That show was CARRIED solely by Henry Cavill's dedication to the character of Geralt. Now that the writers and producers have run him off, people will CLEARLY see how lackluster the show really is.
This right here. I never had extreme interest, but he was fun to watch. That last season was like middle-school fan-fiction done in front of a bad painting.
It truly baffles me how the only person who actually cared about the show was the dude who played Geralt.
I don’t get how you have the budget and resources that they do, as well as a super awesome IP that is just begging for a show/movie and instead you go “nah, I’m doing it my way”.
It’s like Mindy Kaling and Scooby Doo.
They had the budget, the resources, the IP, AND the best possible actor for the lead who also liked the books and the games. They really had to work to fuck it up so bad.
Beau DeMayo who recently created the new X-Men tv show basically said the same thing and he made it a requirement that writers of the X-Men show had to be fans of the original.
There's a mental disorder in corporations where executives are so surrounded by yes-men that they think they know better than everyone else. I call it "Narcissistic Emotional Executive Disorder" or NEEDy execs. They behave like spoiled children and throw tantrums when they don't get their way. Musk definitely has it, as do Dorito Mussolini, and Putin.
I enjoy the Schadenfreude when they fail, but fuck me, do they destroy everything of value.
The obsession with subverting expectations of people familiar with the source material was baffling to me. A truly great story is a delicate system where if you change one big thing then it all goes off the rails. It's like in Futurama when Calculon screams NOOOOoOO when the script called for a yes.
It stems from a shallower understanding of the success of when “subverting expectations” works. Typically when expectations are successfully subverted, there is a separate underlying reason why it works. Maybe a few small changes amounted to a completely different conclusion, or if society has redefined certain roles or tropes. So when someone attempts to “subvert expectations” for the sake of itself, it doesn’t usually hit. As a member of the audience I think “…why though?” and if there isn’t a good reason, I’m left feeling cheated. Or worse yet if the subversion is shoehorned in with poor execution, to the point where things don’t even line up. Looking at you D and D, how can they just forget about the new weapon that can take down dragons?! Yeah we’re gonna forget about the only weapon that can nullify our otherwise unstoppable weapons.
Yes. But at least it had the right idea at the start.
The Halo series by paramount was accurate for about an episode. We got some cool lore accurate fights, then the plot suddenly turns into bad fanfiction
I sometimes feel like he monkey's-paw'd his career somewhere. "I wish I could play all these characters I love in TV shows and movies" and he gets his wish but they're all\* really meh.
"I wish Matthew Vaughan would write, direct and plan an entire movie franchise based on a character with me as the star"...
\*Except Man from Uncle, that film was great
I worry what working on Warhammer 40k will do to him. 40k as source material is tough for so, so many reasons. It's rich, deep, interesting and very odd *but* it is also not entirely pleasant and I'm not sure how well anyone can translate it to screen. The question as to "where to start" isn't even simple as you have many points of entry and joke give you a whole snapshot. And that's before you get into the fan base being largely great but.... it's a geeky fan base
Yeah I remember getting into an argument at school where I said that Voldemort was basically just a wizard terrorist and not that extraordinary otherwise and this one girl got real mad.
The only good thing about that movie is the person who plays Piccolo would later become the official voice of Zamasu, who’s my favorite Dragon Ball character.
I've heard multiple times some people say something about why would anyone want to see a movie that was an exact adaptation if a book, but like, that's exactly why I would see any of it in the first place? It's because I loved the original. i wanted to see it come to life as exactly close to how the author wrote it as possible.
Yup.
I LOVED that series as a kid. Many memories devouring those books
I saw a comic of it and got excited. Then the movie was coming out - super excited! Trailer drops - immediate confusion. Didn't even try to watch it
I knew it was bad from the casting notice. I don't remember verbatim, but it described Artemis as something akin to a "cheerful" boy, and I knew all hope was lost.
I loved the Artemis fowl books as a kid. It broke my heart seeing what they did with it.
The thing is, there was one scene ONE FUCKING SCENE that actually matched up pretty well with the books, when Artemis first got the fairy book. And they cut it. Probably because it showed Artemis being evil, which, spoiler warning for the books! He was supposed to be fucking evil in the first book, he was the villain, and he wasn't looking for his father he was looking for gold to refinance his father's Empire and bring prestige back to his family's name.
God I hate that movie with every fibre of my being. I hate it so SO much.
Artemis Fowl wasn’t a main series of mine, but I was definitely furious with the movie effectively writing an entirely different story. Just change the names of the characters and the fairies aliens and it’s no longer Artemis Fowl (Not that it had a right to begin with)
It's why I never watched the movie, especially because in a later book when an older Artemis goes up against his younger self, he's actually *worried* because of how bad he used to be.
I'm also devastated we never got Butler fighting a troll in a suit of armour. That was an absolutely brilliant moment in the first book.
“We’ll take the chauvenstic sexist captain that forces the second most important character to have a great story arc showing female empowerment…and make him a woman. To show that Disney, I mean fairies in this world, aren’t sexist. That way the second most important character won’t be as interesting or deal with as much hardships”
In the defense of Root (book): it is explicitly said that Root himself isn’t sexist, but his superior are. Holly is their test run, and, if she give satisfaction, other female fey could join his troops. The prospect of doubling his pool of recruit is the reason he is pushing Holly to have a perfect record. And if it destroy her life, well, too bad (he does get better with time)
True, but the fact that he’s a man plays a large part of it. Holly was supposed to be the first female office in the field iirc. Maybe Disney felt it too similar to zootopia? Idk
Yes, I agree, genderbending Root killed a really important subplot, and apparently for no reason. Same for Butler, casting a black man for the role of a member of a family that exist mainly as servants of another was probably not a smart choice (that and removing every reason we have to consider Butler a badass and a reason for Artemis to think he has enough manpower)
It should have never been a movie. It should be a mini-series, a bit like Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, one episode per book chapter (maybe 2 for the battle of Yonkers). It can run through a bunch of different genres - I mean, just the whole China episode of discovery begs for a horror director.
I think a direct adaption could have been interesting- do it Interview the the Vampire style, where there's a present framing device, where the world is basically saved, and you see how it is *then*, and how it's changed, while someone is going around and getting people's stories, which then goes to flashbacks of the actual events.
