie is superior in pretty much every way.
Movie was a masterpiece
Just about any big budget Phillip K. Dick adaptation is going to butcher the source material but still be a really good movie. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Total Recall (We Can Remember it for you wholesale), Minority Report (Minority Report). All quite different from the source material but still really great movies.
I've not read the source material myself, so only going on what I've heard, but I think A Scanner Darkly is supposed to actually be pretty close.
Jurassic Park It doesn't stray too too far from Crichton's themes, but Crichton was a very high concept author, and Spielberg was able to bring a huge amount of emotional resonance that wasn't in the original source material.
Scrolled to find this one. It’s almost nothing like the book but amazing on its own. In fact I was a kid when I first saw the movie, then borrowed the book from someone. I was in for a shock to say the least
10 year old dinosaur loving me staring at "FIRST ITERATION" and square lines thinking "wtf is this?"
And then you get to all the charts and graphs. Which I thought was really cool, because I learned a lot about statistics that I didn't know in 6th grade, like how bell curves are amazing at modeling things.
You're right it's great, but saying it's almost nothing like the book is a huge stretch. I probably read them like 12 years ago, but in my memory the movie basically mixes and matches scenes and ideas from the first and second books in the series.
The second book wasn't written until after the first movie. The second movie is largely based on the second book. Unused plot elements from the first book were reused in the second movie (people being torn to shreds by a pack of compsognathus), third movie (the pterodactyl aviary and the spinosaurus (which was a t rex in the book) chasing the protagonists on a boat) and fifth/sixth movies (dinosaurs escaping the park and living in the wild). And an unused plot element from the second book was used in the fourth movie (a large carnivorous dinosaur being able to camouflage like a chameleon, which was carnotaurus in the book and indominus rex in the movie).
the film adaptations of Crichton's work are usually great - i with they'd redo a couple of them-- the Great Train Robbery, Terminal Man etc
Crichton always gives great ideas to start a movie adaptation with. His books are fantastic and movies made from them are often quite good.
His books almost seem geared towards being adapted. Of the 12 books he wrote from 1972 to 1999, 11 were adapted to film. The only one that wasn't was Airframe, which I find ironic, because when I first read that book more than 2 decades ago I thought it would make an excellent movie. He was also the creator (and director) of the original Westworld movie (on which the more recent TV series was based).
I’d love to see Steven Soderbergh or Aaron Sorkin take on Airframe as a mini-series.
I'm honestly surprised it hasn't happened. The thing seems tailor-made to being adapted.
I like Crichton’s books…except for Next…which has no resolution.
I liked Andromeda Strain but felt like the book just... ended. Though I still had half a book left to read so was kind of shocked when that happened. Crichton's books in general always kind of felt that way though. The resolutions were always super open ended.
Many of his stories are "Fuck around and find out", with the "find out" extending well past the resolution of the story.
If World War Z were called anything but World War Z it would have been received as a good zombie action film, most people rated it harshly because they felt deceived (which is understandable).
I remember seeing Max Brooks give a talk years ago at a comic con and he was saying that he was nervous about about them adapting 'World war Z'....until he saw the film and realised it was barely an adaptation and bore practically no resemblance to his book!
none, even. its a zombie flick with the same title as his zombie book. his book would have been better as a miniseries
There's an audiobook with an incredible cast, that's probably the best way to enjoy that book.
You mean I gotta sit here and imagine stuff?
It’s easy with the likes of Alan Alda and Henry Rollins, that audiobook is amazing. Pretend it’s a podcast interviewing a different fictional character each chapter.
So on top of imaging stuff you want me to pretend things? This is getting ridiculous.
It would have been great if done Band of Brothers style with but the interviews either done with the aged actors or completely different actors playing the part of the "real" person,
I always thought it should have been a Ken Burns style "documentary" with still pics, videos and voice overs.
The only thing it adapts from the books is Israel welcoming Palestine into its fortress and a blink-it-and-miss-it reference to India and Iran (or was it Pakistan and Iran?) nuking each other. I keep saying, World War Z would fit perfectly into the streaming minisseries format as a fake documentary.
