Worst Book to Movie Adaptations
There is nothing better than falling in love with a book. You are introduced to characters that feel like friends, become immersed in a world that all feels so real, and are excited if not a little nervous when you hear that it is being adapted to the screen. And there is nothing worse than seeing that book botched in the transition. The characters you loved were miscast. The world you imagined was ruined. There was too much CGI. It was too long or too short. Your favorite parts were cut. Whatever the reason or treason, some disappointments stick with you. These are my top five disappointments in Book Adaptations.
Number 5. The Dark Tower. This well-cast adaption was overwhelmed by its source material. It is one movie that tried to cram in 14 Stephen King-length Stephen King novels. Not to mention the fact that The Dark Tower books are considered an axis for the Stephen King universe, connecting settings and characters, and references from countless novels or short stories from a career of almost fifty years. That’s so much material. It would be impressive to fit everything into a trilogy…and maybe that was the original plan…but the jumbled montage of callbacks and references fell flat. Especially coming out the same year as IT Chapter 1…one of King’s best adaptations.
Number 4. Mortal Engines. Again, there was too much material to work with. The books are in-depth and detailed. They are expansive, political, and scientific. And it was too much for one movie. But the real reason I hate it: False Advertising. The trailers featured mobile cities rampaging across apocalyptic landscapes, swallowing smaller towns like hungry-hungry hippos. I enjoyed how little the commercial gave on the plot and concentrated on the action (it turns out that’s because there is no plot). Then the trailer revealed that it was “From Peter Jackson” the director of my favorite series and book adaptations, The Lord of the Rings. I went to see it thinking he directed it. Only when it turned out to be such a miserable laughable mess did I look into it. Peter Jackson was just a producer. He had originally been at the helm but passed on the project and it went to a storyboard artist that had worked with Jackson. But he was affiliated enough for the studios to rely on name recognition.
Number 3. Artemis Fowl. The YA books were fresh, smart, and exciting. The film was doomed from the start. It was the smallest marketing and wide release on this list. A Disney Plus exclusive that came out in 2020 during the pandemic. Ten years too late to capitalize on the height of the book’s popularity. And the execution only made it worse. The CGI was bad. The casting was worse. The script was terrible. Pointless and dumb, the poor excuse for a movie was panned by all critics. Currently holds an 8% on rotten tomatoes. It is the flat-out worst movie on this list. But I still have two that were more disappointing.
Number 2.
I just said Peter Jackson directed my favorite films, and that’s why The Hobbit series is all the more terrible. He was in the director’s chair. It was not false advertising. It is his work. Guillermo del Toro was originally going to direct. I love del Toro’s style, but I didn’t want Middle Earth to look like Pan’s Labyrinth. I wanted more of the same. More of a fantasy that felt like a historical epic. I was ecstatic when Jackson took lead, promising to continue the immersive world of the original trilogy. The result was beyond disappointing. One drawback is how heavily it relies on the originals. You have to see The Lord of the Rings to understand The Hobbit, a prequel series that does zero world-building or character development of its own. And when you compare them, the two sets are opposites. The Lord of the Rings was planned meticulously and completed in one long shoot. Three movies were filmed as one. That’s amazing. The original shoot is worthy of a documentary in itself like Heart of Darkness did for Apocalypse Now. We kind of have one. (If you are willing to watch the behind the scene dvd specials…which I have.) It was an impressive feat of filmmaking, but now we have The Hobbits—filmed in the same long-form style—to compare it to, we know how sloppy, disjointed, and poorly paced the original trilogy could have been. The Hobbit was one kids' book stretched to three epics and shot in a single run. The result is as bad as it sounds. The action sequences are silly. The characters are nonsense instead of complex and relatable. Over-reliant on CGI. I have to forget they exist so I can enjoy the originals.
Number 1. Personal choice here. The Giver. This was one of my favorite books, growing up. The beautiful novel was unlike anything else I’d read in the children/YA realm. It was vaguely sci-fi. Maybe fantasy. Speculative fiction before I knew what that was. About a society that had decided to remove pain, identity, differences, and memory. A special member of society is chosen to ‘remember’ everything. The story was slow but deliberately paced. The ending was ambiguous and thought-provoking. It trusted its young readers to think and feel and connect. The film did the exact opposite. It turned the philosophical story into a pointless action movie. For example, the casting. The Giver himself was played decently by Jeff Bridges although he phoned it in with that True Grit accent he was using for every role at the time. But the surrounding cast included an utterly wasted Meryl Streep. She played a character that wasn’t even in the books. A character that was just a stand-in for President Snow from The Hunger Games. That’s what the movie was trying to be. There were a lot of books and movies like this. Think Divergent films and the Maze Runner series. (Neither of them reached their conclusion.) But The Giver was worse because the book was not intended that way. The movie switched focus and turned it into a story with hover crafts and teenagers fighting for their lives against some government official running the games. So so disappointing.