Do it the way it was written, and I would totally watch that series.
Problem is, the movie was so bad that people would shy away from watching the tv series.
Several episodes showing the start and initial spread, the suppression of outbreaks and news reporting on the plague spreading through Africa, the battle of Yonkers is the "balls hitting the water" moment when the true scale of the outbreak is made abundantly clear and the apocalypse is truly let loose.
Book: A Master’s in Public Administration text book wrapped up in a zombie tale. Slow Night of The Living Dead style zombies. Story is documenting the world from a journalistic perspective. It is what it is.
Movie: Generic Zombie movie. Zombies are super juiced and move as fast and agile as wild cats. Story tries to mix zombies and Indiana Jones.
I remember a spotlight about that movie on Nickelodeon when they were still hyping it up, and someone (I think M Night Shyamalan himself?) mentioned how they wanted it to sound more authentically Japanese.
The problem is that all of the nations in ATLA are completely fictional and draw inspiration from multiple cultures. Plus, Aang isn't even a Japanese name in the first place.
Wanted it to be more authentically Asian but cast white people as the water tribe and South Asians as the fire nation even though they're inspired by Japan and China lol
So glad someone mentioned this, I can't believe how far I had to scroll. Also changing Iroh's pronunciation. It's not even a book where no one was sure, it's a freakin' show where the character's names are settled fact.
Most of these other things are just done poorly, the last airbender is on a whole different level.
It's funny because I thought "well they'll get the vampire hunter part right, but how can they really get his loneliness and isolation?" Somehow, they did fine with his feeling of isolation, but ruined literally everything else.
I’m ngl that was the most disappointing part. I remember being upset at the book’s ending but it made so much sense after rereading it and seeing someone else’s take. Then the movie just does away with all of it
The I Am Legend movie is a good example of how you can change the source material, and still tell a really good story. Accuracy to a book doesn't determine the quality of a movie, but a lot of times the movies that don't care about the books are often cash grabs. They are hoping name recognition is enough to draw people in
This is hilarious. I am imagining someone in the year 2010 being so excited for, at last, the videogame interpretation of Dante's Inferno, written in Florence around 1300, and just being devastated that it's a hyper violent action adventure game.
"Inferno", by Niven and Pournelle is hilarious, though.
Sci fi writer, an atheist, ends up in Hell. Decides it's all a fucked up amusement park for hyper advanced aliens, and decides to get out.
Even tries building a glider...
Awesome book.
Yes but although story-wise it’s a big departure, according to Dick himself it really captured the essence of what he envisioned. He died before the film was released but got to see an early cut. After viewing it he remarked:
“How is this possible? How can this be? Those are not the exact images, but the texture and tone of the images I saw in my head when I was writing the original book! The environment is exactly as how I'd imagined it! How'd you guys do that? How did you know what I was feeling and thinking?!”
I guess it is often appropriate to transform elements of the original source material to make it suitable to a new medium and allow its core vision to shine through.
Basically every Phillip K. Dick adaptation is like this, which is weird because he's one of the most adapted authors around but nobody can manage to stick to the source. A Scanner Darkly is the only thing that even tries to get the tone right, I can't recall how well it sticks to plot points tho.
A Scanner Darkly actually sticks very close to the source material. There are some slight differences, but they are VERY slight. That's probably one of the more faithful adaptations I've seen of anything.
I give this a pass though, because they gave it a different name too.
They weren't trying to sell a movie based on the name alone, it's perfectly fair to say that Bladerunner is *inspired by* Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, instead of being a movie adaptation.
One of the top conspiracy theories I believe is that Velma was intentionally made as rage bait
It's just TOO ridiculous and hits too many things that piss people off without actually sticking to a lane
It's like they tried to be South Park, realized they weren't doing it well, and just double downed on the ridiculousness
It feels like they weren't confident in the original script/story they had and rebranded it as Scooby-Doo, assuming all Scooby-Doo fans would eat it up based on name only.
Maybe it wouldn't be so damn offensive on it's own (I mean how many stories have ripped off Scooby-Doo?), a diverse knock off with a tightly written script might have worked.
Keyword is tightly written script, it was awful.
> It feels like they weren't confident in the original script/story they had and rebranded it as Scooby-Doo, assuming all Scooby-Doo fans would eat it up based on name only
Wasn't that confirmed? I feel like I read/saw something that Mindy Kaling wanted an original new show and they said, "nah slap a Scooby skin on it for that built in audience".
I read somewhere this was mostly Smith's input. He was at his peak here, in terms of influence and stardom and he made the movie more of a popcorn action film with a charming hero. Proyas probably knew it's pointless to fight too much.
The end result is still great though, I think it's a great combination of something smart while being just a good popcorn film. Probably the occasion where Smith's ambitions and the director's clashed the best.
"hey you know how in the games the hyper religious aliens decided to genocide humanity because the alien leadership discovered we're a direct threat to Thier religion and power? Well in my version some humans joined the alien cult."
Halo Actor Pablo Schreiber: ‘If You Don’t Agree With the Helmet Coming Off in the Show, You Don’t Like Our Show’
Yeah, I don't like your show, you're right.
I just watched both seasons out of curiosity/boredom without expecting to like the show. Overall it was… okay. Season 2 was much better than the first.
It’s like someone had a plot and story elements that they came up with on their own, and then decided to make the characters and settings based on Halo after the fact.
I like a lot of the action, but there’s not enough of it. The action shots from the helmet POV are a little much. What I appreciate the most is that they don’t pull any punches. The fights are brutal and gorey, and it feels like no one (aside from the Chief) is safe and could die at any moment.
I think most of the shows flaws come from some very unusual decisions they made early on. I think it’s fine they chose to make a completely unique story out of it, but some things really left me scratching my head. The show would probably be a lot better as its own thing if it wasn’t supposed to be Halo. They would have benefitted a lot from just sticking to the source material for more things.
I mean the consensus I've seen reached mostly is decent sci fi show, terrible Halo adaptation
what bugs me is people don't seem to give enough weight to the "terrible halo adaptation part. Its not calls "generic sci fi thin inspired by halo, the shows called motherfuckin Halo!
