The novelization of Stargate was much better than the movie.
Mostly out of perverse humor, I decided to read the novelization of Snakes on a Plane while flying from Toronto to Vancouver. The author did a tremendous job turning caricatures into actual characters.
His sequel, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, is better still, despite a bit of a goofy-sounding title.
And Orson Scott Card’s novelization of The Abyss is spectacular.
I have heard in that one the commies are the good guys, so much so that Asimov has been accused of being one.
Forbidden Planet, although be warned very different in tone and story elements.
If we don’t restrict to movies, there’s a few more famous examples.
The Hitch Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy, was originally a radio series, of course.
Peter Pan And Wendy was originally a stage play, then novelized by the author.
One of the later Sherlock Holmes storiesby ACD was originally a play.
Some of the Target novelizations of Doctor Who stories are pretty good. Some better than the original episodes. *The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, * for instance, is a great read, which cuts out some of the duller bits of the televised version.
Flashing on an old What’s New with Phil & Dixie panel from the Dragon magazine: A smiling Hollywood exec, in tropical shirt and sunglasses, is in his office, on the phone; a big poster for the David Lynch Dune movie on the wall behind him. Caption: “But, Frank! Sweetie! Alan Dean Foster does all our novelizations!”
If that sounds too silly for words, I also recall a book I saw in a bookstore about the time Kenneth Branagh’s film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came out (which Branagh touted as being the most true-to-the-book Frankenstein movie yet, emphasized in the title). The book was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – that is, not the novel Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley, but a novelization of the movie.
The novelization of Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp was worlds better than the movie. It fleshed out the happenings in Tombstone and was much more historically accurate.
Oops!:smack: Misunderstood the OP. Never mind.
Along that vein, we have Pier’s Anthony’s novelization of Total Recall, which was itself a (loose) adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.
I can kind of see that one - the original was a short story, and there are major differences between it and the movie - but still. Piers Anthony?
Well, I don’t think so – there aren’t really any “good guys” or “bad guys” in the book. The US and the Soviet Union are friendlier than they were in the mid-80’s (when the book was written), and the main character, an American computer scientist, goes to the Soviet Union to be miniaturized and travel into a comatose scientist’s brain, so he can use his super-EEG device directly on the neurons and hopefully extract information that will lead to a massive scientific advance.
I don’t recall getting a pro-commie vibe from it, but it’s been years since I read it. I’ll have to go back and read it again.