What major changes from book to movie do you most like/dislike?

Cafe Society
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Even the greatest of movies of course have to be trimmed and changed to fit into the time slots, but sometimes it seems to really compromise the book and other times it enhances it.

Some of my least favorite changes:

THE FIRM- WTF was that new ending? I loved the ending of the book in which Mitch and wife escape from the Mafia and the FBI and whoever else is chasing them by taking big wads of cash to Panama City Beach, registering in a series of cheap mom/pop style motels, and walking from one to the other as needed. If you’ve ever been to PCB you’ll know how brilliant this is; many have been sold and torn down to make way for condos now but at one point those little cheap cinder block “we don’t need no stinkin’ ID or records” places went on for MILES and weren’t computerized and were just perfect for a getaway.
In the movie… mail fraud? They don’t take the money? They don’t even change their identity after causing the indictment of dozens of mobsters? Are you feckin’ kidding me?
GWTW- really wish they’d included at least Scarlett’s first child as it helped explain in part her fight (though she wasn’t, to put it mildly, the maternal sort) and most missed some of the side characters (particularly Grandma Fontaine).

The Godfather- would love to have seen the side story of Luca Brazi’s baby kept in the plot; it would have worked particularly well in the DeNiro sequences of II.

Contact- Matthew McConnaughey is not hard to look at but I don’t think he could convincingly act the part of a corpse, but what most bothered about his character was that the book’s description was far more Robert Duvall Gene Hackman (when either was about 45-55 years old): middle aged, wild and crazy past, old enough to have actually developed the reputation that McC.'s 20-something character has in the movie, and a lot more world weary and obviously intelligent than the pretty boy in the movie.
FAVORITE MAJOR CHANGES:

The Godfather again- thank God they got rid of that “Lucy Has a Large Vagina” subplot. I don’t know how Puzo’s editors let him keep that. (I’ve wondered if he knew someone with that problem and was trying to do a “help is available” PSA.) The whole thing had a “meanwhile in another novel” feel to it.

About a Boy- I actually liked the ending in the book just as much, but it stuck the story forever in 1994. I don’t think it’s enough of a spoiler to box to mention that the death of Kurt Cobain is a major touchstone (he’s not an actual character in the book but one of the characters is a major fan) and about the only way to have worked this into the movie without making it a period piece would have been to have a fictional star (“Kirk Bocane” or whatever) which would have been cheesy. Also- sue me, the movie ending was, however unlikely it may have been, sweet and touching.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin- I don’t have to have a happy ending to like a movie and, ironically, I mostly didn’t like this movie (twas Cage that ruined it for me) but the ending was definitely more satisfying.

Contact again- more satisfying ending regarding the senate hearings and much more explicable as to why Ellie’s experiences were doubted than in the book where she was one of several scientists in the pod and they all reported the same story about a person they loved/admired coming to them with the same message, plus James Woods is always a fun sleazeball villain (though ironically from everything I’ve read he’s a great guy and extremely intelligent).

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I don’t have a clue why they decided to make a movie of The Relic without including FBI Agent Pendergast. He was the best character in the book, and later became the protagonist of an entire series of books. The movie isn’t terrible, but without Pendergast you don’t really have The Relic. They should have changed the title (as was done in the case of the wretched Simon Birch, a greatly altered adaptation of John Irving’s wonderful A Prayer for Owen Meany).

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To be fair, Pendergast is a mighty unlikely character, and Hollywood may have thought he was impossible to cast, as well as difficult to have audiences identify with him. Were there any other Pendergast books by the time they made the movie?

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From Hell is another one that should have changed its name (and it could have done so easily since it’s a different story and most of the characters are historical). They combined the characters Abberline and Lees (and IIRC others) into one character (Abberline, played by Depp) and the result was dreadful. The graphic novel was never my favorite but it was well done, but (I’m trying hard not to invoke obvious and appropriate Ripper serial killing imagery out of respect to some dead prostitutes) they changed it.

Speaking of Simon Birch, I wish that they had left Cider House Rules for a miniseries. I don’t think think it’s a spoiler to reveal that the movie takes place over a few years- WW2 basically- while the book takes place over about 30, but they condensed the events of those 30 years into the 3-4 year space.

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Miss Lonelyhearts. The movied ends not with Miss Lonelyhearts being shot by Faye’s husband but with him effecting a tearful reconcilliation between Shrike and his wife as violins swirl. Nathanael West claws his way out of his grave, staggers to the nearest trash can, the wires holding his jaws pop open and and he vomits up ten pounds of mortician’s cotton wadding.