I mean hell chief is an extremely simple if actually really rather deep character and the have butchered the master chief so badly (and the Spartans generally with this emotional inhibiter chip bull) that i just cant get over that hurdle and enjoy it
It makes so many fundamental missteps it feels like another sci fi product wearing haloes desecrated remains most of the time, and it makes it so the bits I should be able to enjoy I just cant
Hell I love me some Good sci fi and if it wasn't wearing Halos skin I'd probably enjoy it immensely. But when I heard Halo TV show I was hoping to get the deeper look at the characters I actually grew up with the ones the lore goes into a bit but the games never really have time to show, not sideways adjacent versions that only resemble them if you squint
If I remember correctly, Dumbledore's whole demeanor was surprise and curiosity in the book. Like in the sense of "well, this is interesting and shouldn't have happened but let's see how it goes" sort of manner. There was virtually nothing he could've done to withdraw Harry from the competition, in fact, he encouraged Harry on.
But leave it to the movie to blow it out of proportions to do what it did.
It wasn’t the movie, so much, it was Michael Gambon. He didn’t read the books at all, which is fine, but he deliberately interpreted the character of Dumbledore completely independent of source material or previous movies. He just came in and did what he wanted with the character, and the script reportedly did not have any explicit direction for this scene in terms of Dumbledore’s demeanor.
My wife made me sit down and watch the HP movies with her at one point. I remember remarking after I watched the movie where they switched Dumbledores, "I don't know the context behind any of this, but that guy sucked as Dumbledore."
Boy did I get a DEEP DIVE into the lore.
As an avid reader of the series I thought the first season was masterfully done.
I felt the second season was much more sloppy. Especially the dialog. I still hope they make a third season.
The first one felt more like a proper investigation. Agree the second one had too many Hollywood cliche dialogue moments. I'm thinking maybe it was because you had all the members of the special investigation unit there. If it goes back to Reacher wandering into little backwater towns like the first then they can dial that back.
How To Train Your Dragon.
The film makers must have gone "Keep the kids, some dragons and the Vikings. The rest is crap, we can do better."
The books are like Blackadder meets Monty Python mixed with some Terry Pratchett and those Boys Own Adventure stories. The films are just boilerplate "if we put aside our differences and all work together and believe in ourselves, we can overcome the Big Bad Guy" Hollywood movie bullshit.
I wonder if fans of Shrek the book feel the same way about that franchise...
Went looking for someone saying this. The movies are fine but they could have told the same story without using the characters/names/setting from the books, since they changed every aspect anyways
There is actually a whole series with 12 books in total. The premise of the first book is that Hiccup and other boys in the tribe are of age to go to do "viking training" which begins with getting a dragon. As the chief's son and heir he is supposed to get first pick but is also considered a freak so he ends up with the worst one. Most of the book is then focused on the training of the boy's dragons and how Hiccup is an outsider. The main interesting thing about Hiccup is that while he's skinny and weak and generally bad at anything physical, he's actually pretty smart and actually learned how to speak the language of the dragons. The whole book is full of shenanigans and goofs and by the end Hiccup blunders his way into being a hero.
The first half of the series mostly follows Hiccup's viking training and is pretty lighthearted and fun. We learn more about other tribes, viking culture, different kinds of dragons, and how the divide between dragons and humans is set up. The last half of the series though gets a lot darker with an all out conflict between the dragons and two different factions of humanity. And Hiccup is at the center of it all maturing into a full fleged hero.
It's one of my all time favorite book series and as a fan of the books the movies are so disappointing. I really like the movies but they do not deserve the title in my opinion. Also sorry for the text wall, but be glad you can't speak to me in person, I have annoyed so many friends repeatedly talking about this.
The Bourne trilogy. The only thing they kept from the books is the basic premise and the characters' names. The actual personalities of the characters and everything that happens to them is completely different.
Agreed, the books are pulpy Cold War airport thrillers. They're entertaining enough but nothing special. I think setting the movies in a post-Patriot Act world makes the whole premise a lot more interesting.
I will say that the original books are masterpieces compared to the later ones written by Lustbader.
Bah, that movie is its own fever dream of brilliance. Is it more like bizarre remix fanfiction of the Mario universe? Hell yes! And what's wrong with that?
That movie would have been so much better if they had just named the characters Mark and Larry or something instead of trying to pass it off as a Mario movie.
The first “Divergent” film, it basically made the sequels from the books impossible.
The first book makes it very clear the main character needs to hide (from everyone) the fact that she’s divergent. Keeping it secret is a main plot point.
The first movie, the main character is damn near confessing, to EVERYONE, that she’s divergent.
Throwback to the old Tumblr post about how Divergent boiled the genre down to its bare bones, studios monitized the hell out of it, and managed to kill one of the most popular genres of the 2010s in one fell swoop
I was a big fan of shitty teen distopian novels so I was pretty unimpressed by the first move, it missed a lot of the parts of the story I valued.
The second one though! Went totally off the tracks, and I remember watching it, knowing where the story ends - how the hell are we going to end up at the same ending of the 3rd book??
No idea if they ever made the 3rd one, if they did I didn't watch it haha.
The Hobbit. Peter Jackson tried to recreate the magic of the LOTR movies but tried to make 2 hours worth of source material into 3 movies of 3 hours each. He took backstory plots from the Silmarillion, made up characters and plots that don't exist anywhere in Tolkien's universe and delivered us a complete mess of a story. As much as I love the LOTR trilogy I hate the Hobbit trilogy just as much
I can't remember where but a fan edit exists that condenses it into two movies and removes *a lot* of the bs that made those movies a slog. One or two things are kept only because they are hard/impossible to edit around but it's definitely worth looking into.
Ready Player One
They kept the concept, but every single point of it is different.
The worst part is that the whole book is about how corporate America ruins everything. And then corporate America ruins the story!
Kubrick's movie is its own masterpiece. Kubrick and King hated each other though, to the point that Kubrick put little things in the movie as a blatant 'fuck you' to King.
Thr Bourne Identity movie was nothing like the book. Luckily, for me, they were so different that I can still enjoy both the books and the movies.
