The 2005 film adaption of Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story “A Sound of Thunder” got a lot of negative reviews.
Short stories that have a punchline for want of a better term don’t hold up when expanded. That short story works very well but it’s not meant to be looked at deeper.
Agree. This is another case of “short story padded out with needless stuff”.
Interestingly, there was an attempt to make “time traveling dinosaur hunters” as a movie back in the 1990s – I’ve seen production sketches, but I can’t recall who was doing it.
It wouldn’t have been an adaptation of Bradbury’s story. It might have been an original one, or they might have been adapting one of the other stories about time-traveling dino hunters (L. Sprague de Camp’s A Gun for Dinosaur, David Gerrold’s Deathbeast, etc.)
You’re forgetting another “classic” - H.G. Wells The Shape of Things to Come
Which pretty much took the name, and a few character names, and jettisoned everything else. I mean, so do many of the ones in the list, but most of them kept at least part of the trappings of the original story. This one? Not even that threadbare dignity.
Now known almost only for the fact that Rifftrax has a version.
Here’s a famous one from outside the world of science fiction:
Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities was an amazing read. Interesting plot, and dozens of memorable characters from all over New York City.
The movie was awful. The main problem was the casting was off. Wolfe’s characters were chosen specifically for certain reasons, and the movie threw them away.
To take just one example: In the book the Bronx judge is an old cantankerous Jew named Myron Kovitsky. He represents the large Jewish community that used to live in the Bronx, but has mostly left. He tries to be strict and fair, but there’s an underlying racial tension in his courtroom that can’t be avoided.
In the movie he was played by Morgan Freeman, thus missing the whole point of his character.
Actually, Wells himself, who wrote the book The Shape of Things to Come, had already gone that route, turning his speculative book into a dramatized screenplay. It’s pretty disappointing. There are a few good scenes, and some interesting special effects and model work (I especially like the futuristic “tanks”, which is made extra special because Wells himself provided part of the impetus to make tanks in the first place). But it doesn’t hang together well, and is painfully didactic. Kubrick watched it in preparation for making 2001, on the recommendation of Arthur C. Clarke. Afterwards he told Clarke to never recommend a movie to him again.
If you want to watch it, the Criterion DVD has lots of extras, but the colorized version (with Ray Harryhausen in charge of colorization) is more fun.
@CalMeacham are you talking about the flawed, but creator involved 1936 movie, or the 1979 piece of trash I linked too? 
Because, while the 1936 version was indeed flawed, it’s a far, far better thing than the drek I listed.
Og course I’m referring to the 1936 one – said Wells was involved. And I doubt that CRiterion video would put out an edition of the other one.
Speaking of 1930s movies really badly remade around 1980, there’s She with Sandahl Bergman from 1984.
I find the movie interesting up until Ralph Richardson dies then I quickly lose interest.
Yes. Some of the exchanges just before are priceless.
(Richardson plays The Boss, Raymond Massey is Cabal}
An even more remote subset is film adaptations that take nothing from the source except the title. Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but were Afraid to Ask) took a nonfiction book title and used it to package a bunch of short comedy vignettes.
As the TV ad for the film went “If you want to see how this man [picture of Woody Allen] turned this book [Picture of the cover of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask] you’re going to have to see the movie.”
Is this in the same class as the movie Battleship? Or Clue?
Clue, at least, retained named characters from the source.
The movie also introduces each vignette with a title card styled after the headings in the book (e.g., “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?”).
Meanwhile, two of the three films titled Cheaper by The Dozen have almost nothing in common with the original book, except that they’re about families with a lot of children.
I figured, but wanted clarification. I didn’t think the 1936 one for all it’s flaws was worth of a mention in a “worst adaptation” thread!
Anyway, I also wanted to throw in some other adaptations that haven’t gotten much mention yet. Comic book adaptations.
I mean, with the glut of superhero movies out there (some great, some terrible) we are awash with examples in both directions. I mean, in the “good” category, Sin City was an almost perfect re-creation of the graphic novels.
But in the bad? We are soooo spoiled for choice.
Currently, I’m leaning into the two different movie attempts to adapt part or all of the “Dark Phoenix” X-Men arc to movies. Just… no. They use far more actual material than my snark at The Shape of Things to Come but they completely miss the point of what makes the story worthwhile.
Of course, for me, it barely loses out to the Dark Emo variant of Spiderman and Venom in the Macguire Spiderman 3, and the treatment of Doctor Doom in recent-ish oft-rebooted Fantastic Four.
This is a sub-category ripe with horrible examples for this thread.
Okay, children’s classics. The Secret Garden from 1993 and A Little Princess from 1995 are both nauseatingly unfaithful. First few things that come to mind: In the Secret Garden movie, Colin gets on his feet way too soon and easily. The two moms were not sisters*; Colin’s mom was Mary’s father’s sister, and the family connection was irrelevant beyond a simple, “Waitaminut, we’re cousins!” And there’s that “woomba, woomba, woomba” ritual they do around the fire; besides that it’s hokey, I wonder if it might be racist. But I’m not British or Indian, so who am I to say.
In the book Little Princess, Sara’s father is deader than disco. And he died of “business troubles and jungle fever combined,” not in the Great War, which was over a decade off. The movie left out a scene where she has to take charity**, so as not to break a child’s heart and turn him into Scrooge, and another scene where she sacrifices for someone who is worse off than she is. Especially unfortunate is that the role of Miss Minchin, the headmistress, is something Eleanor Bron could really have got her teeth into, if the script had followed the book. As it was, her character was mean for no apparent reason, and it ended like a Simpsons episode. Also, too much time on those fantasy sequences.
I’m on the fence about the Narnia movies from the 2000s. Some changes I appreciated, some I didn’t. But I have no equivocation about the casting of the four Pevensies. Edmund, not Peter, should be blonde, or to be specific, should look like a young Anthony Andrews. He appears to be the perfect British schoolboy, but he’s a complete phony, until his redemption. Peter should the dashing, dark-haired hero. (Not quite Lord Byron, though; a High King has to be more stable than that.) Whatsername as Susan looks like a caricature to me. And Lucy really should have blonde curls, because I think Lewis’s description of her as “always gay and golden-haired” was implying that she almost had a halo.
*What is the obsession with sisters in children’s movies? And teen movies, for that matter. The movie version of Tiger Eyes has Davey’s mom (Gwen) and Aunt Bitsy being sisters. In the book, the (dead) father had been Bitsy’s brother. I hoped the movie would take advantage of an opportunity the book missed, by having Davey and Bitsy discuss her father and put his life in perspective. So not only was that off the table, but Bitsy as written doesn’t come off as having a sisterly bond with Gwen.
**Well, technically, they left it in, but with a very different tone, and it took about thirty seconds when it should have been the focus of a scene.
n/m, caught the edit window
I disagree here- mind you, I did not like the film adaptation. But the basic ideas are there.
I think de Camps story was far superior to Bradbury’s anyway.
Battleship had one great scene- where those WW2 vets got to work on bringing the ship back to battle ready. The rest was shit.
Clue was a great film, one of my faves.
I thought they were quite entertaining, especially the first.
But what did you think of them relative to the books? Have you read the books? I didn’t say the movies were bad, but some bits I could have done without. Like “Because I believe in a free Narnia!” which I’m pretty sure was a swipe at George W. Bush. Not that I’m a fan of his, mind, but intentionally or not, it pulled me out of the spell for a bit.
Having watched the original Secret Garden and Little Princess I feel that these movies should be put in a separate category, Movies that should never be remade.
Glad I never watched the remakes.