For me it’s definitely the Dark Tower, but the Golden Compas was also a huge letdown.
- 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.
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
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?
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.
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.
What’s so bad about enders game. I don’t remember that being a bad adaptation, but it’s been a while.
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
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.
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
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)
I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Amazon Prime’s “Wheel of Time” adaptation.
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.
I imagine they couldn’t get the rights to The Lord of the Rings in order to adapt book 1 of Shannara.
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.
I almost hear nothing good about the books themselves these days. Everyone liked them when I first got into them… 😥
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