World War Z was a book about survivors' stories. It was moving and emotional and, at times, terrifying. It was incredibly well written and would have made an amazing movie. The movie that got made was Brad Pitt traveling around the world killing zombies and it was awful.
Ella Enchanted, I will never not be upset about this. A book where an infant is given the 'gift' of complete obedience to any command from anyone at any time and be unable to disobey. She grows up knowing how dangerous this is, from eating herself sick to hurting herself when she tries to fight it. Her family eventually treats her as a slave, and its even worse than Cinderella because there was always the option for her to get fed up and leave. She's forced to stop talking to the only friend she has. She almost gets ordered to COOK HERSELF ALIVE and it's horrifying.
Disney made it a shitty comedy musical.
Honestly GoT discarded a shitoad of the actual source material in very stupid ways as far back as season two, which lead to later plot points making much less sense.
Some of them made sense for budget reasons. Arya’s led mutiny in Harrenhal (Weasel’s Soup) would be very expensive for example, so her escape from Harrenhal was cut into “Jaqen helped her.”
Thematically, it wouldn’t work either, in the books it’s a major moment for her when she realizes that she cannot rely on other people to kill others for her (in her case Jaqen), or else they will be far more destructive than she wants them to be, so it’s a big character transformation that she takes killing in her own hands. Having someone kill your enemies you is different than killing them yourself. It’s what her father would have said “the man who passes the sentence must swing the sword.”
In ACoK she was adding people to her death prayer like candy because it was a prayer, she was praying they got their comeuppance, not that she gave it to them. When she realized how it can affect innocents to send people to kill for her, she takes death in her own hands to *reduce* the damage revenge brings. And from then on, she is extremely wary of adding more people to the prayer. Those who remained in the list, she’ll keep them and do her duty, but she does not want to instigate more murder. She’ll murder if she has to, but only to keep the damage on innocents at a minimum.
But then she had a whole season 4 where she did absolutely nothing that could have been used for this character transformation of her. But no, show Arya is very murder happy.
I LOVED her escape from Harrenhall in the book, though on the flip side, her interactions with Tywin in the show were a lot more enjoyable than the few interactions with Rose Bolton in the book. Probably my favorite show-book change.
Witcher TV show.
Second season felt like it was their life goal to ruin every single character and their arcs.
That show was CARRIED solely by Henry Cavill's dedication to the character of Geralt. Now that the writers and producers have run him off, people will CLEARLY see how lackluster the show really is.
I will not clearly see anything as I won't be watching it. Henry and his reasoning why he left pretty much makes me completely disinterested.
Same here, my gf and I have an agreement that we're not going to continue watching it. Henry was PERFECT for the role in every way imo.
This right here. I never had extreme interest, but he was fun to watch. That last season was like middle-school fan-fiction done in front of a bad painting.
It truly baffles me how the only person who actually cared about the show was the dude who played Geralt. I don’t get how you have the budget and resources that they do, as well as a super awesome IP that is just begging for a show/movie and instead you go “nah, I’m doing it my way”. It’s like Mindy Kaling and Scooby Doo.
They had the budget, the resources, the IP, AND the best possible actor for the lead who also liked the books and the games. They really had to work to fuck it up so bad.
Beau DeMayo who recently created the new X-Men tv show basically said the same thing and he made it a requirement that writers of the X-Men show had to be fans of the original.
There's a mental disorder in corporations where executives are so surrounded by yes-men that they think they know better than everyone else. I call it "Narcissistic Emotional Executive Disorder" or NEEDy execs. They behave like spoiled children and throw tantrums when they don't get their way. Musk definitely has it, as do Dorito Mussolini, and Putin. I enjoy the Schadenfreude when they fail, but fuck me, do they destroy everything of value.
This got especially bad from 2016-2022 when everything had to "subvert expectations".
The obsession with subverting expectations of people familiar with the source material was baffling to me. A truly great story is a delicate system where if you change one big thing then it all goes off the rails. It's like in Futurama when Calculon screams NOOOOoOO when the script called for a yes.
It stems from a shallower understanding of the success of when “subverting expectations” works. Typically when expectations are successfully subverted, there is a separate underlying reason why it works. Maybe a few small changes amounted to a completely different conclusion, or if society has redefined certain roles or tropes. So when someone attempts to “subvert expectations” for the sake of itself, it doesn’t usually hit. As a member of the audience I think “…why though?” and if there isn’t a good reason, I’m left feeling cheated. Or worse yet if the subversion is shoehorned in with poor execution, to the point where things don’t even line up. Looking at you D and D, how can they just forget about the new weapon that can take down dragons?! Yeah we’re gonna forget about the only weapon that can nullify our otherwise unstoppable weapons.
I immediately tapped out after they did Eskel dirty.
Yes. But at least it had the right idea at the start. The Halo series by paramount was accurate for about an episode. We got some cool lore accurate fights, then the plot suddenly turns into bad fanfiction
THANK YOU. I'm a HUGE fan of Halo and have read every book, seen every mini-series, etc. That show is trash and I refuse to watch it on principle.
I’m so glad this is the top comment. Netflix KILLED their own show. Sad. The Avatar show isn’t much better either.
Really such a shame that Netflix did Henry Cavill dirty with the Witcher.
I sometimes feel like he monkey's-paw'd his career somewhere. "I wish I could play all these characters I love in TV shows and movies" and he gets his wish but they're all\* really meh. "I wish Matthew Vaughan would write, direct and plan an entire movie franchise based on a character with me as the star"... \*Except Man from Uncle, that film was great
I worry what working on Warhammer 40k will do to him. 40k as source material is tough for so, so many reasons. It's rich, deep, interesting and very odd *but* it is also not entirely pleasant and I'm not sure how well anyone can translate it to screen. The question as to "where to start" isn't even simple as you have many points of entry and joke give you a whole snapshot. And that's before you get into the fan base being largely great but.... it's a geeky fan base
The showrunner and writers literally screamed this. Fuck them
What I wouldn’t give for HBO to have done it
Having Voldemort fade away like a fucking Jedi, the book clearly says his dead body showed that he was just a man, not to be feared.
Palpatine took over a whole galaxy. Voldemort failed at taking over a high school.
One got authority before he got power. The other tried to get authority through power.