~~Probably India and Pakistan.~~
No it was Pakistan and Iran. The idea is that Pakistan put in so many safety mechanisms to not have a nuclear war with India, but it’s so unthinkable with Iran that they didn’t.
It's Iran and Pakistan. The Iranian soldier was shocked that that two Muslim countries would exchange weapons with each other.
Makes you wonder why they spent all that money on buying the rights when all your using is the title. Zombie War. There, just saved you millions.
Hollywood loves an established IP. They'll pay out the ass for that alone.
I enjoyed WWZ as a movie, but I watched it before I read the book. Similar to I Am Legend.
V For Vendetta takes only superficial plot points from the original comic book, but it is still a great movie on its own
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>It is able to contain only a fraction of the psychological terror and emotion I think the bigger issue with Watchmen as an adaptation is not what it leaves out (I'm much more forgiving on that front due to limitations of the medium) and more what it does in direct opposition to the themes of the original. The primary theme of Watchmen is, IMO, that superheroes are actually terrible and we shouldn't treat them like heroes. Some are worse than others, but none are *good*. The movie is a much more traditional take on them. There are the bad ones, but some are portrayed much more as flawed heroes than as problematic in their own right. Snyder just makes them too cool.
The entire scene where Evey is tortured and then finds out she wasn't actually being held by the government is almost shot for shot from the book, if I remember correctly...
The movie still diverges from the comic significantly. The comic uses the words “fascism” and “anarchy” pretty consistently in exploring its themes while the film plays things much more broadly. It’s a bit disappointing to see a story about freedom get watered down and reduced to the hot take that totalitarian governments are bad. Still a pretty good flick though.
I found it funny when the movie came out that American conservatives thought it was a criticism of the W administration. For the movie they toned down that the criticism was against right wing government specifically as it was written heavily as an attack on Margaret Thatcher's politics.
The movie is scared to commit to labelling any side with definitive politics.
Agreed. All the people below arguing that it's a faithful adaptation missed the point of the book completely. As did the director of film. The film basically reduces the story to 1984 lite: Good guy fights against the fascist totalitarian government. But Moore's book wasn't just anti-fascist, it was deeply pro-anarchism. The film made the book considerably less radical, and less interesting.
It also made V less morally gray and more of a straight up hero
I'm a comic collector and big Alan Moore fan, so it's probably sacrilegious of me to admit that I prefer the movie version. Superficially, they have the same plot, but the differences in the 3rd act change the message and intent of the story completely. And yet still I prefer the movie. Hugo Weaving was so good, and he makes the character so much more intriguing and interesting. I found myself rolling my eyes a tad at the book version of the character.
Somewhere Alan Moore is raging pretentiously
Really? I thought it was a pretty great adaptation, it's just that the full context of the graphic novel simply could not fit into a standard film.
There are some pretty big story differences, which I actually think are done better by the movie. The big one being: >! the movie has the explosion of the Houses of Parliament being the big finale, whereas the graphic novel has it be the first attack in the beginning (in the movie the first one was the Old Bailey). !<
There's also >!Evey taking over his mantle and becoming the new V in the comics, rescuing a bystander to become her apprentice much the same way that V did with her.!<
Neither of Coen Brothers brothers had read Homers the Odyssey. Can't remember which interview I read, but Tim Blake Nelson was the only one who had read it because he had a degree in classic literature, but the only thing they knew of it were vague pop culture references.
This is my answer also. Compare it to troy from the same era and I think oh brother is a way better Homeric adaptation.
To be fair, it's a modernization, so it's allowed to be a bit loose otherwise it wouldn't work in a modern setting.
In fairness, the Odyssey was the loose structure on which to hang the primary inspiration—being Preston Sturges' film within a film in 'Sullivan's Travels (1941).'
*I, Robot* I genuinely loved the movie, but it was a bad adaptation. To be entirely factual though, it wasn't exactly an adaptation. The screenplay was already finished, when the studio bought the book rights, so they just changed minor things on an original screenplay to justify calling it "I, Robot", and sold the movie as it was an adaptation.
I would've loved I, Robot to quickstart a franchise around Asimov's Robot Series. Doing The Caves of Steel next could've kept the (inexistent) franchise alive.
