You’re only saying that because you’re not in touch with your feminine side. Among chick-flick devotees, this is one of the better recent entries (although “Return to Me” is the champ.)
Man in the Iron Mask.
Now countless kids will think Louis XIV was d’Artagnan’s illegitimate kid. Not to mention that m-lle La Valier [sp?] happily slept with the abovementioned Louis for some 11 more years.
let me add one more
Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews
ugh! there are major elements of the book missing and the end is different. someone is killed that actually goes on to live in the next book!
I do think that movies and books haveto be judged seperatly, and the fact that a movie is different than a book in some way is really not a valid critisism. However, sometimes you ahve a movie that takes all that is bad in a book and leaves out all that is good–I’m talking about those examples where depth and meaning are replaced by triteness and quickie-mass appeal (Hollywood’s habit of forcing happy endings comes to mind).And I do think there is a point where the movie is so divorced from the book, it is more honest to say “Inspired by”–not that there is anything wrong with one work of art inspiring another.
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Number Six, I don’t disagree with you that excellent movies have resulted even when the original premise of the book has been radically altered. My point is that the result is NOT “Book Title - The Movie”
“Bridge on the River Kwai” would have been equally excellent had it been titled “Escape from Japanese Prison Camp” or “Britsh POW Goes Obsessive”
And while we can argue how far one can stretch the original premise before it breaks, I’d still argue that butchering the script by letting Romeo and Juliet live or by having the villain be brought to justice instead of escaping pretty much qualifies the movie for a different title.
Another vote for The Shining.
I stayed up all night, with the lights on, reading the book. The movie was such a disappointment - particularly Shelly Duval. Her…monotone…and…wooden…delivery…of…every…piece…of…dialogue…was…so…annoying. Nicholson did a good job (I particularly liked the scenes with Lloyd the Bartender), but that was about it. Another big screwup, IMHO, was changing the roque mallet inton an axe. An axe is so passe’ - getting bludgeoned to death with a glorified croquet mallet, now that’s a great visual.
If by “book” you mean “story”, then The Little Mermaid. Keeping with their long tradition of butchering classic fairy tales, Disney actually had the mermaid and her sisters live? That’s bugged me ever since I saw the movie as a nine-year-old.
When I heard Disney had made Hercules, I refused to see it. I knew from the start that all the good parts would be cut out. I wasn’t quite prepared for the complete changing-of-characters that went on, though.
Note to Disney: stop it. Now.
Hey, is there a single classic fairy tale Disney did not butcher? Well, maybe the biblical ones went relatively intact…
Raise the Titanic. Great book. Horrible movie.
The Life & Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon, transformed into the Roseanne Barr vehicle e-Devil
The ending in the book (SPOILER ALERT) had the lead woman undergoing total body plastic surgery and turning herself into the spitting image of the woman her husband had an affair with. She also touched on the “Disney-fication” of the original “The Little Mermaid” story, saying that the little mermaid didn’t necessarily want legs, but “the part where they joined together on the top” and that after getting leg, “every step was as if she trod on nails” which is what happens to the protagonist. (/SPOILER ALERT/)
The ending in the movie removes all the original ending and just has Rosanne Barr gaining self-esteem. SNOOZE.
The movie Return To Oz kinda butchered the book(s) - it was a mushing together of the second book in the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz together with Ozma of Oz mainly because Dorothy wasn’t in the second one and doesn’t reappear until the third book, so they re-wrote the whole story to mush it all together, as well as leave out the sex-change operation in the second novel. Okay, it’s a spell, not an operation, but the whole part where Ozma is a boy who learns he’s really a princess was removed from the movie. Which kinda sucks, because the average boy watching that movie probably wished he could grow up into a beautiful princess <sniff><sob>
…that should be “the Roseanne Barr vehicle She-Devil,” not e-Devil. Oopsie.
A great book called War Of The Rats which was made into a horrible movie Enemy At The Gates, is my choice for a book that was butchered by the movie.
Two things:
First War of the rats was not the book that was made into enemy at the gates. Enemy at the gates was the book that was turned into the movie.
War of the Rats was incredibly good though. I was sad to find out later that the never found each other.
