Check this out. This could almost work as a movie.
The best idea that was turned into the worst movie, I think, was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They stripped all of the jokes out, had no sense of comic timing, and Arthur had a one-note glum performance that just made him dull. Monumentally disappointing.
Does the author explain how any piece of land could be truly that isolated, or how you maintain an ecosystem of megafauna on a tiny island of a few square miles?
There’s a whole blog devoted to re-writing the Left Behind series as it might have been done by a competent storyteller.
John Norman’s idea of combining softcore bondage porn with sword and sandal fantasy was actually quite brilliant. If only he had farmed the work of writing the actual stories out to someone with a nice, crisp writing style, an ear for dialogue, and who wasn’t laboring under the delusion that sexual bondage fantasies were a sound basis for ordering human society. I bet his books would have RULED. (Considering how badly they were written, the Gor novels did incredibly well, a testament to the brilliance of his central concept.)
I thought the basic idea behind The Happening was actually really cool. A toxin that causes people to kill themselves that is released whenever people are in a large groups. That has the possibility for some real psychological horror right there.
I like that movie! 
I thought the movie “Gamer” had an interesting idea. People would be playing live action versions of video games, renting other peoples bodies as their avatars. The movie was awful. Even “Surrogates” was better.
Kind of - it´s the most isolated island in the pacific (in the middle of an area of water the size of the continental United States, or something), and there was only freshwater when those creatures evolved (well, low-salt water) and they couldn´t evolve back for some reason - even though they had no problem evolving every other implausible feature of anatomy you could imagine. The book´s characters didn´t really know, they only had theories, which is a nice way of saying that the author decided to chicken out on this one.
A pretty thin explanation, really. I mean, over 500 million years, there would be some rafts that drifted away, and some of the creatures are microscopic and could be carried by the wind, the way insects are.
It´s basically just an excuse to have an island of monsters. There are lots of SF books that do this in one way or another. Sometimes it´s something from space that crashes on earth and brings with it an alien ecology (as in the Cthorr books), sometimes an area is swapped in from an alternate timeline, sometimes experiments run wild in some lab, but usually it´s just some spot isolated by geography - remote island, the center of the earth, under a dome in the Antarctic, a remote valley in the Himalayas.
Wow, that was hilarious! The basic characters would work well in a gangster movie. Just make the Bros Sicilian instead of plain Italian.
I suppose you saw this one? Mario Bros in the real world featuring post-traumatic stress disorder, unemployed plumbers, domestic abuse and mushroom addiction.
Hey, Starship Troopers is a good film. I think people just completely misunderstand it. It’s a comedy, I laughed myself silly the whole way through.
Seconded on I, Robot though. What the fuck were they thinking?
It’s been done. The Christ Clone Trilogy by James BeauSeigneur.
I kind of disagree here. Making the HGTTG into a movie was always a bad idea. It was written as a radio serial and later transformed into a really very good TV Series. Condensing all of that into a <2 hour movie meens re-writting most of the jokes and removing 80% of the content (most of which was very good). I guess there was a slim chance they could have made a watchable movie out of it, but it would never have been much like the HGTTG as I know it.
My own entry would be Aliens Vs Predator. Two of the most iconic alien badasses every created, coming from a similar vibe and (more-or-less) compatible universe - how could that not be awesome? I mean, they didn’t even have to write their own plot, they could have just borrowed it from the graphic novels (like the later Alien movies also should have done).
I understand it perfectly. I own a copy. And I feel the same way about it that I would if that old Carol Burnett Show skit about Gone With the Wind was presented as a valid adaptation of Mitchell’s book.
See the thread title? ‘The best ideas that became the worst works.’ 
By that criteria somebody’s idea was to make a ridiculous bug-killing-in-space-with-tits-and-giggles movie and they pulled it off pretty well. Clearly they weren’t trying to make a faithful adaptation so I don’t care how faithful it was to the source material.
I just discovered that 'Howard the Duck is one of the worst films of all time. Wow, I really liked that film when I was a kid!
Yeah. They weren’t asking if they succeeded in what they were trying to do, the OP asked for things that became “the worst works”. If you set out to make a bad movie and succeed, it’s still a bad movie.
Any mention of the “Starship Troopers” movie is likely to devolve into this Caran d’Ache cartoon from the nineteenth century, originally about the Dreyfus affair. The first panel’s caption translates approximately to “Let us not speak of the affair!” The second reads “They spoke of it!”
Yeah, this has to be about the biggest example of ignoring the cheese out there. I mean, what is the cheese … the reward that would anybody want to watch an Alien vs. Predator movie? The versus says it all – to see aliens and predators fighting. So if you follow cheese theory, you write a movie with lots and lots of aliens and predators fighting each other in various spectacularly badass ways while the human protagonists cower, run and hide a lot. But that’s not the story the filmmakers wanted to tell. They wanted to write a story about a modern Xena: Warrior Princess having a doomed quasi-romance with a Predator for some reason. So that’s what they did. There were scenes of aliens and predators fighting in the movie, but not many, and let’s face it, not very good ones, because their hearts just weren’t in it.
Sorry, forgot to include the link. You’ve probably seen it already, but anyway, here it is, in all its youtubey glory:
I agree it clearly was a comedy, and a hilarious one at that, but from what I can tell, Starship Troopers is second only to Hamlet in terms of brilliance and importance, so asking its fans to have a sense of humor about anything that bears its name is an exercise in futility.
Asylum movies qualify under the OP, but only because they often take good ideas other people had and turn them into shitty movies (see: Sherlock Holmes (vs the Monsters)
No, you’ve got it quite wrong. ST was an incredibly controversial book when it came out, but it’s good, solid SF. Ask yourself how you would feel if you were a big Margaret Mitchell fan and the only version of the film that existed looked like the Carol Burnett thing I link to above. If you groused, you’d just be a Mitchell-worshipping yahoo who couldn’t see the humor in the production, right?
