Ask Lemmy

• 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.

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

I've heard nothing but bad things about Amazon Prime's "Wheel of Time" adaptation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Hitch hiker's Guide (movie version).... what a lost opportunity.

That first Dune movie decades ago. Yikes.

Some Dean Koontz and Stephen King adaptations were pretty bad. Hideaway, Phantoms, The Dark Half, Sleepwalkers.

I hated the two made for TV Terry Pratchett adaptations of Colour of Magic and Going Postal. Like, they pissed me off so hard I couldn't sleep. Particularly Going Postal (my favorite Pratchett book), they couldn't have missed the point of it any harder even if they tried.

Starship Troopers. The book is great, but the movie is like if someone wrote a short summary of the cliffs notes of the book. I guess they both had bugs.

Put a list of Ursula Le Guin works on a wall and throw a dart at one of them. Don't know which one you threw a dart at? That's okay, because absolutely none of them have gotten good adaptations.

The only exception, extremely ironically given I'm saying this, is Tales of Earthsea. The first half is alright but I guess they lost their train of thought during the second act (their words not mine) and it became a Legend of Zelda story. Still not terrible though, I can't understand why people hate on it when the same people love Ponyo.