Followup question: Blade Runner (movie) has nothing in common with The Bladerunner (novel) other than being a variant title.
So the movie pretty much sets the bar for not following “the novel”. Does this count?
(It also doesn’t follow “the other novel” at all well.)
It’s not a trick question, so no trick answers, please.
I’ve listened to every Reacher novel (Like you, NOT my cup of tea, but when read by the perfect narrator, Dick Hill, I love them). So I have a pretty firm picture of Jack Reacher in my mind, all six and a half feet of him.
I’ve imagined what I would have said if Tom Cruise had come to me and said:
Tom: “There’s a character I want to play… Jack Reacher.” Me: {Huge, wet spit-take, spraying Dr. Pepper all over Tom}
But give the movies a chance. Mr. Cruise nails the intensity, and the movies are true to the fun twists of the books.
You’d think I’d’ve learned to reserve judgment on casting since I muttered “Batman is going to played by Mr. Mom? Sheesh…”
(“What? Now by that kid from Newsies? Sheesh…”)
The Lovecraft-inspired film “In the Mouth of Madness” is also a decent adaptation of HPL’s style.
actually what people hate the most about the depp chocolate factory is whats the most faithful part to the book
the fact that despite all the wonderful things he does hes a immature judgmental dick (like Roald dahl himself) they just bury it with the sort of abused child back story
Probably not the worst adaptation ever, but the movie version of David Brin’s The Postman, with Kevin Costner in the title role, really stunk. The book wasn’t up there with Brin’s Uplift books, but it was still quite good. (I just re-read it last month.)
‘Be Cool’ by the master, Elmore Leonard, was awesome. The movie with John Travolta, Uma Thurmond and Vince Vaughn was horrendous.
Billy Bob Thornton’s version of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All the Pretty Horses’ was so bad even he didn’t like it.
^ I’ve heard of you; I heard you were dead.
And thank you for reminding me of that movie. I look for it on DVD or iTunes every now and then - it has never been available - until just now when I found it on iTunes.
There’s the one scene I quote to people a bit. That’s where Clancy Brown’s character has sold out Lovecraft (Fred Ward) to David Warner’s character, who intends to summon Cthulhu.
HPL: What do you get out of this?
CB: I get to be King of the world!
DW: Yes, it will be a blasted, ruined, DEAD world, but you’ll be the most important thing in it.
CB: 
Every Dean Koontz book made into a movie has been terrible.
Especially all 23* versions of Watchers.
*I exaggerate…slightly.
I read the book … so I knew better than to watch the film …
I could not agree more.
The movie version of A Sound of Thunder was horrible both in terms of fidelity to the short story and the quality of the end result.
The Syfy version of Childhood’s End though maybe 70% accurate to the novel, and a reasonably good product, was still a disappointment because of unnecessary changes that necessitated even more changes. As a result some very moving parts of the novel were lost and some BS mysticism was shoe-horned in.
I get that Tom Cruise does not look at all like the character described in the book. But hair color and physical size are not essential to the character. Reacher is a badass smartass loner nomad ex-cop with a major chip on his shoulder for any petty authority. Lee Child could have written basically the same books and made him a 5-foot tall redhead, or a medium-build black guy, and they’d be… basically the same.
Didn’t the Ted Danson TV version do all four parts? I read the book after I saw that and thought it was actually not too far off.
Just checked: It’s on youtube. Yep, they did all four parts, including the horses and the Yahoos part.
Agreed. I mentioned this in post 56 above. And, as I pointed out there, the Harryhausen version, while not really faithful, at least did Brobdingnag as well.
The book to movie adaptation I was most disappointed by was Mira Nair’s “Vanity Fair” with its “girl power” version of Becky Sharp. To be fair, I gave up on it after half an hour, so it might have improved after that.
No mention of what Redford did to “The Horse Whisperer?” People in the theater were staring at me, I guess I made a scene.
If we are beating this horse, in the novels it is deliberately and repeatedly emphasized how most people are intimidated by Reacher’s physical size and shape (this is played with on rare occasions such as when he has to fight a guy the size of André the Giant who is all muscle). Just at first sight by his appearance.
Now, I am not saying it is impossible to portray such a thing with an actor who is 5-foot-nothing, but you would have to find one with seriously crazy eyes and body language to believably convey that a squad of football players or bikers would think twice before messing with him.