Lots of movies are based on books, TV show, video games, plays, fairy tales, and so on.  Some movie versions are great.  Others suck a$$.

Name a movie & say whether you think it was/is a good or a bad adaption.

For example:  I loved the books that inspired the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, but I didn't like the movie:

...  The original was a trilogy of books, and the movie tried to cram all three books into the movie.  As a result, it lacked the depth of the original story.

...  The movie made arbitrary changes to the peculiar children, changing the abilities for no reason, losing other children altogether, and just messing things up.

...  Whole significant branches of the plot had to be sacrificed.

...  The villains had more menace in the book.

...  The movie skimped on their special effects budget.

So, I give the movie a solid "D".  Maybe a "D-".


You?

some big disappointments that quickly come to mind are:
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Dreamcatcher
The Great Gatsby
Slauterhouse Five

some movies that really got it right:
Fight Club
all the Harry Potter books
Lord of the Rings trilogy
Jurassic Park

some movies are vastly superior to source material like:
The Godfather
Goodfellas
Blade Runner

Being There with Peter Sellers and Shirley McClaine is one of my favorite all time movies. I had read the book by Jerzy Kosinsky prior to seeing it. A wonderful adaptation of the book.

A Clockwork Orange - Stanley Kubrick, another excellent adaptation and yet another movie where I had read the book first and was not disappointed.

Finally, The Man Who Fell To Earth with David Bowie. A pretty good science fiction book, not an A list story. The movie really brought it to life and was better than the book. Bowie did a good job being an alien, I believe that was his first movie.

That's all I have for books and movies. Since they are all positive reviews I now feel compelled to complain about something so I will just say I think the first Star Wars movie was one of the most over-rated movies of all time. I managed to sit through it but I never went to another Star Wars movie again and I have no desire to ever see one. I've never read any Star Wars books if there are any and I don't intend to do so.

Plays & musicals often go through a "polishing up" process, where the material is improved based on audience reactions.  Thus, a successful play/musical is often great source materials for movies, provided that the movie doesn't mess with the magic too much.

Example:  Chicago, which was practically a word-for-word and note-for-note adaption of the musical (although I took slight exception with John C. Rielly's interpretation of the character "Amos").  It was a great musical, and the movie did it justice.  So, I'd give it an "A-".  (Interesting enough, this musical was an adaption of a mid-century non-musical movie).

I hate when Hollywood attempt to "improve" its source material with arbitrary changes.  I particularly hate it when they make changes to increase the profitability of the movie. 

Example:  Little Shop of Horrors -- in the musical, everyone dies in the end, but to make the movie more kid-friendly, they rewrote the movie to have a happier ending.  I'd give it a "C-".


Thinking along this line -- my most hated movie of all time is a musical adaption:  A Little Night Music.  It's a Stephen Sondheim musical, it's the show that gave us "Send In The Clowns".  On stage, it's a charming tale of intertwined love stories.  In the movie (starring Elizabeth Taylor, btw) -- it is nearly unrecognizable.  It seems to me that they filmed the musical, edited it together, threw out the edited version, and created a new version from the scraps left on the floor, and the movie cut out key cast parts.  It was a real butcher job.  This was a "F-" in my book.

Funny, I just ranted about this the other day. Guess it's fresh.

I don't think it's possible to make film adaptations of *most* books or comics while still being 100% true to the source material, and still possessing the traits that make a film good. Clockwork Orange was a great mention, and I agree that it did an excellent job. But to use a more popular example ... The Hulk movies are all terrible. The comic is (mostly - it's had a bit of a run) about Banner, and trying not to have the Hulk around. The first film fit that best, but that's also a good part of why it was a terrible film - we don't want to see that. You can't slap a giant green monster into The Piano and have it make sense, but that's sort of what the comic was. Or tried to be - storytelling was a bit different back then.

But it worked well for the Hulk TV show, because the format was longer, and allowed for more character development and ongoing stories. You had enough time for Banner to mope and hide, and still bring out the Hulk for a few minutes every episode. It's a good ratio, but that same ratio in film leads to about eight minutes of Hulk.

That's probably the number one reason why Netflix and Amazon got so much Emmy love this year, and why directors and actors that could be doing film are doing that instead. The format allows for a much more complicated storyline, while in film it's extremely difficult to tell a complicated story without it turning into an absolute cluster fuck, or being about complicated people or scenarios.

I always tried to give a fair chance to all the movie or TV adaptations that I'm familiar with the source material for. There may even have been a day back in the time before time when I eagerly looked forward to them. These days, I rarely bother. If I do, I expect the worst. I think I just get too personally invested in books I fall in love with. I understand why the adaptations make some of the changes they do, and the reasons rarely sit well with me. Then there are the changes where you have no idea what Pete...I mean they...were smoking.

Lord of the Rings:
About as good an adaptation as one could have expected given today's social climate and the way things go in Hollywood. Everyone talks about what a faithful adaptation it was, but I can't watch more than a few minutes without picking out some inconsistency or another. They obviously had to cut out a lot, and some of the changes were mind-bogglingly bad and unnecessary. Overall, I still think it was a decent adaptation and don't mind watching, though I probably suck to be around while I do. I imagine Christopher Tolkien would be far worse of a viewing companion, though.

The Hobbit:
Can't talk about it in any real detail. The first time I watched it, I shut it off somewhere less than halfway through. I tried another go a few years later after all the movies were out, never made it through them. If LoTR was slightly more focused on the fighting and conflict, The Hobbit trilogy was a tank that steamrolled over the original story and continued on to wage war against the collective intelligence of its viewership. Everyone was militarized to the capacity of their personality. Completely new and made up characters were added to the so-called story just so they could be militarized too. Nothing was left of the theme, the feeling, the actual storyline of the original books. An argument could be made that it would have been difficult to bring a short children's book to the big screen in the wake of the epic LoTR trilogy. Is the answer, then, really to pad the story enough to fill three shitty movies and turn it into something completely different than source material? Peter Jackson thought it was. If he ever gets his hands on the rights to The Silmarillion, I'm going to sic a balrog on him. I don't think the Tolkien estate will ever let that happen, though.

Harry Potter:
I saw Order of the Phoenix before I knew anything about the books. I remember just being excited, walking out of the theater with my girl friend, an actual fan of the series, feeling like I was the diehard one. Then I read the books. I can still watch the first two movies, but after Chamber of Secrets the books started getting a lot bigger. Once I'd read through the series a few times, all I could see while watching the later movies was how much they had to leave out due to severe time constraints. I'll give it to them that they did a 'very' good job of adapting the books and the feel of the story. Whenever I try to sit through the movies, though, I always feel like I have to go back and reread the books just to get my facts straight.

FFS I'm writing too much.

A Song of Ice and Fire:
That's what the series is called. Not Game of Thrones, which was only the title of the first book. I never made it through the first season of the show. I'm aware of how immensely popular the series is, but I can't stomach it. I know this isn't a movie, but this was really the turning point for me in feeling like I could even bother trying to sit through an adaptation of something I'm invested in at any significant level. Ton of shit left out. Ton of shit added that has nothing to do with the actual story. Most of said shit being shit solely intended to further sexualize an already hyper-sexualized story. HBO wasted massive amounts of screen time on things like brothels and asslicking lesbian whores and left out really crucial story elements in favor of them. AND they ruined lesbian asslicking whores for me for a while. The casting sucked. The characters don't look or behave the way you'd imagine their book counterparts to. All that's left is a hollow shell of the feel of the books, and a glossy facepaint to appeal to the masses. I'll stick to books from now on.

I need to get back to work, so I'd better take off my neckbeard and nerd hat now. I could really go on for days.