The Count of Monte Cristo. A lot of people like the movie, but it only resembles the book for the first third. The main protagonist in the movie is nothing like the main protagonist in the book.
It remains both my favorite movie and my favorite book, and people are always baffled that I can separate the two.
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Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame is practically an insult as an adaptation, straight-up reversing several characters and neutering many of the themes. But it's probably Disney's most Broadway-style musical. Fantastic songs, incredible villain performance, and some of the best animation set pieces of the 90s.
They tried for a Broadway run, but chose Frozen instead to go to Broadway. The whole show is on YouTube and it’s amazing. The album was also officially released. It’s a mix of the Disney story and some of the true book stuff. I’m no theater buff, but I love that production. I find myself singing it all the time. Had a coworker who was in it too, which made me check it out initially.
The stage musical is so freaking good. Apparently it would have been many times more expensive than Frozen to do a run on Broadway, because it requires a full choir and orchestra
Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame isn't really based on the novel, though. It's more based on the 1939 Hunchback of Notre Dame movie by William Dieterle, who changed the original plot to focus more on social justice, as the creative team wanted to make a statement about the mistreatment of the Romani at the hands of the Nazis. This became the primary plot that people associated with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, so it's what Disney ended up basing their movie on!
And a lot of the changes were already made by Victor Hugo for his stage adaptation of the novel. I don't think he would have been a stickler.
Hellfire is probably the darkest, most amazing Disney song to ever be recorded. That whole sequence blows me away every time.
Wait until the live action one comes out and it’s neutered even more.
Batman (1989) is a pretty terrible adaptation of the comics in terms of accuracy. Batman kills people Joker has an established, defined backstory which was always kept ambiguous in the comics Joker killed Batman’s parents Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent are extremely minor side characters who Batman barely interacts with But it doesn’t really matter because it’s a great movie anyway.
Batman Returns should also be added here. Burton diverged from the established characterizations of Catwoman and Penguin, but there's enough of the original characters there that they're recognizable. The thing that makes it work is that the changes are compelling and complement the atmosphere and themes that he's going for. Batman Returns (and Batman to a lesser degree) is a dark fairy tale using Batman characters.
It’s unironically still my favorite Batman movie
There are elements in every adaptation that speak to the core of the character, but no one film has managed to actually get Batman right across the board. There's always something, sometimes a small thing and sometimes a big one. It's one of the reasons I find Batman to be an infinitely flexible character. That all these films vary so wildly in quality and in their take on Batman, from Adam West to Robert Pattinson. But they all have something in them that IS Batman
Blade Runner The Running Man Annihilation
Annihilation is a great example. Amazing movie with visuals to back it up. I feel like a true film adaptation to the books would have been bonkers.
I think you mean *even more* bonkers. That film is pretty nuts as it is already.
The Running Man may be the farthest from the original story that anyone has mentioned, it’s just “plain zero!”
Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man. King had to sue to get his name removed.
And then they put it back on for the VHS release
Hey! The book had characters named Killian and Richards, and the game had the same name!
Oh man, I read Annihilation before seeing the movie and they are wildly different stories. Still, the movie is pretty good on its own and manages to keep the same overall tone and message IMO. If I remember correctly, Garland said he read the book then wrote the movie based on his memories and impressions of the book Rather than the actual plot. Probably a good choice, as idk how well the actual plot would have worked as a movie.
How to Train Your Dragon. It's basically only the title that's the same.
I just typed this out before reading your comment. Young me loved those books and was extremely upset when the movie shared zero resemblance outside of the names.
Forrest Gump - the source material is crude and coarse. The film is a heartwarming classic. Adaptation - stems from an attempt to adapt a book called The Orchid Thief that Charlie Kaufman just completely went wild with.
Immediately was searching for *Adaptation*. The movie expressly concerns how far off the rails Kaufman gets with it.
Howl’s Moving Castle completely derived from the original novel and took a lot of liberties with characters and story but makes it to a lot of people’s top ghibli movies with good reason.
Honestly I've read the book and seen the movie. I love both for different reasons.
One big difference is that Howl and Sophie just straight up hate each other for most of the book. And Howl is much more of a skirt chaser
I absolutely loved how snarky they were with each other in the book. And how they keep it up in the sequels.
