Worst Movie Adaptations of a book!

Your #1 worst Adaptation:

There are so many places I could start, but there was one adaptation I saw this year that particularly stuck out as a terrible adaptation: The Dark Is Rising. There was barely a single aspect of the book that wasn't changed, and NOT for the better.

The book's title was Asking For Trouble and the screen adaptation was The Wedding Date. The characters didn't match at all, the ending was completely different as well as so much other stuff. I was not impressed.

Not on the list. clearly, but either of The Princess Diaries films did quite piss me off. These are the only ones that annoy me because I generally respect the wishes of the directors as they are part of a different art. I usually only watch films from book adaptions that I know will be fairly good anyway.

Not a bad movie, really, but Prince of Tides was a MUCH better book than the movie.

I don't think any of these titles are on the 1001 list. Did you know that you can join a group dedicated to discussing movies & books at LT?
http://www.librarything.com/groups/madeintoamovie

Off the top of my head, all the movies I've seen from the 1001 books were pretty good or great, but if I think about it I could probably come up with a rotten tomato.

I couldn't stand the recent big-screen version of Pride and Prejudice. Granted, I'm a devotee of the mid-90s BBC television version, with which any other adaptation would have difficulty competing, but even viewed in isolation I thought the film was rubbish.
I realise this is an unpopular view!

I don't think yours is an unpopular view at all! There's a great thread about this over in the Jane Austen group. Didedeo, in particular, has some insightful reasons why the film was "rubbish", to borrow your word.

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=9851

Haha, those amazing posts about the Hollywood version had me laughing out loud for a full 20 mins! That person is a legend, and I wholeheartedly agree. The Knightley version is a travesty, the BBC version is a masterpiece, and that's that.

I saw the recent adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera and it was pretty bad. I felt like they took the plot but leached out everything that made the book good. Also, the balance between humor and drama was completely off.

#10 - It seems to have received universally bad reviews. Too bad because I loved the book.

I did not really care for the movie versions of Possession -- not bad, just lacked emotion. I imagine if you hadn't read the book, it was even worse. And also The French Lieutenan't Woman -- I understand why they added the modern day plot line -- but it just didn't work for me; although Meryl Streep was great as usual.

spoiler

The movie edition of Everything is illuminated completely twisted the books ending, thereby completely changing the ending of the book. In the book, the grandfather was a christain who did not assist his Jewish best friend, who ended up being killed by the Nazis. In the movie, he is turned into a hidden Jew who wathces his other Jewish friends.

This twist does not sit well with me, as I think it distorts the message that Mr. Froer was trying to impart.

I saw the first Princess Diaries movie before I read the books, and when I realized what Disney hath wrought on the series, I wanted my money back big time! They got rid of any character trait of Mia Thermopolis' that was remotely interesting--her social awareness, her dream of working for Greenpeace, her vegetarianism, etc--and turned her into a typical awkward teen who for some BIZARRE reason loved rock-climbing (If you've read even just the first two PD installments, you'll know that Mia would be very wary of any activity which involved hanging over people's heads suspended by a rope.)
And then of course, they turned the colorful, chain-smoking battleax who was her paternal grandmother into Mary Poppins with a tiara (Julie Andrews.) And don't even get me STARTED on the sequel! Soppy feminist backlash, anyone?

Yeah, I am among the many who despised the idea (and look) of a Dark is Rising adaptation. Ella Enchanted also left me seriously disappointed. Once again, Ella's talent for language, her desire to break free of her curse, and her mischievious nature were all compromised to make her struggle with obedience into little more than comic relief. And the whole pseudo-medieval, Shrek-ian enviroment was deeply unnecessary and made the film seem like it was making fun of the book.

The Harry Potter film adaptations have been pretty solid and I really liked them all, but for me the biggest thorns are Emma Watson's characterization of Hermione (forever upstaging Ron and occasionally even Harry) and especially the way in which Ron's character is constantly being given fewer lines, not to mention how he is used to fill the role of the Comic Sidekick rather than Harry and Hermione's best friend.
Although, the ending of Chamber of Secrets--I'm sorry, pure mush. "There's no Hogwarts without you, Hagrid." Oh, Daniel Radcliffe....I was never less attracted to you than at that moment. Thank God you became so hot in your later years and branched out a bit.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin was the worst book-to-movie adaptation I have ever seen!

What about best one's we've seen though?
There are some fantastic ones I've seen. Fight Club and Lord of the Rings are two that stand out at the moment.

Maybe the best ones should be their own thread.

I agree on Ella Enchanted. Horrid movie, silly and uninteresting.

I actually enjoyed Ella Enchanted. I didn't read the book though. I found the movie fun and it had some interesting singing bits. This is probably because I first saw it when I was about 15 and it appealed to me.

Oh thank goodness. I thought I was the only person on the planet that found the big screen version wanting. I though Keira Knightly would make a much better Catherine (Wuthering Heights) than she did Elizabeth.

I was really disappointed by the Cider House Rules. The movie just made the story seem silly and unimportant.

Well, I haven't seen it, nor do I ever plan to, but from what I remember of the reviews, the Gary Oldman-Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter was supposed to rank as one of the all time worst film adaptations.

I thought the adaptation of Camus' The Plague was really rotten. William Hurt was terrible, not that the REwriters gave him much to work with.

No I completely agree with you. The mid 90's version was pure class and truthfully with that good a production, I could never understand why Hollywood HAD to mess with it!

The Tesseract by Alex Garland is a wonderful book, but the movie version of it was fairly disgusting; they kept mostly to the book--well, idea-wise anyway, until the end, which they changed entirely and pretty much made the whole idea of the book fall apart.

But it's not a book from the 1001 list. Did you know that there is a group called Made Into a Movie? You can post to it here:

http://www.librarything.com/groups/madeintoamovie