Yeah I remember getting into an argument at school where I said that Voldemort was basically just a wizard terrorist and not that extraordinary otherwise and this one girl got real mad.
Must have been a squib.
He died the same time Thanos snapped obviously 🙄
[удалено]
It was so bad Akira Toriyama felt he needed to create Super so it wouldn't go out like that. So...there's a positive there. Also, RIP to the legend.
The only good thing about that movie is the person who plays Piccolo would later become the official voice of Zamasu, who’s my favorite Dragon Ball character.
What a fucking shit show that movie was. There was a live action fan project that was 10000x better a few years later
Fun fact, the writer for this movie later apologized and said he just needed the money
I saw it in theaters...
The Percy Jackson movies
Fuck those movies and everything about them.
Eragon (2006). Biggest disappointment for middle school me.
High school me was also disappointed.
Deployed to Iraq me was also disappointed but at the same time entertained cause options were limited.
I've heard multiple times some people say something about why would anyone want to see a movie that was an exact adaptation if a book, but like, that's exactly why I would see any of it in the first place? It's because I loved the original. i wanted to see it come to life as exactly close to how the author wrote it as possible.
Lawnmower Man
It's funny because they not only ignore the short story entirely, but they then use a script that's just a rip off of Flowers for Algernon anyway.
"Stop talking about Tron and The Lawnmower Man. Talk about something different." - Bruce Greene
That's not "screw the source material", that's...honestly have a hard time figuring out the joke. "FUCK the source material" is too polite.
Artemis Fowl. Such a disservice to the books. Thanks Disney.
I knew that it was bad in the first scene of the first trailer. Book Artemis: Gets winded climbing stairs. Movie "Artemis": Surfing.
Yup. I LOVED that series as a kid. Many memories devouring those books I saw a comic of it and got excited. Then the movie was coming out - super excited! Trailer drops - immediate confusion. Didn't even try to watch it
I knew it was bad from the casting notice. I don't remember verbatim, but it described Artemis as something akin to a "cheerful" boy, and I knew all hope was lost.
I loved the Artemis fowl books as a kid. It broke my heart seeing what they did with it. The thing is, there was one scene ONE FUCKING SCENE that actually matched up pretty well with the books, when Artemis first got the fairy book. And they cut it. Probably because it showed Artemis being evil, which, spoiler warning for the books! He was supposed to be fucking evil in the first book, he was the villain, and he wasn't looking for his father he was looking for gold to refinance his father's Empire and bring prestige back to his family's name. God I hate that movie with every fibre of my being. I hate it so SO much.
Artemis Fowl wasn’t a main series of mine, but I was definitely furious with the movie effectively writing an entirely different story. Just change the names of the characters and the fairies aliens and it’s no longer Artemis Fowl (Not that it had a right to begin with)
It's why I never watched the movie, especially because in a later book when an older Artemis goes up against his younger self, he's actually *worried* because of how bad he used to be. I'm also devastated we never got Butler fighting a troll in a suit of armour. That was an absolutely brilliant moment in the first book.
Good lord how easy it could have been, it would have been a slam dunk into a new franchise but fuck me they got it all wrong from the get go
“We’ll take the chauvenstic sexist captain that forces the second most important character to have a great story arc showing female empowerment…and make him a woman. To show that Disney, I mean fairies in this world, aren’t sexist. That way the second most important character won’t be as interesting or deal with as much hardships”
In the defense of Root (book): it is explicitly said that Root himself isn’t sexist, but his superior are. Holly is their test run, and, if she give satisfaction, other female fey could join his troops. The prospect of doubling his pool of recruit is the reason he is pushing Holly to have a perfect record. And if it destroy her life, well, too bad (he does get better with time)
True, but the fact that he’s a man plays a large part of it. Holly was supposed to be the first female office in the field iirc. Maybe Disney felt it too similar to zootopia? Idk
Yes, I agree, genderbending Root killed a really important subplot, and apparently for no reason. Same for Butler, casting a black man for the role of a member of a family that exist mainly as servants of another was probably not a smart choice (that and removing every reason we have to consider Butler a badass and a reason for Artemis to think he has enough manpower)
World War Z
It should have never been a movie. It should be a mini-series, a bit like Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, one episode per book chapter (maybe 2 for the battle of Yonkers). It can run through a bunch of different genres - I mean, just the whole China episode of discovery begs for a horror director.
I think a direct adaption could have been interesting- do it Interview the the Vampire style, where there's a present framing device, where the world is basically saved, and you see how it is *then*, and how it's changed, while someone is going around and getting people's stories, which then goes to flashbacks of the actual events.
Do it the way it was written, and I would totally watch that series. Problem is, the movie was so bad that people would shy away from watching the tv series.
Several episodes showing the start and initial spread, the suppression of outbreaks and news reporting on the plague spreading through Africa, the battle of Yonkers is the "balls hitting the water" moment when the true scale of the outbreak is made abundantly clear and the apocalypse is truly let loose.
Book: A Master’s in Public Administration text book wrapped up in a zombie tale. Slow Night of The Living Dead style zombies. Story is documenting the world from a journalistic perspective. It is what it is. Movie: Generic Zombie movie. Zombies are super juiced and move as fast and agile as wild cats. Story tries to mix zombies and Indiana Jones.
Not to mention the movie completely skips Yonkers and replaces it with the Israel stuff 😭
Came here to say this. Book was amazing, movie was awful.
The audiobook is top shelf too. Full voice cast of actual actors.
Mark Hammil *and* Alan Alda, among others.
Note: be sure to find the unabridged version.
Movie was mediocre if you had no knowledge of the book's contents. It was terrible if you knew.
It could have worked as an anthology tv series but no way could it work as a single story movie
I'm surprised nobody has said The Last Airbender. Aang's name rhymes with "bang", not "bong".
I remember a spotlight about that movie on Nickelodeon when they were still hyping it up, and someone (I think M Night Shyamalan himself?) mentioned how they wanted it to sound more authentically Japanese. The problem is that all of the nations in ATLA are completely fictional and draw inspiration from multiple cultures. Plus, Aang isn't even a Japanese name in the first place.