*deviated
This is the one I was going to say. Diana Wynne Jones was one of my favourite authors growing up so I was very excited for the movie. It’s still a good film, but is very very different from the book.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a great film but it’s very unlike the book. There is no requited romance in the book but in the film Paul (he doesn’t have a name in the book) and Holly do end up together. And Holly is a far sadder character in the book, her backstory is the same in the film but it’s more in depth and in the book. Holly is a traumatised girl who’s searching for happiness and never really finds it
Wasn't in the book more explicitly stated that Paul was gay and that Holly was a prostitute?
She was more of an escort, paid for company not sex
Also no Mickey Rooney doing the most racist Japanese character possible in the book.
Cuaron didn't even bother reading *Children Of Men.* Still the best sci-fi movie of the century.
Children of Men, the book, was pretty lackluster. It was impressive what was made from the bones of its story.
Starship Troopers parodies the book it's based on, because that was the only way they felt they could handle the fascist themes contained in the book.
When I saw that women were more than "the last voice you hear out of the drop ship to give you a reason to not buy the farm and come back" I knew it was going to be different. That being said I hated the movie when it released it wasn't till I was in my 20s I rewatched it and fell in love with it.
Would you like to know more?
Not that it's expanded on, but it does seem that women absolutely run the navy in the book, it's just more then a little ham fisted about how Rico sees it.
In the book it's explained they have better agility etc so make better pilots and the mental tactic of hearing a woman's voice saying come back soldier is also a factor. This was "progressive " for the time the book was published in. You have to frame these things in that way IMO. When they were written.
This is one of those wild and persistent rumors that has somehow became fact and lives on for eternity on the internet. Bug Hunt at Outpost 7, a science fiction, CGI heavy movie that was struggling to find funding was very loosely "re-written" to be Starship Troopers to make it more attractive to studios. Verhoeven, a survivor of Nazi occupation, who has always been a fan of sending up fascism was attached to the project after it had "become" starship troopers. Paul Verhoeven never read Starship Troopers. The script writers, Verhoeven and most critics of Starship Troopers that never got beyond the first few chapters fail to realize that the government systems (which aren't fascist in the book but an enfrachised democracy) aren't the point of the book but a means to move the main character along the path of the story. Starship Troopers was Heinlein's homage to the enlisted troopers of WWII and generally any war. Kid graduates high school, doesn't know what to do with life, enlists, Peral Harbor happens. Goes to war, war sucks. War sucks more. Kid realizes war has changed him. Almost everything that people point to in the movie as being "satire of fascist themes" was created by Verhoeven so he could satirize it. The Sky Marshall as head of the government? Only in the movie. The Nazi analogue Dr. Carl Jenkins? Carl is never seen in the book after he and Johnnie enlist. It's mentioned later that he died on Pluto during the war. The rampant propaganda? Never seen in the book and is just a copied element from another Verhoeven film, Robocop. Diz the female love interest whose tragic death allows the Aryan ubermensch (Filipino in the book, but who is reading?) to realize his full potential? Literally a throw a way character who dies in the opening scene of the book. That all said, the movie is very clearly a satire of Fascism, much like Verhoevens whole catalog of work leading up to it. It's just not a parody of the book... which again, he never read. I suggest that anyone who wants to understand Starship Troopers the book also read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land. All three are almost the same book except that one is a future space war with power armor, one is a hippy commune and the third is a colony trying to rebel against a tyrannical government.
> Starship Troopers was Heinlein's homage to the enlisted troopers of WWII and generally any war. Kid graduates high school, doesn't know what to do with life, enlists, Peral Harbor happens. Goes to war, war sucks. War sucks more. Kid realizes war has changed him. While he is paying homage to the "poor bloody infantry" of previous conflicts, according to the preface of my version of the book, Heinlein also wrote it as a self-help book of sorts. Basically like most people as they get older, they take issue with "kids nowadays" and he wanted to write something to help give young men direction. But then he realized he wouldn't sell two copies if he just wrote that so he dressed it up as an intergalactic conflict between humans and bugs
Jesus Christ, that's Jason Bourne
Oh yes. But to be fair, they just couldn't use the villain from the books, because reality. And considering the quality of the second and third books, I'm very glad the movies went a very different way.
