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submitted 11 months ago by abbadon420@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

For me it's definitely the Dark Tower, but the Golden Compas was also a huge letdown.

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[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 35 points 11 months ago
  • 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.

[-] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 7 points 11 months ago

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

[-] Phanatik@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Maultasche@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

What about the middle Dune adaptation?

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[-] Extrasvhx9he@lemmy.today 28 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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

[-] Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi 8 points 11 months ago

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)

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[-] TootSweet@lemmy.world 24 points 11 months ago

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

[-] seaQueue@lemmy.world 15 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] TwitchingCheese@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 11 months ago

I imagine they couldn’t get the rights to The Lord of the Rings in order to adapt book 1 of Shannara.

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[-] Drusas@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago

The first episode was enough for me.

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[-] IonAddis@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] BunnyKnuckles@startrek.website 17 points 11 months ago

The Princess Bride is the best movie adaptation I can think of off the top of my head. I fact, I'd argue that it was better than the book.

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[-] KepBen@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] sanguinepar@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

Was going to say the same, the BBC/HBO Dark Materials series is really excellent, beautifully made.

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[-] Drusas@kbin.social 16 points 11 months ago

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.

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[-] morphballganon@lemmy.world 15 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Fredselfish@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

The movie totally went against the novel and sucked hardcore because of it.

[-] TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

It was and will always be impossible to turn RPO into a movie, first there are the copyright issues and second the challenges are really boring to watch.

[-] morphballganon@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

That doesn't excuse swapping Wade's deliberate-servitude-to-hack-the-system with Art3mis's damsel-in-distress-happening-to-save-the-day-by-chance sequence, nor Wade's decision at the end to shut off the Oasis two days of the week (what about people who rely on the Oasis for their livelihood or for self-worth, like severely disabled people? Hello), nor him saying his friends are his "clan," something they are vehemently against in the book.

[-] hellothere@sh.itjust.works 13 points 11 months ago

I'd say Foundation, but the show has been so far away from the books since literally episode 1 that the name might as well be a coincidence.

[-] Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 9 points 11 months ago

I agree but a direct adaptation of the books would not make a good TV show.

The books are a series of vignettes spaced decades apart with no continuing characters and each is a separate short story. While they work in the written form, they would not on the screen.

[-] hellothere@sh.itjust.works 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It could be done as a series of vignettes, for example, as 6 episode series, with each series centred around each crisis. That would give you 4-5 hours - or 2.5 Mrs Doubtfires - to do what Asimov does in around 60 pages (depending on crisis).

I don't understand the argument that this is impossible to do, pretty much every film you will have ever seen will have had a shorter runtime than 5 hours, and handled all aspects of character introduction, motivation, conflict, growth, and resolution, within than time too.

I am not saying it has to be identical or a word for word adaptation - I have no issues what so ever with gender swapping Hardin - but as another poster points out, having Seldon live on (other than as recordings getting increasingly divorced from reality) directly rejects the core premise of the book, which is a refutation of the great man hypothesis.

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[-] magnetosphere@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago

I don’t have Apple TV, and I was irritated that I’d be missing Foundation. The more I hear about it, though, the less irritated I am.

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[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 4 points 11 months ago

They very much lampshade that with the whole outliers thing. Events spin off in wildly different directions.

If you want a direct translation of the books, no dice, but damn the shit they've pulled out of whole cloth with the Cleons is amazeballs.

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[-] abbadon420@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago

It feels more like an addition than an adaptation (it isn't, but it's the only perspective in which the show can be good). I'm a big fan of the books, and I'm also enjoying the show so far.

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[-] ptz@dubvee.org 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] TheDoctorDonna@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Except that the first Jurassic Park movie is only one small part of the book and they never let Hammond get eaten like he was supposed to.

Endless disappointment on that front, but I still love the movies.

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[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 13 points 11 months ago

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.

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] Omnificer@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

Way worse than break his neck, he outright accidentally shoots himself in the head.

And then it was insane that the zombies can magically tell if someone is specifically terminally ill and then will actively avoid them.

[-] lingh0e@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago

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.

Yeah. It really bugs me when people are like "it's still a good zombie movie."

It is a bad movie. Regardless of genre.

[-] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago

Tbh the book does a lot of dumb shit too

Like instead of a blind martial arts master surviving the zombies

Imo like this. This is some cringy anime shit, it felt so out of place

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[-] GyozaPower@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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

[-] YaksDC@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

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.

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[-] FlavorPacket@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] MrEff@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Funny you say that- that isn't far from how it was made. Someone wrote a spec script about a human war with space bugs, independent of starship troopers. When one of the production people read the script they brought up the point that there was a book that they remembered that was kind of like it. When they checked, no one had the film rights to it so they bought it for cheap. They then did a quick rewrite to slap in the character names and basic/cheap/easy things from the book to make more of an appeal to the book fans. Then when the director came on board he was a fan if the book but also wanted to do his own thing. So you now had at least 3 different directions the story was going and it was simply held together by the loose premise of starship troopers.

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[-] TSR55@lemm.ee 7 points 11 months ago

That first Dune movie decades ago. Yikes.

[-] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 7 points 11 months ago
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[-] CatZoomies@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Bwaz@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

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

[-] 31415926535@lemm.ee 5 points 11 months ago

The Wrinkle in Time movie, think Oprah was in it. Haven't seen it, heard it's horrendous.

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[-] 7fb2adfb45bafcc01c80@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

Battlefield Earth was my favorite book as a young teenager. Ignoring everything else about the author (which I didn't know at the time), I thought the book was brilliant (especially the first half). It touched my imagination in a way no other book had before, and I must have read it about a dozen times.

I seem to recall the book cover saying that a major motion picture was coming out soon, but I guess time is relative. For me it was about eighteen years (which was more than half my life at the time) before the movie actually came out, and that seemed like an eternity.

I wish I could say it was worth the wait. The movie was horrible -- it had bad acting, a bad script, and couldn't carry the book in only two hours.

It currently has a 3% tomatometer score at Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.5/10 at IMDB. The movie also won Worst Picture of the Decade at the 2010 Razzie Awards.

[-] TheDoctorDonna@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

To be fair, as a Sci-fi writer L.Ron was actually pretty talented. I feel like I could have actually gotten in to his writing if I hadn't only ever known him as fucking L.Ron Hubbard the idiot father of Scientology.

[-] Fillabong@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

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

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago

I really enjoy the movie Phantoms, but not because it's as good as the book. It's just a fun movie if you're into that genre. But we could definitely add almost every Stephen King adaptation to this list. Don't get me wrong--some of them I very much enjoy, but that doesn't mean they're not terrible (looking at you, The Stand (first one), Storm of the Century, and Tommyknockers).

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[-] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

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[-] BustinJiber@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

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.

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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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