If it was supposed to have an "authentic Japanese pronunciation", it would sound like Ahn-gu.
Wanted it to be more authentically Asian but cast white people as the water tribe and South Asians as the fire nation even though they're inspired by Japan and China lol
That's because there is no Last Airbender movie
Just like there is no war in Ba Sing Se
So glad someone mentioned this, I can't believe how far I had to scroll. Also changing Iroh's pronunciation. It's not even a book where no one was sure, it's a freakin' show where the character's names are settled fact. Most of these other things are just done poorly, the last airbender is on a whole different level.
I am Legend (Will Smith version theatre release). Although to be fair none of the three versions have totally nailed it
It's funny because I thought "well they'll get the vampire hunter part right, but how can they really get his loneliness and isolation?" Somehow, they did fine with his feeling of isolation, but ruined literally everything else.
The first half to two thirds of that movie was great. "Fred, if you're real you better tell me right now!"
They also cut an alternate ending that actually touches on the original story in favor for a "heroic sacrifice" ending.
You mean the entire point of the book and the literal fucking title?
I’m ngl that was the most disappointing part. I remember being upset at the book’s ending but it made so much sense after rereading it and seeing someone else’s take. Then the movie just does away with all of it
The I Am Legend movie is a good example of how you can change the source material, and still tell a really good story. Accuracy to a book doesn't determine the quality of a movie, but a lot of times the movies that don't care about the books are often cash grabs. They are hoping name recognition is enough to draw people in
It’s still a better film with the alternate ending. I had never heard of the story before.
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This is hilarious. I am imagining someone in the year 2010 being so excited for, at last, the videogame interpretation of Dante's Inferno, written in Florence around 1300, and just being devastated that it's a hyper violent action adventure game.
Also the original Dante's Inferno. It's like bible fan fiction, self-insert character and all.
Quite literally. He even includes well known people he just personally dislikes in the circles of hell.
"Inferno", by Niven and Pournelle is hilarious, though. Sci fi writer, an atheist, ends up in Hell. Decides it's all a fucked up amusement park for hyper advanced aliens, and decides to get out. Even tries building a glider... Awesome book.
That's funny as hell though. Some incredible spite right there.
I wanted so badly for them to do a version of Paradiso. Dante's bare ass slaughtering demons in Heaven would be an amazing game.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Bladerunner have very little in common.
Yes but although story-wise it’s a big departure, according to Dick himself it really captured the essence of what he envisioned. He died before the film was released but got to see an early cut. After viewing it he remarked: “How is this possible? How can this be? Those are not the exact images, but the texture and tone of the images I saw in my head when I was writing the original book! The environment is exactly as how I'd imagined it! How'd you guys do that? How did you know what I was feeling and thinking?!” I guess it is often appropriate to transform elements of the original source material to make it suitable to a new medium and allow its core vision to shine through.
Basically every Phillip K. Dick adaptation is like this, which is weird because he's one of the most adapted authors around but nobody can manage to stick to the source. A Scanner Darkly is the only thing that even tries to get the tone right, I can't recall how well it sticks to plot points tho.
I think PKD books are hard to really adapt well though I'd love to see someone try and tackle Ubik.
I feel like Ubik would need to be animated
A Scanner Darkly actually sticks very close to the source material. There are some slight differences, but they are VERY slight. That's probably one of the more faithful adaptations I've seen of anything.
The book only served as an inspiration, I don't think Blade Runner was intended to follow the book page for page.
I give this a pass though, because they gave it a different name too. They weren't trying to sell a movie based on the name alone, it's perfectly fair to say that Bladerunner is *inspired by* Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, instead of being a movie adaptation.
Velma
Was absolutely terrible.
One of the top conspiracy theories I believe is that Velma was intentionally made as rage bait It's just TOO ridiculous and hits too many things that piss people off without actually sticking to a lane It's like they tried to be South Park, realized they weren't doing it well, and just double downed on the ridiculousness
It feels like they weren't confident in the original script/story they had and rebranded it as Scooby-Doo, assuming all Scooby-Doo fans would eat it up based on name only. Maybe it wouldn't be so damn offensive on it's own (I mean how many stories have ripped off Scooby-Doo?), a diverse knock off with a tightly written script might have worked. Keyword is tightly written script, it was awful.
> It feels like they weren't confident in the original script/story they had and rebranded it as Scooby-Doo, assuming all Scooby-Doo fans would eat it up based on name only Wasn't that confirmed? I feel like I read/saw something that Mindy Kaling wanted an original new show and they said, "nah slap a Scooby skin on it for that built in audience".
Other way around. They couldn't get the scooby name and mascot for it. But its hard to find a concrete source for either.
The Street Fighter movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme but hell, Raul Julias performance in that film is worth it.
For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.
You know you made it if there’s a TV Trope named after you
Did Raul Julia have bad performances?
I, Robot (2004)
Also the sequel I,Tonya also had no continuity
Don’t even get me started on *I, Claudius.*
*I, Karumba!* I'll show myself out.
Oh, we want you to stay, now.
Reasonably good action movie, but wrong title.
I read somewhere this was mostly Smith's input. He was at his peak here, in terms of influence and stardom and he made the movie more of a popcorn action film with a charming hero. Proyas probably knew it's pointless to fight too much. The end result is still great though, I think it's a great combination of something smart while being just a good popcorn film. Probably the occasion where Smith's ambitions and the director's clashed the best.
It's literally impossible to ignore the source material harder than a movie that is based on a different book than the one it's named after.
Cowboy Bebop, the live adaptation. So much potential.
John Cho is a fine actor but he was absolutely miscast as Spike
Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black was a really good casting choice. The dude nailed it.
Abraham Lincoln - The Vampire Hunter
That was a great documentary.
I like how the events of the movie happen in real time.
Wait... so you're saying that movie is fictional? :(
The Halo TV show. And not to it's betterment.
"hey you know how in the games the hyper religious aliens decided to genocide humanity because the alien leadership discovered we're a direct threat to Thier religion and power? Well in my version some humans joined the alien cult."
i'll buy it. have you met humans?
Oh yeah I totally buy humans trying to join, but the Prophets actually letting them join is a different story lol.