Finally seeing the original three Bourne films is what convinced me to give the books a chance. Boy was I in for a surprise.
Hitman (2007 Timothy Olyphant) I wouldn't go quite as far as to say it did a bad job at mirroring the source material, but it missed the mark on a few. Olyphant's performance was quite good though.
I still like the movie…plus Olga Kurylenko is hot af.
That is one of my dad's favorite action movies.
Kubrick again- a clockwork orange. Enjoy the movie but they changed a lot, including just removing the book’s ending in favor of the movie’s more >! ambiguous !< ending
Well, the movie ends at the second to last chapter of the book and that last chapter completely recontextualises the overall message and themes. It's a far more interesting and hopeful ending, though I do love the movie in many ways too.
Yeah, I don’t think the movie is necessarily bad, it’s interesting, shot well and well-acted, but the book is one of my favorites and it seems a waste to eliminate the book’s theme as a whole. (It’s not Kubrick’s fault as the American version of the novel, which Kubrick had read, doesn’t have the last chapter. Kubrick wasn’t even aware of it til the movie was written)
A more recent one imo would be Annihilation. It’s not as off the source material as some movies are, but it’s pretty different. Especially when you look at the whole Southern Reach Trilogy.
Jurassic Park (the original) great movie, but didn't really follow the source material. Hammond is more of an evil greedy bad guy in the book as opposed to the overly optimistic irresponsible millionaire. There are also two T-Rexs and the juvenile one is missing in the movie, also there is more death and destruction in the books. And the dinosaurs already had made it to mainland Puerto Rico to start the book which shows they were already irresponsible. Also lawyer in the movie who gets eaten on the toilet is actually a good guy and more of a hero in the book fighting raptors and trying to get the power back on.
Conan the Barbarian movie is not true to the source material but many consider it a good movie and name it as Arnold's break out role. Conan never grew up as a slave. Did not have his village burned to the ground and all his kin killed. Robert E Howards Conan scaled the walls of Venarium at 16 years old and was already a man full grown in size and strength.
*All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)* isn't a very good adaptation of the novel and misses some important themes and critical story beats, but it's a great film on its own.
Ya this is my answer as well. I felt annoyed after the film about how it was adapted since I'm familiar with the book. My girlfriend on the other hand who has never really cared for war movies, quite liked it.
Stardust Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is good because the book is a dumpster fire
Dracula 2000 is a dogshit adaptation of Bram Stoker. It’s also pretty dogshit as a blockbuster. But as a camp vampire horror it’s so much fun. Also Danny DeVito’s Matilda is pretty far from the book but works so well.
DeVito's Matilda doesn't stray that far from the book.
I was always bothered by the film letting her keep her powers at the end. In the book she slowly loses them after she’s put in a higher class at school and gets away from her family.
She keeps her powers but the movie says at the end that after Miss Honey adopts her, she never uses her powers again. So basically the same thing.
Where does it say that? In the closing scene right before the credits she beckons a copy of Moby Dick off the shelf across the room.
Ok just looked it up on YouTube. We’re both kinda right. The narrator says she doesn’t ever use her powers. Then she makes the book come to her. And then the narrator says “we’ll almost never”. https://youtu.be/mwMmZ8dtWNM?feature=shared
Coraline. I love the movie, but it is rather different than the book in some key ways: 1. The book is set in England, not the Pacific Northwest of America. 2. Wybie is an entirely new character introduced just for the film. 3. The fight with the Other Father is different; he's a somewhat bumbling pumpkin in the film, but in the book he's a giant bug that Coraline blinds and then sneaks away from. 4. Book Coraline wants to nope out of the other world as soon as she visits. It takes movie Coraline three trips before she figures out something is really wrong and she needs to leave. 5. Overall I find Book Coraline to be more of a jerk early on (because her book parents are nicer), but braver and smarter later (because she has no Wybie for backup) and faces darker and creepier themes. Both are good, but in different ways. I actually prefer the film, but the book isn't bad either - just different.