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Forrest Gump. How in the world they got that sweet and touching movie out of that horrible book I’ll never know. There are too many incongruencies to name, but mainly the book contained none of the pop culture references (Curious George, Elvis, smiley face, etc…) that sort of wove the story together and made the viewer feel connected to the story. The catch phrases so popular from the movie are also nowhere to be found in the book, so no “Run Forrest, run!” Also, the book contains virtually nothing about Jenny’s backstory, so you have no sympathy for her, she comes off as just a big ol’ slut. You don’t really identify with Forrest, either. The character is just a big dumb lugnut. The book also has a sequence where he becomes a wrestler and has to fight another wrestler called “The Turd”, and a chapter where he is an astronaut and gets shot into space with a monkey. It was beyond stupid and never got better.

I bought the book after seeing the movie, so naturally I expected the book to be better than the movie, as is usually the case, but this time it was quite the opposite. The story of Forrest Gump that we all know and love was not written by Winston Groome. It was written by who ever did the screen play.

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I always say that The Firm looks as if they let the studio lawyers get their hands on it. I loved the book, but they changed the movie so much that I had to ask “Whay?”

Some movies are so completely changed that you really do have to wonder why they even bothered with the name of the book. These are mainly science fiction and spy movies. The Osterman Weekend and Ice Station Zebra, for instance. In recent science fiction, the most glaring examples are The Usual Suspects – Starship Troopers and I, Robot. It’s impossible to pick out even a couple of major changes in these cases - the changes are deep and wholesale.
The Gone with the Wind and Godfather changes didn’t bother me – heck, even in a long movie, you don’t have time for all the subplots and characters. So it disdn’t bother me that Field of Dreams threw out an entire major character from Shoeless Joe.
I like that changes they made to Lord of the Rings. I am, in fact, amazed that they could get that entire series of books down to only three longish movies without eveything seeming confused and rushed, so it didn’t bother me to see Tom Bombadil go, nor (after consideration) The Scouring of the Shire. Not all changes were in the interest of slimming down the narrative – one interesting change was that, in the film, to merely touch the Ring implied that it could exert more power on you, so Gandalf, at Bag End, never touches the Ring, although in the book he does (This makes Gandalf seem callous when he tells Frodo to take the Ring in his hand after it gor tossed in the fire – “Take it; it’s quite cool!”) In the book, he’s handing it to him, so he knows. In the film, he’s got it in tongs, which sorta undercuts his words.) Or the way Sauron doesn’t have a body in the film after he loses the Ring, whereas he certainly does in the books. It implies the threat that, once He gets the Ring and gets a body, it’s all over, folks. As long as he’s just the Flaming Eye of Doom, things are kept at bay – like Voldemort before he re-corporates in Goblet of Fire.

I disliked many changes in the David Lynch Dune (Weirding modules?? And Why does Baron Harkonnen look like he has terminal acne, and act like a raging idiot? He’s supposed to be a superb Machiavellian manipulator. And we can tell they’re all a family, even without the sledgehammer sumbolism of really red hair), but overall I liked what he did, and thought the film never really got the reception it deserved.
I liked them putting a hapy ending on The African Queen, which really needed one. And making **The Gun ** less episodic and depressing. C.S. Forester wrote great stuff, especially great military stuff, but he had a love of depressing endings that, I think, wemnt past even reality. He indulged in happier turnouts in his pet, Horatio Hornblower, and I think that has a lot to do with why that’s his most popular and best-selling series.

I also liked the happy ending on “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” in Disney’s Fantasia 2000. If there’s anyone who likes a maudlin sad enfding more than Forester, it’s Hans Christian Anderson, and the sad ending of TSTS comes out of nowhere to Snatch Defeat from the Mouth of Victory. The story’s far better without it.

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Most Like: BEING THERE- Chance strolling during Mr. Rand’s eulogy is much better than him lying in the garden with his thought-processes being as minimal as those of the plants.

Most Dislike: BEING THERE- And then they have to make Chance a New Thought Christ figure by having him stroll upon the lake.

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My favorite book by Larry McMurtry is Buffalo Girls. I’ve read my hardback copy (a cheap book club edition) so many times I read it in two and had to buy another copy. Just love it. When they made it into a mini-seres, I was really excited. After all, the mini-series of Lonesome Dove (also by McMurtry) was brilliant.

