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[JaseMath]

I'm reading Jurassic Park and it's good—really good—but am finding it to be so removed from the film, it's staggering. The only things the movie and book share in common are characters and location and all of one set piece featuring the Tyrannosaurus.

To their credit, they each stand on their own merits, something you can't say for a lot of adaptations of great books. Also, I'm glad Ian Malcom/Jeff Goldblum didn't come across as the douchebag he is in the book.

GAF, tell me other movies that are dissimilar to the books.

 

[Count Dookkake]

The king has to be Lawnmower Man.

 

[haikira]

World War Z

 

[mrkgoo]

Blade runner.

To be fair though so many adaptations will be different. When the source material is a different media, often large changes need to be made to condense it to 2 hours.

 

[ArgyleReptile]

World War Z.

 

[Haly]

 

[Elitist1945]

Was also going to say World War Z. Not that they could've really made it like the book anyways.

Also, Starship Troopers.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

The Percy Jackson movies changed so much shit it feels like the writer just read the blurb on the inside flap.

 

[cheststrongwell]

Lawnmower Man. The Stephen King story it's based on has absolutely no similarities to the the story in the movie.

Edit: beaten!

 

[ArgyleReptile]

Was also going to say World War Z. Not that they could've really made it like the book anyways.

I think it would have worked if they kept it documentary style like the book.

 

[The Kree]

X-Men 1 - 8.

 

[Rymuth]

World War Z

Goddamn shame, too.

I LOVED the book.

 

[SneakySneaks]

The Shining. Went from a loving but deeply troubled man tormented into hurting his family. To a movie about a man giving into his desire to hurt his family.

 

[Foxeyes Only]

Ender's game

 

[Morrigan Stark]

Game of Thrones
Starship Troopers

 

[Bobby Roberts]

The king has to be Lawnmower Man.

Yeah, this is very likely the best example anyone coulda come up with.

 

[Haly]

It wasn't a bad movie per se, it just didn't capture the wonders of the book.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

It it even POSSBILE to do a "faithful" adatation of World War Z? It read more like a history textbook than a novel.

Same with The Silmarillion.

Game of Thrones

I assume you mean seasons 5 and 6?

 

[Bunta]

Jason Bourne movies, basically the fact that he's a badass and forgetting who he is (I think he can't remember in the book, been a bit since I've read them).

 

[Sushi Nao]

It's a short story, but Running Man was originally about a guy on the run anywhere in the entire world, who could be turned in by anyone for a reward.

 

[JaseMath]

It wasn't a bad movie per se, it just didn't capture the wonders of the book.

Holy shit. Is this based on the Neil Gaiman novel?

 

[Haly]

It was very much possible to do a faithful adaptation of WWZ. Those classic 90s and 00s History Channel docus? Boom, that's all you needed to emulate. The real problem is you can't sell a fictional documentary like this to investors, and you certainly can't get Brad Pitt for it.

Holy shit. Is this based on the Neil Gaiman novel?

Si.

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

It it even POSSBILE to do a "faithful" adatation of World War Z? It read more like a history textbook than a novel.

Same with The Silmarillion.

Silmarilion would have to be like Bible movies.

 

[Parallax]

Wanted.

 

[Bigfoot]

The Bourne movies
Cap America: Civil War
The Hobbit movies

 

[Tubobutts]

Timeline.

 

[Haly]

Silmarillion is definitely impossible for a single movie or even multiples, since there's only the barest amount of continuity. But it'd work as a mini-series.

This is just from hearsay cause I never watched it myself but apparently the adaptation was so bad it put Le Guin off of collabs forever.

 

[Hinchy]

Game of Thrones

I assume you mean seasons 5 and 6?

even then that's ridiculously hyperbolic. Season 5 is still more faithful to the books it's adapting than most book-to-TV adaptations, and, well, now it's probably going pretty far off the rails, but it's still no Dexter or True Blood.

 

[jesu]

It's a short story, but Running Man was originally about a guy on the run anywhere in the entire world, who could be turned in by anyone for a reward.

That's what I would say too, would make a good movie that.

 

[Edwins]

World War Z could be adapted more faithfully, but such an adaptation would be more suited to a television series (Netflix, FX, or AMC probably being good fits).

