The live-action movie adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender is among the worst films I have ever seen.
Sphere by Michael Crichton - loved the book, came out of the movie going “Huh??” It was a few years between when I read the book and when I saw the movie, but I find it hard to believe that I forgot or mis-remembered so much. But, frankly, even if I hadn’t read the book, I thought the movie sucked.
I’m convinced that movie started as an adaptation of The Humanoids, but someone got the rights to the more well-known work, and slapped the title on the film in order to make more money. Add in a few names from Asimov, and the Humanoids become Robots.
Even more S. King: This has been a much hashed-over debate, but Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
King himself has said he hated the adaptation. I was 14 when I read the book, my first Stephen King novel, and loved it. Became an instant King fan. The movie came out two years after I had read it, and I eagerly went to the theater and managed to get an R-rated ticket at 16. And I absolutely hated what Kubrick did to the story. I felt like the novel’s psychological complexity and sense of creeping dread was replaced with a series of ‘haunted house’ style jump scares.
Nowadays, I appreciate the movie on its own terms, but it’s very much more ‘a Kubrick film that happens to be loosely based on a Stephen King novel’ than an adaptation. Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange was a much better adaptation, IMO.
It also completely inverts the whole point of the original story. The Whos didn’t need to be “reminded of the true spirit of Christmas”, or whatever. It’s right there: It came all the same, Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, were singing, with no presents at all.
There’s a brilliant (though really un-PC) story published in National Lampoon, taking up almost an entire issue, called O.C. & Stiggs, about a couple of Delta-style teens who terrorize their neighborhood over a summer. Robert Altman filmed an adaptation of it during that rough post-Popeye period in his career. The two leads are played by a couple of actors who made no other films of note, but there are folks like Jon Cryer, Dennis Hopper, Jane Curtin and Martin Mull in the supporting cast. I was stunned to find the movie even existed, as it seemed an unlikely piece to be adapted, and I watchd it shortly after I read the original saga. My feeling at the time (I was 19 or so) is that random pages were yanked out of the magazine, shuffled together haphazardly, and filmed without anyone looking through the camera lens. The story is 99% unrecognizable, and fails to capture the malicious anarchy of the story.
Most adaptations of Michael Crichton’s works suck mightily. Jurassic Park is a great movie and perhaps one of my favorite movies of all time and one of the very, very few movies I can watch over and over again (and have, for over 30 years now – it’s also the only movie I twice watched in the theaters). But as a somewhat faithful adaptation of the book? No. Other than a few of the characters and some vague plot points, it has very little in common with the novel.
The Lost World is even worse. Other than the title and a single character reprising their role from Jurassic Park, the movie has almost nothing in common with the novel. Even so, Malcolm’s character has been tweaked significantly to make him less pedantic and annoying. The movie might be better than the book – the book truly sucked and Crichton wrote it solely to give Spielberg some source material for another movie – but still wasn’t good. It felt like Spielberg was just phoning it in on that one.
Rising Sun might be the most faithful adaptation of a Crichton novel but that’s not saying much.
Crichton wrote many of his later novels, starting with Jurassic Park, really with the specific goal of selling the movie rights and thus wrote most his characters with specific actors in mind. He wrote John Connor in Rising Sun with Sean Connery in mind to play him, and he wrote Mark Lewyn in Disclosure intending for him to be portrayed by Dennis Miller. Crichton was a bit of a hack and it’s too bad the film adaptations of his books aren’t more faithful to the source material.
This is a controversial choice, and not only because I consider Adaptation to be perhaps the most brilliant adaptation (and pun) of all time. But people either love it or hate it, I admit. The source material is an admittedly dry-as-dust New Yorker article, later expanded into a book, containing long stretches of detailed prose about flowers, which posed a problem for the adaptor of the property, namely: how you sex up a dry-as-dust science article? In my view, he did a spectacularly clever and witty job of it, incorporating himself and his imaginary twin brother as main characters of the screenplay, and drew a fantastic parallel between the changes called for in adapting an article into a movie and the changes an organism, such as a flower, goes through in surviving as a species.
The funny thing is, that movie is so over the top that my oldest son and I both love it. But we understand the hate.
It’s been a while but I remember Timeline being a pretty close adaptation. Some compression was needed but it still mostly followed the book. That’s not the same as saying it was good.
The Andromeda Strain was fairly faithful to the book, only changing a few things (unnecessarily, IMO). They even managed to keep the book’s jumbled post-hoc after-incident testimony reporting style fairly well. No bibliography, though. 
eta they changed the name and state of the town where the Scoop satellite came down. Why change that?? It was a fictional town anyway. I can never figure why Hollywood writers do that. Ego?
One change the movie did right was completely re-writing the kids’ roles. In the book, the younger kid was the girl, and she served no other purpose than to be the annoying little kid that did nothing but put everyone else in danger by being stupid and annoying. The older brother character was far better. In the movie, they mostly killed off the first kid, and split the second into the two kids we saw, which improved both kid characters.
In the book, I was rooting for the girl to get killed, because she was so annoying. In the movie, you actually care if both kids live or die.
Harland Ellison wrote a screenplay for I, Robot that naturally never was used, but by all accounts it was a great adaptation. It couldn’t have been made reasonably at the time, I wonder if it’s time to dust it off and give it a shot?
That’s an intriguing open, even if it isn’t the way the book opens. ETA I forgot the original was short stories, I think I have to revisit them!
I’ve read it, and agree that it’s great. Ellison clearly ripped off Citizen Kane for the overall structure, but I forgive him that – steal from the Greats, after all.
You’re right that they couldn’t have done it at the time is first was published, but CGI has come a long way since.
The I, Robot movie wasn’t an attempt to adapt Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids – screenwriter Jeff Vintar wrote an original screenplay set in the universe of Asimov’s “Robot” stories, Three Laws and all, entitled Hardwired. Then Hollywood heppened to it. Like Starship Troopers, you ended up with a movie that was philosophically 180 degrees from its supposed source.
You can read about it at the Wikipedia site:
Now, I’ve never read it. Maybe someday.
Did it keep the short story structure? Did it keep the boolean logic solutions for robot behavior? Did it add a love interest? 
Yep. Worst offenders for me are the various WOTW films.
Yes. Couldn’t agree more. For me King’s book is still his masterpiece.
Much more recently: Disney’s version of Into the Woods. Saw it in a theater with relatives; we all were expecting something similar to the stage musical and left disappointed. According to its Wikipedia page, Into the Woods garnered a total of some four dozen award nominations from 25 different organizations – including Production Design from the Academy. Sure, it looked great but it owes more to the original Grimm fairytales than Broadway; the sequences with Red and the Wolf in particular.
Well, that’s good, but it still isnt Baum.
The film also had a hidden dismal ending. Yes, the kids have reached the surface- and so? No survival skills, no tools, no idea of what plants to eat, no weapons- they will die within months.
The books has the same issue.
The Film “Holes” is an almost perfect adaptation of the Book of the same name. This is rather unique.
Generally, all authors say that- but they cash the check anyway.