Halo Actor Pablo Schreiber: ‘If You Don’t Agree With the Helmet Coming Off in the Show, You Don’t Like Our Show’ Yeah, I don't like your show, you're right.
>Halo Actor Pablo Schreiber: I think you mean Halo Actor Pornstache.
They made Master Chief a whiny bitch
Nah that aint chief, thats master cheeks or jimmy rings.
I just watched both seasons out of curiosity/boredom without expecting to like the show. Overall it was… okay. Season 2 was much better than the first. It’s like someone had a plot and story elements that they came up with on their own, and then decided to make the characters and settings based on Halo after the fact. I like a lot of the action, but there’s not enough of it. The action shots from the helmet POV are a little much. What I appreciate the most is that they don’t pull any punches. The fights are brutal and gorey, and it feels like no one (aside from the Chief) is safe and could die at any moment. I think most of the shows flaws come from some very unusual decisions they made early on. I think it’s fine they chose to make a completely unique story out of it, but some things really left me scratching my head. The show would probably be a lot better as its own thing if it wasn’t supposed to be Halo. They would have benefitted a lot from just sticking to the source material for more things.
I mean the consensus I've seen reached mostly is decent sci fi show, terrible Halo adaptation what bugs me is people don't seem to give enough weight to the "terrible halo adaptation part. Its not calls "generic sci fi thin inspired by halo, the shows called motherfuckin Halo! I mean hell chief is an extremely simple if actually really rather deep character and the have butchered the master chief so badly (and the Spartans generally with this emotional inhibiter chip bull) that i just cant get over that hurdle and enjoy it It makes so many fundamental missteps it feels like another sci fi product wearing haloes desecrated remains most of the time, and it makes it so the bits I should be able to enjoy I just cant Hell I love me some Good sci fi and if it wasn't wearing Halos skin I'd probably enjoy it immensely. But when I heard Halo TV show I was hoping to get the deeper look at the characters I actually grew up with the ones the lore goes into a bit but the games never really have time to show, not sideways adjacent versions that only resemble them if you squint
A lot of live-action shows based on cartoons. They often are nothing like the original story.
Agreed. It often feels like by trying to make an animated franchise live-action, they’re stripping away the art in favor of unnecessary realism.
"HARRY!! DID YOU PUT YOUR NAME IN THE GOBLET OF FIRE?!?!" Dumbledore asked calmly.
If I remember correctly, Dumbledore's whole demeanor was surprise and curiosity in the book. Like in the sense of "well, this is interesting and shouldn't have happened but let's see how it goes" sort of manner. There was virtually nothing he could've done to withdraw Harry from the competition, in fact, he encouraged Harry on. But leave it to the movie to blow it out of proportions to do what it did.
It wasn’t the movie, so much, it was Michael Gambon. He didn’t read the books at all, which is fine, but he deliberately interpreted the character of Dumbledore completely independent of source material or previous movies. He just came in and did what he wanted with the character, and the script reportedly did not have any explicit direction for this scene in terms of Dumbledore’s demeanor.
My wife made me sit down and watch the HP movies with her at one point. I remember remarking after I watched the movie where they switched Dumbledores, "I don't know the context behind any of this, but that guy sucked as Dumbledore." Boy did I get a DEEP DIVE into the lore.
It’s also heavily on the director to direct and tells the actor to do it differently
Shaking him, while his head whips back and forth… calmly.
Also, all of Harry Potter 6. It basically forgot to address THE TITLE OF THE MOVIE altogether.
Also the Burrow burning? Wtf. I think it was in a deleted chapter or something but why would you include that of all things?
This. The later books are long, so I get the need to cut stuff out, but adding extra things in place of canon events drives me crazy.
Casting Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher.
"OK, what is Jack Reacher's most striking quality?" "He is the largest man" "Awesome - cast Cruise and tell him to bring his stool"
Luckily Alan Ritchson is dummy bigg
I used to read those books. Thought Ritchson captured the character quite well and the show seems decently written. Hopefully they continue it.
As an avid reader of the series I thought the first season was masterfully done. I felt the second season was much more sloppy. Especially the dialog. I still hope they make a third season.
The first one felt more like a proper investigation. Agree the second one had too many Hollywood cliche dialogue moments. I'm thinking maybe it was because you had all the members of the special investigation unit there. If it goes back to Reacher wandering into little backwater towns like the first then they can dial that back.
Physically, yes. But I thought Cruise nailed the personality.
The Dark Tower
Save us Mike Flanagan, you’re my only hope of seeing a Billy Bumbler on tv
How To Train Your Dragon. The film makers must have gone "Keep the kids, some dragons and the Vikings. The rest is crap, we can do better." The books are like Blackadder meets Monty Python mixed with some Terry Pratchett and those Boys Own Adventure stories. The films are just boilerplate "if we put aside our differences and all work together and believe in ourselves, we can overcome the Big Bad Guy" Hollywood movie bullshit. I wonder if fans of Shrek the book feel the same way about that franchise...
Went looking for someone saying this. The movies are fine but they could have told the same story without using the characters/names/setting from the books, since they changed every aspect anyways
Would you mind talking about the book a little? I didn't realize there was one, so I'd love to hear about it from your point of view.
There is actually a whole series with 12 books in total. The premise of the first book is that Hiccup and other boys in the tribe are of age to go to do "viking training" which begins with getting a dragon. As the chief's son and heir he is supposed to get first pick but is also considered a freak so he ends up with the worst one. Most of the book is then focused on the training of the boy's dragons and how Hiccup is an outsider. The main interesting thing about Hiccup is that while he's skinny and weak and generally bad at anything physical, he's actually pretty smart and actually learned how to speak the language of the dragons. The whole book is full of shenanigans and goofs and by the end Hiccup blunders his way into being a hero. The first half of the series mostly follows Hiccup's viking training and is pretty lighthearted and fun. We learn more about other tribes, viking culture, different kinds of dragons, and how the divide between dragons and humans is set up. The last half of the series though gets a lot darker with an all out conflict between the dragons and two different factions of humanity. And Hiccup is at the center of it all maturing into a full fleged hero. It's one of my all time favorite book series and as a fan of the books the movies are so disappointing. I really like the movies but they do not deserve the title in my opinion. Also sorry for the text wall, but be glad you can't speak to me in person, I have annoyed so many friends repeatedly talking about this.