I'll throw out another general group of adaptations that were very different: the filmography of Shane Black. Iron Man 3 was his most loyal adaptation, Trevor and all. He tends to take the basic idea of a book and do his own thing with it (to the point that many people don't realize his film is an adaptation of a book if they don't pay attention to the credits). Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was an adaptation, for example.

 

[Ōkami]

Jurassic Park 2 has next to nothing from The Lost World, in fact The Lost World shares much more with the original Jurassic Park.

Apart from the setting and the T-Rex scene in the trailer they are really different.

 

[Madao]

iirc, a couple of James Bond films just use a book's title and run with a completely different story.

 

[Green Mamba]

The Jurassic Park film is way closer to the book than the average offender of this phenomenon.

 

[BumRush]

World War Z

Came in here to post this. It's really just the name and the fact that there are zombies and everything else is different, including tone.

 

[BronsonLee]

Stardust was an excellent movie but ya not quite right

The winner though is those two Earthsea Sci-Fi movies

 

[forgeforsaken]

Vampire$ is much better than the movie and rather different.

 

[JustAnotherMike]

It it even POSSBILE to do a "faithful" adatation of World War Z? It read more like a history textbook than a novel.

Isn't the book just stories from a bunch of different people? I always thought the only decent way to go was a Ken Burns style documentary.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

iirc, a couple of James Bond films just use a book's title and run with a completely different story.

The short story "Quantum of Solace" is literally just Bond having dinner with a guy.

 

[SolidChamp]

Yeah OP, you should read The Lost World when you're done. That's actually a great fucking book that's tarnished by the shitty movie.

 

[marrec]

Stardust was an excellent movie but ya not quite right

The winner though is those two Earthsea Sci-Fi movies

The Stardust movie is at least narratively very similar to the book, even if it doesn't quite capture the novel.

Really good movie though.

 

[Manu]

I, Robot.

 

[Bobby Roberts]

iirc, a couple of James Bond films just use a book's title and run with a completely different story.

Moonraker bears almost zero relation to its source, yeah.

 

[ArkhamFantasy]

I didnt know there was a starship troopers book, do you guys recommend it?

 

[KittenMaster]

iirc, a couple of James Bond films just use a book's title and run with a completely different story.

Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me are the biggest examples of this. Moonraker wanted to capitalize on Star Wars' success and ended up absolutely crazy, and Ian Fleming himself wanted The Spy Who Loved Me to be nothing like the book due to the book's commercial and critical failure.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

I didnt know there was a starship troopers book, do you guys recommend it?

Its very good. Just keep in mind that the main theme of the book is that militant fascism = good. The movie satirized and ridiculed that concept. The book plays it straight.

 

[bootsthecat]

Most of them?

I'll cite two of the ones close to my heart (gangster flicks, of course) Goodfellas (Wiseguys was the book) and The Godfather. Not so much that they deviated from the source content, more how much they left out.

 

[Edwins]

There's also a whole class of adaptations in which having an extremely loose connection to the source material is kind of the point. Loads of Dracula films have no real connection to the novel. Journey to the West is a popular one to do incredibly loose adaptations of, too. Dragon Ball started out as a Journey to the West adaptation. One could argue that the DBZ movie in which Goten and Trunks fight a sludge monster clone of Broli is the loosest "adaptations" of one of The Four Great Novels of Chinese Literature ever made.

 

[Mathieran]

I am Legend. Only shares the most barebones plot. Movie was awful.

 

[Not]

Game of Thrones

Uh huh sure

Out of all the adapted movies and shows

 

[Grizzlyjin]

The Divergent films have taken some pretty huge liberties. The first movie had only minor differences, but they started diverging heavily with the second film. Characters who are of significance in the books are in the film but don't have speaking parts, deaths are moved around, etc. It's actually quite bizarre because they change things simply for the sake of changing things. There are tons of adjustments they could make to the source material to improve it. But it just sorta meanders with whatever the films are doing instead. It's amazing actually because the last movie is split into two parts (YA film law demands this) and Part 1 ended with a good majority of the ending from the book. So Part 2 is going to have to be "Fuck it, we'll do it live" in cinematic form.

World War Z is its own thing. Real broad strokes of the book. But if they wanted to make the film follow one protagonist, they did a decent enough job. It makes it more ridiculous than the book but still entertaining.