The author prefered the movie ending.
:dubious: Ha-ha.
Similar, the movie The Door in the Floor covers only the first third or so of the Irving novel A Widow for One Year. The movie is OK, but I thought the book was a lot better.
On the other hand, Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games was a real mess of a book with a cringeworthy subplot about a thinly-veiled Prince Charles and Princess Diana; the movie of the same name omitted them and was a much better, well-crafted, full-speed-ahead action thriller.
Thornton Wilder felt the same way about the movie ending to Our Town, where Emily isn’t dead but just having a dream so she’ll wake up and appreciate everything.
Or perhaps he preferred the financial rewards it brought
Anthony Burgess was conflicted on this point over **A Clockwork Orange. ** The movie made his fortune, at the expense of the point he made with the book’s omitted last chapter.
I loved The Dark is Rising books. I couldn’t even watch what they filmed.
That is generally the case.
Has the obligatory mention of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” been made yet? It could hardly have been a more UNfaithful adaptation.
CalMeacham - thanks for the correction about Hunchback of Notre Dame. I loved the tragic ending in the book; you are right that Disney’s is not the only version that tried to make it happier.
I can see how Clancy’s works would be difficult to translate to film. Even so, I wouldn’t consider any of the Clancy films to be faithful adaptations. The changes seem random and arbitrary. The one that really turned me off was in the film version of Clear and Present Danger. The spy that is dating the FBI director’s secretary has his cover blown in the book and makes an undramatic exit from the scene. In the movie, for no readily apparent reason, he breaks her neck instead. I also hated the movie version in which Jack Ryan is trying to copy files while a CIA guy is deleting them. The book handled it much better- there was simply too much for him to copy.
Don’t get me started on The Sum of All Fears.
Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow bears very little resemblance to its source material. In the book, Ichabod Crane is an unsympathetic character and the Headless Horseman is pranking him to get the girl. No mysterious forces at work.
I remember looking forward* to Wilt and being severely disappointed.
It felt like they wanted to keep to the original story but either executive meddling or plain bad judgement resulted in the addition of serial killer sub-plot that detracted from the film as I’d imagined it.
*I was evidently the only person looking forward to it - apart from the friend I’d dragged along, and a movie reviewer, the cinema was otherwise empty!
Starter for 10 was an OK book butchered to fit into a standard rom-com mould.
One of my favorite books, The 39 Steps, has been made into two bad films. The first time was by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. When a new PBS version was announced a few years ago, I had high hopes, but it, too, took a clever, suspenseful plot and “improved” it. I wish someone would just make a movie of this simple, exciting book as it was written.
ETA
I agree that Jeremy Brett is THE definitive Sherlock Holmes.
Of course. Off the top of my head, I can think of only three movies that I prefer to the books that inspired them: Patriot Games, Cold Mountain and Limitless.
Neither that movie nor his Alice in Wonderland even try to film the source material, but instead use them as an “inspiration” for a completely different sort of movie—with, IMHO, much better results in the case of Sleepy Hollow than of Alice.
Upon reading the first sentence, my first thought was “They made a movie out of Wilt Chamberlain’s autobiography? I wonder if they included the sequence where Wilt gets blown by the stewardess!”
Then… no. Unless they really changed the book! 
You obviously never read Peter Benchley’s Jaws. 
Contact the movie had a lot of changes from the book, but most of them were understandable in that the two forms are quite different and it made cinematic sense to focus on the main character, even if it meant eliminating the 5 other characters that flew with Jodie Foster on the spaceship.
What was inexcusable was the final scenes, where Jodie Foster capitulates on the side of woo, telling everybody (and the congressional committee) “You’re going to have to take me on faith”, walking out to meet a bunch of people holding signs saying “we believe you, Ellie!” and shit like that, so that the audience is lead to believe that one more conversation/boinking by Matthey McConaughey would leave Eleanor to a career of selling Bibles door-to-door.
In the novel this never happens. She’s told to keep quiet by Kitz (James Wood) and does so. Instead of saying “take me on faith” (something her character never would have said) she tries to prove their trip happened (and, by extension, the existence of God) via some hints given to her by her “father”… and does it.
I know he’s been mentioned a few times in the thread already, but I wanted to mention “We Can Remember it For you Wholesale” (Total Recall) - The short story has about four pages after Quail/Quaid leaves Rekall. Nothing after the Johnny Cab comes from the story. As for the 2012 remake…I don’t think they even mentioned Mars in that version, but kept the whole Cohagen story.
Yes, good point - I’d forgotten Contact. Generally better than the book, but not entirely, as you say.
Now that’s a movie I’d want to see.
The Wizard of Oz (1925). The 1939 classic strays pretty far from the source material–but watch the 1925 version sometime for something that has hardly any resemblance.