That change first appears in the 1937 film version of Pygmalion, actually.
Does Adaptation count as an, uh, adaptation of The Orchid Thief?
PLEASE tell me you’re an Excel Saga fan! 
As a big fan of Shaw’s, I agree – this is how the Leslie Howard/Wendy Hiller film ends.
—But—
1.) Shaw wrote notes for adapting his play into a film (they’re in my edition of the play) and he has the film ending the same way his play did (of course). Shaw hated the idea of a “romantic” ending that had Eliza ending up with Higgins, and wrote a lengthy afterward to his published edition telling how things turned out between Eliza and Freddy.
2.) In the published version of the script of My Fair Lady Lerner (or is it Loewe?) apologizes for changing the ending to the one in which Eliza ends p with Higgins, and asks Shaw to forgive him. But he doesn’t acknowledge that the 1937 film ended that way.
– So who changed the ending from Shaw’s for the first film? And why didn’t the My Fair Lady bunch acknowledge him?
HAIL ILPALAZZO!
I would consider any Disney movie that was based on a fairy tale to be an excellent example. The changes made in most of those movies were understandable considering that most fairy tales are pretty morbid and the movies are marketed to children but it may be exactly what you are looking for.
Shite, nobody’s mentioned *Lord of the Rings * yet?
-
True. In fact, I considered posting the ending (which isn’t quite how Katisha describes it.
-
Lerner, as the librettist, is the likely suspect.
The IMDB credits identify four people (in addition to Shaw) involved in writing the film. (BTW, I got the year wrong- it’s 1938). Any of them could have been responsible.
I was astonished that in the most recent adaptation of “Les Miserables” (the one with Liam Neeson as Valjean), Jean Valjean lives at the end!
The OP doesn’t call for a “book”- it calls for a literary work. TROY is a collage of several literary works but in many ways ends differently than any of them.
(Whenever you patronize another poster, God electrocutes a baby squirrel.)
No, Troy is a loose adaptation of the Iliad. That’s why it focuses on Achilles and why Homer is the only Greek poet to get a writing credit. Yes, the movie does nod briefly to the Aeneid (and one or two other poems), but it is not an adaptation thereof and so is not subject to criticism for omitting things not contained in the Iliad - not in this thread, anyway.
Two other Stephen King works Insomnia and from the short story Lawnmower Man The titles were the only things they had in common with their respective movies.
The film Circle of Friends has a pretty conventional happy, romantic ending. The Ugly Duckling heroine forgives her Big Man On Campus boyfriend for his sins, and then an implied Happily Ever After. In the novel, the ending is also happy but in a different way – the heroine realizes that, even though he’s cute and nice, she’ll never really be happy with the BMOC because she can’t trust him. (The boyfriend’s sins are significantly reduced in the screen version.) She also realizes that she’d made him the center of her life in a rather unhealthy way, and that even though he’s the first guy who ever found her attractive he isn’t the only one. So she goes for “let’s just be friends” instead.
The Hunger (mediocre movie, pretty lousy novel) has more dramatically different endings in terms of the actual events, although I think the tone in both is similar. In both versions of the story, vampire queen Miriam leads reluctant newly-turned vampire Sarah to drink her own boyfriend’s blood. He dies. Realizing what she’s done, Sarah stabs herself. But vampires can’t really die, they’re just reduced to zombie-like beings or conscious corpses.
Then the endings diverge. In the book, Miriam puts Sarah away in a coffin like her other former lovers. She moves away and takes up with a man, vowing to stay away from mortal women in the future because they get too emotional. In her coffin, Sarah thinks of her dead boyfriend and dreams of being able to truly die herself so she can be with him again.
In the movie, Miriam starts to put Sarah away in a coffin, but is attacked by her zombified exes. They “kill” her to the extent that she can be killed. This seems to be the ending of the film, but then there’s an additional scene that reveals that Sarah (now the new queen vampire) recovered from her injuries, moved away, and took up with both a man and a woman. Meanwhile, she’s stuck what’s left of Miriam in a box, where she mentally screams for Sarah.
The Iliad and the Odyssey – a lot of the action in the movie wasn’t taken from the Iliad (which itself only covers a few weeks of the ten years in Troy) but the Odyssey, in which the story of the end of the war (and Agamemnon’s fate, etc. etc) was related to Telemachus by Menelaus and Odysseus by the spirits in the underworld.
The first Time Machine movie (made in the sixties) is pretty faithful to the book, albeit a little campy. I agree that the new version totally sucked.
Pretty much any movie based on a short story will not be totally faithful to the source material, since so much will have to be added to flesh it out to a full-length movie. Philip K. Dick has already been mentioned, but I just have to reiterate: why do they keep adapting his short stories when he wrote three dozen perfectly good full-length novels for them to murder? The short stories are awesome, of course, but they’re one-note, like all short stories. The novels describe an entire world. They’re supposedly making a movie out of Ray Bradbury’s story “A Sound of Thunder.” I don’t know how that’s going to work, seeing as how the original story was only something like ten pages long, but I bet it won’t be faithful.
When I read the Forrest Gump book, I had to check the copyright to make sure it wasn’t just a parody of the character. I thought for sure someone had written a satire featuring an “evil” Forrest. Nothing from the book except the character’s names made it into the movie.
I heard I, Robot had nothing to do with The Caves of Steel but I’ve not seen or read either one.
Blade Runner had almost no relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but it’s still one of my favorite movies ever. Weird, that.
I’ve heard it said a number of times that a short story is the best fodder for a movie, not a novel. A novel is very dependent on perspective, which is hard to transfer to a movie, and its plot may not be ‘movie-ish’ enough. A short story has atmosphere and the germ of an idea, which you can use in the movie. It actually works better because you have to flesh it out and develop it instead of just picking what to drop and what to change. What happened to some of Dick’s stories sounds pretty bad, though. Given what I’ve heard about some of his novels, I don’t know how they’d make movies out of them.
Regarding Insomnia, if you’re referring to the Al Pacino/Robin Williams murder mystery that takes place in Alaska, it has no relation whatsoever to King’s novel. That movie is a remake of a 1997 Norwegian film.
The Servants of Twilight, based on Dean R. Koontz’s Twilight, made a minor yet significant change to the ending:
Yes the boy really IS THE SON OF SATAN!!!
A bit cliche, but I actually liked it.
Someone really needs to put this on a tshirt.
Then I’m going to be even more patronizing in the future. The little buggars are digging up the bulbs in my garden.
Carrie
In the movie, Carrie simply goes home after destroying the high school. In the book, I think she goes through the entire town and blows up gas stations and takes a lot more lives. Also, in the movie Carrie kills her mother by throwing knives at her, and in the book she makes her mother’s heart stop with her mind.
The Silence of the Lambs
The film ends with Lecter calling Clarice during her award ceramony. In the book, she ends up having sex with the bug guy from the museum.