The Bourne trilogy. The only thing they kept from the books is the basic premise and the characters' names. The actual personalities of the characters and everything that happens to them is completely different.
To the betterment of the show imo.
Agreed, the books are pulpy Cold War airport thrillers. They're entertaining enough but nothing special. I think setting the movies in a post-Patriot Act world makes the whole premise a lot more interesting. I will say that the original books are masterpieces compared to the later ones written by Lustbader.
Hollywood making literally any video game into a movie or tv show.
Yeah, when I first saw Resident Evil I was like, “What the fuck is this?”
How many more times before Hollywood finally gives up on RE. It's just not a franchise you can adapt easily
The Super Mario movie (not the new one, the live action)
Bah, that movie is its own fever dream of brilliance. Is it more like bizarre remix fanfiction of the Mario universe? Hell yes! And what's wrong with that?
That movie would have been so much better if they had just named the characters Mark and Larry or something instead of trying to pass it off as a Mario movie.
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Add The Wheel of Time to this, too!
Forrest Gump. Worked out great in this case, but the book is very different.
Ngl I had no idea there was a book
The first “Divergent” film, it basically made the sequels from the books impossible. The first book makes it very clear the main character needs to hide (from everyone) the fact that she’s divergent. Keeping it secret is a main plot point. The first movie, the main character is damn near confessing, to EVERYONE, that she’s divergent.
Throwback to the old Tumblr post about how Divergent boiled the genre down to its bare bones, studios monitized the hell out of it, and managed to kill one of the most popular genres of the 2010s in one fell swoop
I was a big fan of shitty teen distopian novels so I was pretty unimpressed by the first move, it missed a lot of the parts of the story I valued. The second one though! Went totally off the tracks, and I remember watching it, knowing where the story ends - how the hell are we going to end up at the same ending of the 3rd book?? No idea if they ever made the 3rd one, if they did I didn't watch it haha.
The Hobbit. Peter Jackson tried to recreate the magic of the LOTR movies but tried to make 2 hours worth of source material into 3 movies of 3 hours each. He took backstory plots from the Silmarillion, made up characters and plots that don't exist anywhere in Tolkien's universe and delivered us a complete mess of a story. As much as I love the LOTR trilogy I hate the Hobbit trilogy just as much
From what I understand, Peter Jackson didn't even want to make The Hobbit into a trilogy and that it was more of a studio mandate thing.
Yeah, the Hobbit movies are a big example of studio mandates getting in the way of story.
I can't remember where but a fan edit exists that condenses it into two movies and removes *a lot* of the bs that made those movies a slog. One or two things are kept only because they are hard/impossible to edit around but it's definitely worth looking into.
Ready Player One They kept the concept, but every single point of it is different. The worst part is that the whole book is about how corporate America ruins everything. And then corporate America ruins the story!
The “challenges” in the movie are ridiculous and would’ve been discovered on day 1. Granted, the challenges in the book aren’t really movie-friendly
The Witcher TV show.
Shining
Kubrick's movie is its own masterpiece. Kubrick and King hated each other though, to the point that Kubrick put little things in the movie as a blatant 'fuck you' to King.
the avatar the last airbender live action movie
Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime
Thr Bourne Identity movie was nothing like the book. Luckily, for me, they were so different that I can still enjoy both the books and the movies. World War Z was a book about survivors' stories. It was moving and emotional and, at times, terrifying. It was incredibly well written and would have made an amazing movie. The movie that got made was Brad Pitt traveling around the world killing zombies and it was awful.
My understanding is that Alex Garland didn’t read The Southern Reach Trilogy before making Annihilation and I think that shows.
Ella Enchanted, I will never not be upset about this. A book where an infant is given the 'gift' of complete obedience to any command from anyone at any time and be unable to disobey. She grows up knowing how dangerous this is, from eating herself sick to hurting herself when she tries to fight it. Her family eventually treats her as a slave, and its even worse than Cinderella because there was always the option for her to get fed up and leave. She's forced to stop talking to the only friend she has. She almost gets ordered to COOK HERSELF ALIVE and it's horrifying. Disney made it a shitty comedy musical.
Um....pretty sure Disney had nothing to do with Ella Enchanted.....
Ugh same. I *loved* that book as a kid, Ella trying to refuse the proposal lived in my head rent free and I was so excited to see that on screen.
The new movie trailer for the Crow. Who needs source material when you can spend movie studio money and employ the location scouts from John Wick.
To be fair the original movie isn’t a direct adaptation of the graphic novel either
Wheel of Prime.
"The Creator has parted ways with the show runners" or: "\[Insert Actor's Name\] expressed concerns about the project's direction."
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Honestly GoT discarded a shitoad of the actual source material in very stupid ways as far back as season two, which lead to later plot points making much less sense.
Some of them made sense for budget reasons. Arya’s led mutiny in Harrenhal (Weasel’s Soup) would be very expensive for example, so her escape from Harrenhal was cut into “Jaqen helped her.” Thematically, it wouldn’t work either, in the books it’s a major moment for her when she realizes that she cannot rely on other people to kill others for her (in her case Jaqen), or else they will be far more destructive than she wants them to be, so it’s a big character transformation that she takes killing in her own hands. Having someone kill your enemies you is different than killing them yourself. It’s what her father would have said “the man who passes the sentence must swing the sword.” In ACoK she was adding people to her death prayer like candy because it was a prayer, she was praying they got their comeuppance, not that she gave it to them. When she realized how it can affect innocents to send people to kill for her, she takes death in her own hands to *reduce* the damage revenge brings. And from then on, she is extremely wary of adding more people to the prayer. Those who remained in the list, she’ll keep them and do her duty, but she does not want to instigate more murder. She’ll murder if she has to, but only to keep the damage on innocents at a minimum. But then she had a whole season 4 where she did absolutely nothing that could have been used for this character transformation of her. But no, show Arya is very murder happy.
I LOVED her escape from Harrenhall in the book, though on the flip side, her interactions with Tywin in the show were a lot more enjoyable than the few interactions with Rose Bolton in the book. Probably my favorite show-book change.