I won’t mention anything I’ve already seen in other posts, but I thought Requiem for a Dream was an excellent adaptation of the book.
For series/TV, I think Game of Thrones is, at least to date, superior to A Song of Ice and Fire.
Jurassic Park reads somewhat like a screenplay and was a better movie than book. Certainly when I read The Lost World I felt like I was reading a movie script, but the movie was bad too. (Maybe a faithful adaptation 
).
Just read the body, it was only 80 pages so it didn’t take long. Wasn’t too impressed. Movie was much better.
Part of that could be because the movie has a nostalgia factor the book doesn’t. But even putting that aside, the characters in the book were far less relate-able than the movie characters. They were much more 1 dimensional in the book.
Also wasn’t the book supposed to end with Gordie meeting Ace as adults? I didn’t see that part. It just ended with what happened with the other 3 in the gang.
Now that you bring it up, wouldn’t it have been super-cool if they had gotten Donald Sutherland to play grown-up-Ace? IIRC, in the book, Ace walked right by GU-Gordie on his way to the Mellow Tiger without recognizing him.
I was just sure they were going to screw up the Lord of the Rings, any Narnia book, and certainly the entire Harry Potter series. So I didn’t want to see any of them.
But the rest of the family wanted to go to a movie… I so clearly remember cringing as Lord of the Rings started with … the Shire! It’s actually the Shire! They didn’t screw it uh… Gandalf! Oh my god, it really is Gandalf the Grey, and he’s acting like an actual wizened wizard! Look, Hobbits! They’re cute, and the Elves are superior and the Orcs are scary and the Dwarves are… dwarves!
So I gave Harry Potter a try that same summer… I thought the casting was perfect, which really made it work for me. Then I tried the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which wasn’t as epic as the other movies, but still Didn’t Suck.
I gave such a sigh of relief… it was hard to believe they hadn’t irrevocably screwed up three great literary worlds.
When you read a book, you see the story through a window; that other person sees the story through a different window, sees more of certain things, less of others. I saw this most clearly with Dune, of which Alan Smithee made a directorial mess, but it highlighted aspects of the story that kind of went past me in two or three readings.
Recently, I was able to see Winter’s Tale, which I enjoyed as a book, and the movie is quite beautiful (one of the best cinematographers in the business) but renders the story through a different window compared to how I read it.
By contrast, no one has spoken of Egyptian cotton. Catch-22 absolutely has to be one of the definitive transfers made from paper to celluloid. A close second must be Slaughterhouse Five. (Is the some weird thing about WWII and weirdness?)
As far as Harry Potter, I found the actual writing to be less than stellar, to the point that it dragged down my enjoyment of the books – though I was not in the right age-range for the books, despite being emotionally about 12.
I had the exact same experience. Christmases for the next two years were great as I looked forward to each new installment. I had hoped The Hobbit would have been the same, but such was not to be.
I’ll add that I was very happy with the Les Miserables musical adaptation.
Yeah, well, you probably do not want to see what they did to Voyage of the Dawn Treader. That was probably my favorite of the books. The movie was a disaster.
I just wanted to mention that the Robert Wise 1971 film version of The Andromeda Strain was amazingly faithful to the book, and worked rather well. It’s arguably my favorite Crichton adaptation.
There were a couple of very minor changes, and one big one – the character of Leavitt, male in the book, was changed to female and played by Kate Reid. There was a big deal made about the film Alien in 1979 when it was revealed that the part of Ripley was written for a male character, but Sigourney WEaver was cast. Everyone seems to have forgotten that the same thing had happened eight years earlier with The Andromeda Strain
Probably because when you ask most people about Alien they will be able to tell you something about a SF movie with a big monster but if you as most people about The Andromeda Strain they will speculate that it is something that you use for pasta.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Admittedly I read the book after seeing the movie, so I can’t say the movie lived up to my expectations since I didn’t have any base expectations at the time. But the movie is very true to the book, word for word.
LotR as well was great.
The Hobbit movies were garbage - perhaps the worst offender I’ve ever seen when it comes to disappointing a fan of the books.
I have to say I was also rather disappointed by the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie as compared to the books. Love the books, and mostly hated the movie, though I might not have hated the movie so much if I’d not read the books first.
Oddly enough, Stephen King wasn’t happy with Jack Nicholson being cast as Jack Torrance. I’ll try to find an actual cite, but his theory was that the story is this man’s slow descent into madness, and you know that Nicholson is nuts the first time you see him.
The Martian comes to mind as an example of a great book that was made into a great movie.
Yes, they slowed down and spoon-fed the audience some of the more science-y stuff, but I thought that was actually an improvement on the source material. And yes, they skipped over some of the major plot points in the book, to the point that certain scenes made no sense. (Watney calling himself a space pirate.) Certainly, the movie’s ending was better than the book ending, which wound up being rather flat, IMO.
Game of Thrones is one of the rare examples of a screen adaptation actually significantly improving on the source material.
I’ve been disappointed so often by adaptations, that I’m not going to bother listing those.
Ready Player One will be coming out this year, and I’m really hoping they don’t screw that one up although I’m not hopeful after seeing the trailer.
For me, a great example of this is “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (the one with Gene Wilder). I think it’s a huge improvement over the book.
That was my reaction, too.
Actually I wasn’t happy with any part of the movie except the casting of Danny and Halloran, and the physical hotel set. It was a huge disappointment; the book was his best.
I think Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 *Rebecca *is a vast improvement over the Daphne du Maurier novel. The Hitchcock movie tightened up the plot and timeline and even eliminated some unimportant characters (like Maxim’s mother and one extra dog).
The animated Watership Down is pretty good. Takes some liberties and cuts some stuff (and inexplicably adds a new character just to kill her immediately) but it works as a movie and isn’t insulting to the source material.
Another Richard Adams novel, The Plague Dogs, was also animated and, in my opinion, is easier to watch than it was to read (though both still feel like a labor of love).
I have noticed that suspense movies often begin with the killing of animal, usually a dog. I believe this is a deliberately manipulative tactic to engage the audience and get their blood pressure up. I deeply resent having my buttons pushed that way.
Watership Down was a very good adaptation. I haven’t seen the later BBC miniseries but have heard that was also good.