The Lightning Thief movie based on the book by Rick Riordan.
Astonishingly wrong on all levels.
Talking of adaptations of Greek myth the Disney version of Hercules has to get an honary mention purely for its depiction of Hera as Hercules’ loving (and biological) mother.
I’m not sure that’s even the worst adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days. Remember the 2004 film with Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan (with a cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger)?
Worst adaptation I can think of is the 2017 film version of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
More S. King:
Graveyard Shift was a nifty story - not sure how good a stand-alone movie it would be - but the movie was a major rat turd.
I 100% agree, I remember leaving the theater angry that the movie seemed to COMPLETELY miss the point of the show in the first place.
The musical adapted the book, and threw away a lot of critical details, changed much of the plot, and then made a happy ending from the dreary book.
I have mentioned this one places before. There is a entertaining, clever, well-written comic expository children’s novel called The True Meaning of Smekday. It involves an alien species that has invaded Earth and moved humanity to a reservation. It has a complex plot, but it involves a 12-year-old girl who was missed for extraction that is driving cross-country to the reservation in hopes of finding her abducted mother. Along the way she runs across an alien hiding from his kind because he accidentally misaligned a communications dish and allowed the morral enemy of his species to discover their location. They start traveling together for reasons. The enemy reaches Earth and it is the last remaining member of a warlike species that has not only wiped out many other species but also each other. He is in possession of a matter replicator/teleporter technology that allows him to make unlimited copies of himself, including building the majority of his spaceship out of his clones. He travels around in a giant ball of flesh. He also turns out to be allergic to cats and is attempting to wipe out all cats on Earth before eventually wiping out the humans and the aliens. To make a complex story short, eventually the girl gains access to a replicator from a crashed ship and defeats the invader by sending a large number of copies of her cat on to the flesh ship.
Cut to the movie version: it uses a few of the plot fundamentals in very modified ways, but mostly it is a glurgy vehicle for Jim Parsons to make silly remarks. The mistaken communication was to accidentally invite the unwanted alien to a party on Earth. And the conflict between the two alien species is resolved when it is realized that the Earth invaders had accidentally taken an object containing eggs for the last remaining guy’s species. They give it back, everything is okay, and he joins the party. I could write much more on how deeply divergent they are and how deeply inferior the movie is, but I’d have to rewatch the movie to refresh my memory, and that is a bridge too far.
Another example is a YA novel called City of Ember. In the novel there is a small human settlement in a perpetually dark empty plane where the greatest fear is the unknown. In the movie there is a small human settlement in a perpetually dark empty plane where the greatest fear is the insects the size of cars and the moles the size of houses that eat you if you try to leave the city. (Among relatively smaller issues.)
It really isn’t. It was an “original” (i.e. a retread of various sf plot memes) screenplay that had only the most accidental relationship to the stories, it wasn’t even inspired by them. The studio slapped the name on it and the original screenwriter then went back in and doctored his script to add names from the stories, the concept of the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ and some minor tweaks to the plot.
But it was never originally intended to be an Isaac Asimov adaption per se. These are the most glaring kind of bad adaptations - ones that never were intended to be adaptations in the first place, but were shoehorned into one as a type of bait and switch.
Somewhat similarly, the movie adaptation of A Chorus Line. Granted, some of the song-and-dance numbers in the movie are absolutely fantastic, but the plot—really, the point of the show—was entirely changed from the stage version.
In the live version, the dancer and the director had some sort of relationship, years ago, and the dancer walked out of it. Why? Because the dancer liked dancing better than she liked him. This is explained in the song, “What I Did For Love.” And as the song explains, she still feels that way; her love of dance means more to her than any love she has for him.
In the movie version, the dancer returns trying to rekindle what they once had. She wants him, she needs him, and “What I Did For Love” is all about him. But that’s not the point of the show! The point is the love all the cast have for dance, and why they put themselves through classes, lessons, practices, auditions, disapproving families, and waiting tables, in order to do what they love. It is most assuredly not a romance between Cassie and Zach, with all other cast members subordinate to that.
Not to mention, the zombie plague as shown in the movie could NOT have spread that widely. 1) you’re bitten. 2) 30 seconds later you’re raving and trying to bite someone else.
Such a person would not have been able to board an airplane.
There is a whole genre of children’s movies that go like this:
- Ask a librarian for the title of a beloved children’s book – Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Tale of Despereaux, Peter Rabbit, The Story of Ferdinand, and so on.