ANYWAYZ MY VOTE FOR WORST BUTCHERY IN TURNING A BOOK INTO A MOVIE IS…
Watchers
all four of them.
Granted Dean R. Koontz isn’t the best author alive, but can SOME one please explain to me why for godsake COREY HAIM was cast as Travis Cornell???
Oh, but it is on DVD…in the UK. A truely grrr-worthy marketing flaw there. However, I’ve seen it on Ebay on VCD, which is supposed to work in a lot of DVD players (including mine) but I haven’t picked it up yet. I would really like to see this be marketed in the US on DVD because it is one of my favorite mini-series ever(even if Danny is 7 instead of 5 and still not in school) and much better than the orginal “adaptation.”
Bless the Child is the worst adaptation by far that I’ve ever seen. I’m convinced that the screenplay writers decided to just thumb through the book before writing the script.
Nope.
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Would either of those titles have been better than “The Bridge on the River Kwai”? The title, as is, is perfect for this movie.
Certainly it qualifies for a different title, as does an entirely faithful adaptation. But, IMO, it doesn’t require a different title.
Why limit it to fairy tales? Pocahantas showed Disney is capable of butchering history just as readily.
I have to admit I’ve not seen either, but I understand that the movie “Up Close And Personal” which was originally supposed to be about Jessica Savitch and was based on the book “Golden Girl” is quite unlike anything that ever happened in Jessica Savitch’s life.
I have personally only read the book by one of the authors of the screenplay (*Monster; Living Off the Big Screen * by John Gregory Dunne) It’s really an interesting book telling how the oringal story of a coke-addicted news anchorwoman was turned (with Disney’s help, of course) into a semi-happy romance where she no longer dies, even though the actual woman was dead.
It’s like if you did “the James Dean Story” but he survives the car wreck. Why not? It’s happier that way!
What Astro said.Where the hell did that weapon come from?
A Gift for the Boys, but you really have to be an Art Buckwald fan to appriate it. 
. My nod goes to Clear and Present Danger. A Tom Clancy adaptation.I believe the production metting went something as follows…
" The first 150 pages are just back story.Out "
" Jack has to go to South America. In"
“Hey! don’t you think it would be cool to have Jack leave his card at the dope dealers front door? In”
“Isn’t it about time that Jack and Clark did lunch? In”
“MY GOD! We have to kill someone! Let’s leave one behind.In”
Just how much abuse can one book take? This should have said,Inspired by a book by Tom Clancy NOT Based on a book by Tom Clancy. (How much money does Jack have in his checking account anyhow?)Clancy’s Hunt for Red October came over quite well though. Now, with Sum of All Fears soon coming out I’m afraid of the butchering it might take.
Anything, and I do mean anything, that modivates someone to read the originals is OK by me.Noone can reasonably expect a movie based on a book to not be changed for the time constraints of the screen.If a movie does not live up to your expectations, remember you can always haughtly respond,“The book was better” and generaly be right!
Let’s all say it together now…“THE BOOK WAS BETTER!”
Now do you feel better?
. In anticiaption of future posts on the subject, there will be NO Complaining about Bakshi’s LotR!
For me, it’s gotta be ‘Clear and Present Danger’ by Tom Clancy. Now I realize you can’t take a 900-page book and turn it into a 2 1/2-hour movie without losing something in the translation, but for chrissakes, they completely mutilated the story in order to fit it into the movie! It looked like someone took the book, threw it into a Mixmaster, set it to ‘frappe’, took the resulting pieces of paper and glued them together randomly to create the script. John Clark (my favorite character in any Clancy novel) went from a competent CIA agent to a burned-out drifter. Ding Chavez became a cipher; no dialogue, no personality. Ryan was never down in Bogota during an RPG attack, fer cryin’ out loud!
I was completely pissed off when I saw the movie. Other Clancy adaptations were atually pretty good (I liked the ‘Hunt for Red October’ and ‘Patriot Games’ movies) but CaPD was just a steaming hunk of horse poop.
I wonder, however, what I would have thought of the movie if I hadn’t read the book first, whether I would have liked it or not.