Well, the mini-series of Buffalo Girls sucked. The point of the book was that the characters (Calamity Jane and her friends and associates) had belonged to this small window of history (what we call the ‘Old West’) and then spent the rest of their lives as shadows living past their time. At the end of the book it is revealed that Martha Jane’s daughter, whom she writes letters to throughout the book, does not actually exist. Martha Jane never had an affair with Wild Bill – she barely knew him and, in fact, was not able to have children at all. This was her tragedy – not the personal fact that she couldn’t have kids – but the larger fact that she was, even in her time, a fraud. The other characters in the book had really owned their legends – Ragg & Bone were genuine Mountain Men, Dora was a Buffalo Girl, T. Blue was a Cowboy, Billy Cody & Wild Bill were Buffalo Bill & Wild Bill Hickok… but Martha Jane was a fraud. She became an icon (Calamity Jane!) like the rest of them, but only by lying about her story. And then she had to live the lie for the rest of her sad, long life. But in the mini-series? They made the lie the truth! In the mini-series, Martha Jane does have Wild Bill’s baby. And she even gets to meet her later in life (with Annie Oakley’s help). It might has well have been a Doris Day movie! I don’t think I’ve ever been as infuriated by anything on film as I was by that mini-series.

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I hated their changing the title character of** Burglar ** from a man in the book to a woman in the movie (and Whoopi Goldberg at that!).

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On the other hand,Woody Allen’s changing Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex And Were Afraid To Ask from a serious sex manual into a comedy was brilliant.

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Where the Heart Is: They made the character of Lexie, an obese black woman with a passel o’ illegitimate kids, into Ashley Judd. Apparently it’s more aesthetically pleasing to have the heroine’s friend be white. And be Ashley Judd. I didn’t like the movie anyway, but that was an outrage.

And **Pinkfreud ** and nametag: I haven’t seen The Relic, but I would love to see a GOOD movie with Agent Pendergast. I heard Douglas Preston interviewed on the radio yesterday and he said a new book is coming out next year back to the original setting, like Cabinet of Curiosities. But nobody seems to be able to cast Pendergast. I see David Hyde-Pierce myself.

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I haven’t seen all three film installments of The Bourne Trilogy, but I can’t imagine why they thought for a minute that losing the Bourne vs. Carlos the Jackal subplot would improve the films. Subplot, hell, it was the main plot! :rolleyes:

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A book that’s worse than that god-awful Gump movie? That’s quite an achievement!

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Oooo - I get to be first in this post to state that I prefer Spider-Man with organic, part of his mutation web-shooters, as in the movies vs. “he’s a brilliant teen who invented this magic gunk” as in the comic books?

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I don’t mind Parker’s inventing super–webbing on his lonesome (he’s supposed to be a briliant prodigy of a scientist. Lots of things in the comics only made sense if he was), but his method of delivery always bugged me. It seemed as if every time he grabbed something those palm-actuators ought to go off, covering everything either in webbing or in stickly web-fluid. (And did you ever try pressing on your palm with your middle finger the way Spidey always does in the comics? Not the best method of control). So I liked the organic web as a better control system.

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A seriously fucked-up sex manual, but that’s another thread.

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In the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, I liked the fleshing-out of Scrooge’s history. It was enlightening to show his anger toward the newly-born nephew Fred as he exits his sister’s room, where she is dying presumably from childbirth complications. It explains his hostility toward the adult Fred at the beginning of the story. I also like the added scenes of the hostile corporate takeover that the young Scrooge and Marley engineer, as well as poor Fezziwig being pushed out of his business. This illustrates how tightly bound they are in their career of questionable business shenanigans, and supports the dialogue in the famous “Marley’s Ghost” scene.

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I hate the way they changed the being at the heart of Ghost Story into a simple ghost. In the Peter Straub novel she was something far more ancient and terrifying. They cast the movie so perfectly too, it’s such a shame they had to rip the heart out of the book.

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DISLIKE: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - The movie pretty much eviscerated the whole Moony-Wormtail-Padfoot-Prongs issue, which was the emotional heart of the book - the friends becoming animagi to support Lupin, the significance of the stag patronus - in the later movies, Harry addresses Sirius as “Padfoot” without apparent reason (if one didn’t know from the books that the foursome who created the Marauder’s Map were actually Lupin, Sirius, Pettigrew and James Potter).

Also, I was very upset that one of my favorite scenes from the book was missing from the movie - when Malfoy et al dressed as dementors in the hopes of freaking out Harry during a Quidditch game, not knowing that Harry now knew the patronus charm…

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - The third task was so badly re-done on screen. In the book, it’s meant to be a simple (well, complicated, but without any psychological overtones) contest of magical skill and intelligence. In the movie, Dumbledore gets all Yoda-like and issues a warning that “you might lose…yourself” or some corny thing like that. All we ever saw of challenges in the maze was some claustrophobic walls-closing-in thing. WTF? With decent CGI, they could have easily had the boggart/dementor and giant spider (and the sphinx, but maybe that’s not action-y enough for a movie) in the maze like the book laid it out.