- Rather than systematically strip the book of everything that makes it so wonderful–the wild imagination, the gentle lessons about forgiveness, the poetry of the language, the real sense of danger–just don’t bother reading the book in the first place. Much less work, and it achieves the same thing.
- Animate a by-the-numbers wise-cracking smartass action hero animal as the main character. Add in some unnecessary fight sequences and some fart jokes.
- Profit!
I don’t know I can nominate a specific one of these movie as the worst adapation, because they’re all exactly the same. And I hates them, yesss.
I really enjoyed both of those. I didn’t care for the fidelity of their adaptation, I only watched them for the entertainment value, and for me they both had a ton.
However, I refused to watch The Watch, the bastardised adaptation of the Discworld City Watch novels.
That happened with Fredric Brown’s Arena, which they “adapted” into an episode of Star Trek: TOS after they discovered the similarity between a script Gene L. Coon was already writing and the Brown short story.
If you haven’t read the Brown story, I highly recommend it. It’s been heavily anthologized. No invention of gunpowder or dinosaur-like alien, and a completely different ending. There’s a reason it’s in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology.
I bring up, “Payback”, with Mel Gibson because, for the first time two days ago, I watched the Director’s Cut of the movie. It was basically the exact same movie up to the point where it had a completely different alternative ending, which I didn’t like at all. It’s bad enough when a 3rd party bastardizes you work, but it is ironically worse when you do it yourself! LOL
The BBC released a period version in 2019 with a good cast that I was really looking forward to. It turned out to be a complete mess and boring to boot. I can remember very little about it, apart from me getting annoyed at how often it deviated from the book.
The best version is still Jeff Waynes concept album. Original cast with Burton as the narrator.
Apparently, back before George Pal made his 1953 version, Ray Harryhausen was preparing to make a stop-motion animated version. His tripods would have been awesome - in stop-motion, the “strobing” effect gives such mechanical items a convincing stutter – think of the stop-motion AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back
Nevertheless, I’m not sure I’d have liked his version. His Martians wouldn’t have looked the way Wells described them. From his surviving sketches and test reels, they would’ve had heads reminiscent of his Ymir in Twenty Million Miles to Earth
There have been at least two adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein that approach being faithful – Calvin Floyd’s low-budget 1977independent film Terror of Frankenstein
And the Hallmark 2004 TV miniseries that had William Hurt and a completely miscast Donald Sutherland (although he’s good)
Both versions are more faithful than Kenneth Branaugh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which still manages to come closer than almost all other versions, and is arguably the least boring.)
On the other hand, I don’t think anyone will ever film a faithful version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and if they did, I’m not sure I’d want to watch it. As it is, I observe that Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula actually manages to fit in more of the cast than any other effort, and is visually striking. But it’s=got a lot of issues. I also note that Jes Franco’s low-budget 1970 effort, Count Dracula , is amazinhgly faithful for about the first half, after which it sort of falls apart. And it’s got a stellar cast for such a low-budget effort – Christopher Lee as Dracula (and it’s not a Hammer film!), Herbert Lom as Van Helsing! Klaus Kinski (who would in less than a decade play the Count in Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu) as Renfield!
But Stoker’s novel is too scattered and sprawling, with too many characters and taking place over too large an area, and relying on too much coincidence. And people acting stupidly., and too many inconsistencies. It’s just a mess. Screenwriters and Playwrights, in an effort to tame the work to fit into a reasonable running time, without too many characters for the audience to keep straight, and without too many scene changes, have been forced to simplify the story, leaving out huge chunks, and consolidate characters together (when they’re not eliminating them).
Why does Dracula have a connection with Renfield, so far away in England, and with whom he has no obvious link? How the hell did Harker manage to escape and make it so far? Why does Dracula feel pulled towards those particular women? Several versions have introduced the idea that one of them – it varies which, from version to version, is the re-incarnation of his dead wife. Some versions have Harker staying in Transylvania, turned into vampire by his encounter with Dracula’s “wives”. Or they conflate Renfield with Harker. Recent TV adaptations haven’t even tried to be faithful, but have evidently just tried to stretch the story as much as possible to try for a new interpretation. In one, Arthur Holmwood – often ignored or even eliminated, because he’s such a cipher – is the central moving figure, suffering from venereal disease and hoping to be cured by Dracula. Or a sort of time travel is brought into the story, with Dracula’s coffin spending decades under the water in the prematurely sunk Demeter. Or something else.
There is also 2003’s “Bloom”, by the way.
Generally I don’t see the point of adapting Ulysses, but I appreciate the effort.
Also, the live-action adaptation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. That was also completely unnecessary since the half-hour animated television version was so well-done.