I’d like to see Cryptonomicon made into a movie, but there’s no way to do all the intertwining stories justice without making it massively long.
How about the opening of Barbarella?
Anything by Terry Pratchett.
Will someone please get the rights to Andrew Vachss’s Burke mysteries and sign up Bruce Willis?
Nothing remotely like that happens in the novel. It has to have been something else.
Some of my favorite books have already been made into Horrible movies.
Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel…absolutely butchered movie with Darryl Hannah
All of Robert Ludlums Bourne books were fun reads for me and the movies just did not deliver. They strayed too far from the story for my taste.
I came in to say this. I think it would adapt very well to film.
The Honor Harrington series, barring a major reworking of how much of the space travel and combat works in the setting, would have severe trouble in a visual setting, unless people wanted to watch a sci-fi film where all the combat happened off screen, or where they could never see two ships at once. That said, if they could make the Treecats look good, and the (only occasionally featured) Powered Armor look awesome, it could work otherwise.
Well, depending on if you wanted to tackle the whole chessmaster plot from the later books.
Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan I think could work as a movie. Hardboiled detective story with a bunch of cool fight scenes, a little steamy sex, and a nice mystery thrown in. I’d buy a ticket.
Simon Green’s Nightside books, even if done well with a decent budget, would probably still end up looking like another bad Siffy movie. Or possibly a campy, so bad it’s good cult film, which in many ways is what the books are in any case.
It’s already been done, and it’s Historical Fiction, but Johnny Tremain would be great IF filmed on location.
The Black Company, by Glen Cook. I think it would be a good movie to see done, but I’m not too sure how it would do with the larger viewing audience.
There’s no real Good Guys, just morally ambiguous protagonists fighting for morally questionable employers, and an ambivalent, almost bittersweet conclusion. With no clear Good Guys/Heroes and no real “Death Star kablooey” victory/payoff for the protagonist, I think audiences won’t be able to really get behind it.
Plus, for a fantasy series, the language and general “tone” is fairly “modern;” no attempts are made at semi-Shakespearean or even faux-medieval type speech patterns. This might pull people out of the story.
But IMO it’s a grand, if somewhat cynical (via the telling by Croaker, the Company’s Physician as well as current Annalist/historian, and main protagonist) tale nonetheless, and worthy of a Peter Jackson treatment.
One of my favorite Stephen King book is The Long Walk, originally published under his pseudoname of Richard Bachman. It’s about a contest where 100 boys start out on a walk. If you drop under a certain speed (I think it was 4 mph, but after being on a treadmill set at 3, I think that is unreasonable) they get a warning. You can walk off warnings. The 3rd warning is a bullet. Last boy walking gets a prize.
It’s one of the few books that I’ve read more than once. But I don’t think it would make a good movie, because it’s just boys walking, talking, and dying.
Okay, I just found out that there may indeed be a film version of this book after all: Scarlett Johansson to Play Alien Seductress in ‘Under the Skin’