I’d like to see Old Man’s War by John Scalzi.
Yeah, every single thing by Neal Stephenson! But I ain’t optimistic.
Marvels. The Marvel Universe from the perspective of the average man. I thought it was brilliant. Will never get made, though.
Peter Jackson has plans to make a “large budget miniseries” from Novik’s books. As of this interview, he was looking at 2010. But those Hobbit movies will be keeping him busy…
Mark Frost’s The List of 7, a truly ripping yarn, would make a wonderful movie. (I think there were plans that fell through.) I still hope–it could certainly qualify as steampunk & the heroes are A Conan Doyle & the mysterious agent who inspired those stories…
Fletch. It was a movie script to begin with. Unfortunately, they cast Chevy Chase in the role, and the film was turned from an intriguing adventure to a second-rate comedy.
Day of the Triffids was the perfect outline for a horror film. Unfortunately, the producers of the film didn’t think so and made it unwatchable.
Two by George R.R. Martin that would make awesome movies in the right hands:
Fevre Dream, a thriller about vampires along the Mississippi River before the Civil War (as if Mark Twain and Bram Stoker had cowritten a novel).
Tuf Voyaging, an environmental satire about an oddball captain who comes into possession of a gigantic, long-abandoned biowarfare starship and goes from planet to planet, solving (or not) their ecological problems.
Hear, hear! Ridley Scott has optioned Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, which is similar in many ways, and I’ll take that, too.
I remember reading K-Pax and thinking “The guy wrote this just to sell the movie rights”.
Denis Johnsons’ “Jesus Son” a collection of short stories that tell a large story. I read it when I was 18 or so and thought it was the best non-genre fiction I had ever read. Later, I was in an ‘writing adaptations’ class in college and started to turn it into a stage play. While I was doing this, I learned a movie was shortly coming out.
The movie was decent.
H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy. Especially now, when CGI has advanced to the point where CGI Fuzzies would be feasible and believable. The merchandising money alone should make the movie a hit and probably spawn at least a couple of sequels!
Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem. Basically a detective with Tourette’s. He’s not a detective by trade, he’s a small time criminal flunky, just solving this one crime.
Maybe it will be a movie, but the 2013 release date used to be 2010, then 2011. I don’t have high hopes.
Oh god, yes!
Writers do sometimes write author tracts. Much of Piper’s SF was barely-disguised apologia for historical and contemporary colonial imperialism, ETs (such as Fuzzies) substituting for human “natives”. The same imperialism that was being dismantled during the period when he wrote. As we see in Uller Uprising, ETs are, like natives in Earth’s colonial history, to be classified as “good” or “bad” depending on whether they are friendly or hostile to their colonizers. As we see in “Oomphel in the Sky,” the colonizer-native relationship is presumptively beneficial to the natives, and do-gooders who think otherwise just don’t get it.
This is largely forgotten, now, by anyone who has not read Piper’s books – unlike Heinlein, he has no reputation with which even non-readers are familiar. But, if a Fuzzy movie were made, it would draw at least some public/academic/fanboy attention to all of that. Which would be interesting.
I’ve mentioned it several times on this Board, and I’m sure you must have run across it, but there was a BBC adaptation that was very faithful to the book, and is now available on DVD.
(There has also apparently been yet another British TV version, which I hear isn’t very faithful at all. I haven’t seen it.)
Interesting! I didn’t know that. But given the popularity of Avatar, which has similar themes, I think *Little Fuzzy *would do very well today (and you have to admit, stuffed Fuzzies would sell so fast they wouldn’t be able to keep them in the stores!). It would be especially interesting if they made it in the very 1960’s-intensive “cocktailin’” style that the book was written in, though I doubt they’d do that.
I could see Clint Eastwood as Jack Holloway. 
Timefall, James Kahn
The Man Who Folded Himself, David Gerrold
The Green Futures of Tycho, William Sleator
For some reason, they tend to be time travel novels.
Also Momo, by Michael Ende. Apparently there are one or two version in German, but I’d love to see an English one, or obtain the others with English subtitles.
I was highly anticipating the movie of Sphere, but it didn’t live up to my expectations.
Battlefield Earth (seriously).
Needless to say I was wrong.
The books I love do not make good movies. But I’d like to see Ann-Marie MacDonald’s play Good Night, Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet) on the screen. It is extremely cinematic in presentation as written; in fact, in the script notes, MacDonald specifically denies that she meant the play to be produced in Hollywood, so certainly I’m not the only person who thinks so.
It’ll never happen, of course.
Oh, and Anathem is something I’d really like to see as a movie (or miniseries).
Is Guillermo del Toro available to make Perdido Street Station?
Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, by George Lucas.
But seriously:
Susanna Clarke’s book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, two early-19th century English magicians that bring magic back to England. Great story.
also, mentioned many times before: Larry Niven books, e.g. Ringworld, or The Integral Trees, or The Mote in God’s Eye.