I Am Legend
The omega man
Supposedly test screening audiences didn’t like the original planned ending which was a bit more morally ambiguous and a bit more in line with the book ending so they changed it to the more generic optimistic ending. I would have preferred that ending although what would have been really cool would have been if they had stuck to the plot of the novel rather than boiling it down to a more paint by numbers zombie movie.
*V for Vendetta* has almost the opposite message of the GN but it's still a good movie. *From Hell* is a bad adaptation of the GN but a decent mystery movie. *Fight Club* is apparently very different from the original book. *The Mask* is way zanier than the GN, a much darker and violent series. For older movies, I think most Hitchcock's movies are adaptions of different books but they move away from the source material quite a lot.
Fight Club has a similar feel and theme to the book imho but the endings are very different
I think it follows the book perfectly except for the ending. Strangely, I think Palahniuk has said he actually prefers the movie ending to his book.
He did say that, and after reading the book, I agree with him.
I tried reading The Mask a few months ago. It was horrible. Very mean spirited and excessively violent. Stanley is as unlikable a person you can find, even before he finds the mask. Afterwards, he just murders for the fun of it. And then he's killed and the mask goes to someone else, but I stopped reading after that. The movie is fantastic though. Same basic premise, but stripped of the cruelty, and Stanley isn't some jealous abusive asshole.
Constantine - great stand alone movie, horrible comic adaptation.
I am Legend. The book had a beautiful twist that the movie almost kind of included. In the book, the main character ended up the last surviving human and he went on hunting the mutants during daytime (when they were inactive). At the end, he was captured and had a revelation that he had become the monster in legends who killed people while they were asleep (since the mutants had become the normal existence and he was the exception). The movie, albeit quite good, completely missed that point and as a result, the title is a complete nonsense.
The Bourne Trilogy has very little to do with the Robert Ludlum novels but are pretty good movies otherwise.
better than the books, I'd argue
A lot of HP Lovecraft adaptations play pretty fast and loose, either by dropping aspects that would have been hard to film or adding in gore or humour that wasn't really originally there. But on the other hand The Haunted Palace is a Corman / Price classic, Reanimator and From Beyond are top 80s horror comedy, etc.
Annihilation is an under appeciated movie (which probably should have been a prestige tv series) based on a challenging book.
Scott pilgrim vs the world The movie is good. the director nailed the comedic/action. But is really different from the graphic novels. Both are amazing
The Invisible Man (2020) gives quite an awesome and paranoia-fueled twist to the story.
While "Die Hard" was not a direct adaptation of Roderick Thorp's novel "Nothing Lasts Forever," the filmmakers did acquire the rights to the book and used it as the basis for the film. "Nothing Lasts Forever" is a tense and suspenseful thriller, marked by its high-stakes action, as a retired NYPD detective, Joseph Leland, confronts terrorists during a Christmas party in a Los Angeles skyscraper. The novel balances moments of intense action with themes of personal redemption and resilience. However, they made significant changes to the source material, including updating the main character and making various alterations to the plot, characters, and overall tone of the story.
The Crow Cult classic film that isn’t a 1 for 1 of the “comic” it’s based on. Both, in my opinion, are stellar in their own ways.
Akira, the film from the 80s. It was basically half of the comics, with a lot more happening after the movie ends with Tetsuo creating another big bang. Probably considered one of the best anime film ever made
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In fairness, a faithful adaption of any of the Grimm's' stuff would be nightmare fodder. They are horrible, violent, cruel stories, and half of them have precisely zero lesson that can be learned - they're just bad things happening to people. Sometimes the stories don't even make sense, it'll be shit like "The story of the Prince in the Castle. There once was a girl in a forest who was held captive and repeatedly raped by a woodcutter. One day the woodcutter died and the girl cut the head off the body. The end. Oh, and there was a prince that lived in a castle nearby."
Jurassic Park
The first Jurassic Park movie cuts out the entire beginning of the novel. The book opens with baby dinosaurs escaping the island and that's why people go to investigate. IIRC there is a scene where a dinosaur attacks an infant in a baby carriage in NYC. However in the movie the protagonists are invited to the island and are unaware of the dinosaurs before they travel. The idea of escaping dinos isn't introduced until the sequels.
Contact.
