My contention is that The Scouring should have been the fourth LotR movie.
“A trilogy plus an epilogue”
The film Logan’s Run has three scenes where events follow the book, and dialog is copied near-verbatim, but the rest of the movie is vastly different.
Logan and Jessica travel around a continent and an ocean in the book. Filming that would have required an impossible budget.
There is a lot of sex in the book, much of it by characters who are under the age of consent in most 20th-Century U.S. states.
Neither the book nor the movie is an Immortal Classic, but both are entertaining yarns.
Saruman took over the Shire long before he actually arrived there. When Frodo & Co arrive, they hear the story that Lotho Sackville-Baggins had been buying up property & bringing in Men to manage it not long after they originally left. They were already hoarding food & making the Rules long before Saruman got there. Things got much worse when Sharkey arrived, because at that point Saruman’s main goal was to destroy the Shire so Frodo came back a wasteland, not a home.
And many hobbits were fighting & resisting even before Frodo arrived - the Tooks & the Brandybucks specifically. It required Merry & Pippin’s leadership to fight the evil Men, but the hobbits had been quite capable of it all along.
I, too, read it close to 40 years ago as well. So I’m not sure how well it holds up. I happened to be in Europe when I picked it up (had a lot of free time waiting for things to break for work), and there’s nothing like reading Ludlum in Europe. He names all these locations, and you’re like “that’s just over there !” Made the book all that more entertaining.
I had an interesting encounter with a friend whose favorite movie is Logan’s Run. I mentioned that I considered the book to be much better than the movie, even though the book is almost cinematic in its writing, and his reaction was “There’s a book?”
The Magicians TV series was far and away better than the book series. I found it extremely hard to care about the characters in the books, and easy to like them on TV.
Has anybody read Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes recently? It been 40+ years for me, but I still remember the ending being radically different than the film. The planet of apes isn’t Earth. The hero and Nova escape in the orbiting spacecraft he arrived in and return to Earth with the relativistic time dilation. When they land in Paris, they are greeted by apes. Is this parallel history/evolution or did the apes just beat the couple back to Earth? The framing story kind of supports the latter, but it’s never clearly stated that space apes conquered Earth.
The film is emphatically unambiguous about what happened and was able to milk four sequels out of it that filled in the details, while at the same time creating an allegory about racism and authoritarianism.
I enjoy Starship Troopers (1997) far more when Heinlein Cultists aren’t around to tell me I’m watching it wrong.
I mean the book and the movie have entirely different goals in mind. I really enjoy both, but the fact Starship Troopers the novel basically invented an entire science fiction genre means it was doing something right.
I liked them both, but I was disappointed with how the TV series treated Julia.
There they are. 
I was greatly disappointed in the movie, but I’m sure not going to harsh your mellow.
Starship Troopers got really weird in the later sequels where they actually did begin faithfully adapting stuff from the books including the mech armor but it was still in the original satire universe. Doubly-so for the TV show which IIRC was 100% completely serious but still in the same universe.
Do books based on real life count? In which case Beautiful Mind sort of counts. I mean I’m not sure “better” but made the changes to a Beautiful Mind made the story fit in a traditional Hollywood 3-act story structure (and added a Hollywood “imaginary friend” trope).
While the actual story is pretty interesting (including John Nash moving to Europe to become a “world citizen” and abandoning his US citizenship) it does not fit nicely into a Hollywood redemption story and features a bunch of stuff Hollywood is not particularly keen to dwell on including antisemitism, homosexuality (and 1950s attitudes to it* )
-
- including among the psychiatric community, one part of the story is he got pretty awful care from the expensive private mental hospital he was treated at initially, as they were obsessed with the freudian idea that Schizophrenia was actually “Homosexual shock”, caused by repressed homosexual feelings. The public medical hospital (that is vilified in the film) actual gave more effective treatment.
Make room for Daddy? = Make room for dessert?
I went to see Starship Troopers twice on opening day, and it was the first DVD I ever owned - even before I owned a DVD player!
Despite some of the other elements injected into Roughnecks or Starship Troopers: Invasion, I feel like Verhoeven’s film basically poisoned the well for faithfully adapting the definitive powered armour book, and, as hard as it tries Uchū no Senshi doesn’t quite fill the need to see my favourite book in action.
Maybe now that streaming services producing their own award-winning content is a real thing, we will see John Steakley’s Armor (even if they have to call it John Carpenter’s Armor) or Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War or Forever Peace put to film.
Forest Gump, the movie, is only barely similar to the book. The most significant change, to me, is the character of Forest, who isn’t nearly as nice a guy. He also isn’t nearly as naïve.
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story contains almost no actual content adapted from Tristram Shandy…and ends up being a spot-on adaptation of Tristram Shandy.
The Joy of Sex (1984). Only the title remained. And for those of you who might scoff and sneer that the teen sex comedy was hardly an improvement on the source. . . Yes, I think it was.
Side note: Charles Grodin was tasked with writing the script, and he later produced a movie called “Movers and Shakers” fictionalizing the meddling of studio bosses with movie production.
It’s the same character, Lucy Mancini.
The movie dropped Lucy’s large vagina, but during Connie’s wedding reception, we see Sonny’s wife, Sandra, playfully demonstrating to her friends just how large Sonny’s braciole is.