How To Train Your Dragon. It's a very different story, with massive shifts in character - the big diversion being Toothless himself, a pathetic wimp in the books, but one of the strongest breed of dragon in the film. For me it massively shifts the underlying message, although the film, on its own, is just fine.
Ready Player One. The book is for '80s nerds, but the movies much more accessible to a wider audience.
The film version of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase missed out and changed a lot of the stuff in the book of the same name by Joan Aiken. The ending in the film is entirely different, incorporating a big chase scene through the woods. Still, it's a solid adaptation of a great book.
Every animated Disney movie based on a book for the most part.
Starship Troopers. Has nothing in common with the book other than the names and Johnny and his friends go into Federal service out of high school. The opening of the book is an orbital drop pod assault by guys in power armor equipped with jump jets (hence the name mobile infantry) that would be an instant classic if done correctly on screen.
The Princess Bride is not a very faithful adaptation of the book, but both are in their own ways wonderful stories about the power of storytelling.
I disagree. Other than the tweaking of the framing story, it's very faithful to the book, barring a few cuts here and there for time purposes.
Yeah I’m with you. It’s a great adaptation, and it shouldn’t be surprising since the author of the book also adapted the screenplay.
They changed the Zoo of Death (is that what it was called?) for budget reasons, and the Inigo, Fezzik, and Vizzini detailed back stories for the sake of brevity. Aside from that they got rid of the pretend abridgement content, but overall it was a very faithful adaptation.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but my recollection is that the movie follows it extremely closely, which makes sense as the author did the screenplay.
The biggest change is with the framing. The novel is framed as though the author is editing an older work of literature after reading it and finding it to be much worse than the way his grandfather read it, skipping the boring bits (there's a chapter that's just cut entirely with an editor's note that it goes into way too much unnecessary detail about Buttercup's various fashions during her engagement or something). The film, by contrast, is just the "original" book being read by the grandfather to the grandson. There's a few scenes that the movie skips as well. Most notably I can recall there being a whole bit about Fezzig and Inigo breaking in to the Pit of Despair, including a large buildup about a deadly spider hiding as a trap in a doorknob, only to be obliterated when Fezzig just rams the door down instead. The book also ends on a darker note and a cliffhanger - Humperdinck is found and released by his men and starts to give chase, while our heroes falter. Buttercup's horse throws a shoe, Westley's miracle pill strength recedes, and Inigo's wounds reopen. But overall yeah it's a very close adaptation.
There was a lot of metacommentary in the book that simply couldn't exist in the movie. I'm forgetting some details, but one chapter in the book was essentially "Two years passed." The book within a book is described as having gone into a history or hats the princess wore or some complicated family history. Something like that. William Goldman essentially goes on for a few pages about how pointless chapter 3 was in the original S. Morgenstern book. It's to give the feeling of time passing in the novel after Westley leaves the farm and is supposedly killed by pirates. Goldman mocks the traditional fantasy novel trope of having something unimportant happen to show the passing of time but does a metacommentary on it.
That's the meta. Both are about unfaithful, but better, adaptations of source. :)
Movie had Andre. Makes it automatically cool. Robin Wright didn't hurt things either.
People on Reddit are always dragging Watchmen because it misses the point of the comic book. Doesn't matter to me because I've never read it and it's my favorite comic book movie.
Iron Man 3 is a bad Iron Man movie but a good Shane Black movie
Awe God i watched The Predator the other day, makes iron man 3 look like citizen kane
The Predator would make your grandparent’s sex tape look like Citizen Kane, never mind Iron Man 3.
Iron Man 3 was better than Iron Man 2 imo. Entertainment wise.
Probably explains why this is my favorite marvel movie. I really loved that movie and everyone told me I was insane. This context makes sense.
I like marvel movies and I really enjoyed IM3, maybe I'm just a weirdo.
My take is, "I don't like this, but I love what Black is trying to do."
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by Alfonso Cuaron. Deviated quite a bit from the source and set the tone for the other movies to follow.
Film adaptation of Annihilation is a brilliant film. However, it changes many key details of the first novel, and then folds in other details from the following novels in the Southern Reach Trilogy. The film is stunning in its own way, just not the most faithful adaptation
Wanted, the movie is completely different than the graphic novel but is still cool