Hmm. While I didn’t loathe it like I did Rings of Power, the Sandman adaptation was very much by-the-numbers and came across as perfunctory if not lifeless as a result, tho there were some changes here and there.
The apotheosis of this is Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho:
I haven’t seen it, but from the reviews I’ve read, it sounds like it was nearly a shot-for-shot remake of the original, which somehow managed to leach all the tension, drama, and art from the original in the process. The kindest review I’ve read described it as a bold experiment that unequivocally demonstrated that faithful remakes are a terrible idea.
Every adaptation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. If the adaptations aren’t just vehicles for the star performer (Will Rogers, or Bing Crosby), it wimps out and won’t treat the rest of the book fairly. Even the PNS adaptation I’ve seen. And don’t get me started on things like A Kid in King Arthur’s Court.
Twain was a humorist - this stuff is interesting and funny, but you won’t find much of it in the adaptations, outside the bit with predicting the eclipse. Dammit, I want to see Hank Morgan blowing up Merlin’s castle. I want to see his interactions with Morgan l Fay. I want the Restoration of the Holy Fountain, and Morgan and the King rescued by knights mounted on bicycles.
I usually hear, “Oh, but you can’t do the Interdict. You can’t do anything with the Catholic Church.” Well, you don’t have to. There’s plenty of other material there.
I’m similarly annoyed by all the Conan the Barbarian movies. None of them have the real feel of Robert E, Howard’s hero, and none of them use his plots. Give me The Tower of the Elephant, with the Tower, the Spider, and Yag-kosha lovingly delivered by CGI. Give me Rogues in the House and Red Nails and The Frost Giant’s Daughter and The Scarlet Citadel. Don’t give me Thulsa Doom (who was Kull’s opponent, not Conan’s) even if you have someone of the caliber of James Earl Jones.
A good Connecticut Yankee adaptation exists, it’s called Army of Darkness and it’s magnificent!
When the movie was announced with Keanu, I said “What? Was Sting too busy?!?”
Neil Gaiman once said that Constantine was based on “Sting with a trenchcoat and a cig.” And the comic version wasn’t an action movie. It was literate, full of humor and theology (and humor based on theology).
Like the “Holy water changed into Guiness, but then the devil shows up. Constantine treats him to a pint, but then knocks over the candles that started the spell, and the Guiness reverts to holy water in the devil’s stomach.”
Your comments about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court made me think about Gulliver’s Travels and how almost all adaptations miss a lot of Jonathan Swift’s humor and satire.
What’s the Worst That Could Happen? A Donald E. Westlake adaption starring Martin Lawrence could suck all the intelligence out of it and make it as interesting as dirty dishwater, despite a supporting cast that includes Danny DeVito, John Leguizamo, and other usually reliable TV and film actors. The book was intensely funny, fucked up and awkward, but it was like Lawrence couldn’t consent to anything that would make him lose street cred. That’s what made the book so good, all the screwups.
Ocean’s Eleven came out in the same year, so I guess that’s one reason this movie more or less tanked, but it’s mainly because it was such a yawner.
Because the book starts out fun and light hearted and gets really dark near the end. Twain was going thru some dark times then.
I have to admit the scene where Bing teaches the band how to play a song is pretty good.
How about…choppers?
From the 1970 animated version that is so unknown, I can’t even find a picture still from the movie, let alone Lancelot on a motorcycle.
Like these? (Knightriders-1981)
I saw this when it had first come out, and wrote a review as part of a column I was doing for a friend’s SF newsletter. Having previously read the novel, I had been looking forward to seeing a movie adaptation of it. If I’m remembering correctly, I used phrases like “Don’t waste your money” and “It only vaguely resembles the book”. I was practically appalled by the ending, in which we were shown the radioactive cloud drifting away from the Earth, followed by (I shit you not!) a house with a nice lawn and a white picket fence to show how civilization has been restored.
Squinting-is that Ed Harris? Wow, it is. I guess he didn’t have much of a career before The Right Stuff broke him into the mainstream.
In the '90s, I spent my summer weekends working at the local Renaissance Faire. Pretty much everyone involved in the “rennie circuit” back then had that movie on VHS.
You should see him go squish in Creepshow.
Like these (I finally found it!)
I was sooo disappointed when I found out no other movie version of the book had choppers. 
Cheesy good fun.
We SCA folk also enjoyed it.
The Resident Evil movies are a particularly weird example. The 2002 one with Milla Jovovich was a fun zombie movie (and came out well before the zombie resurgence in 2004 from the Dawn of the Dead remake and Shaun of the Dead making it unique at the time) but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an entirely different script they put the Resident Evil name on as other than the names “Raccoon City” and “Umbrella Corporation” there’s literally NOTHING that connects the video games to the movie. But then the second one with Milla “Resident Evil Extinction” suddenly adds in the plot and characters of the game Resident Evil 3, and somehow is really bad because the film can’t decide if they want the movie to be a direct continuation of the first movie with Milla or a direct adaptation of RE3 with those game characters and winds up being a disjointed mess. Later movies in the series continue the bad formula, with Milla as the main character but adding more and more elements from the games but stripped of any actual context they may have.
But even worse was the 2021 “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” movie with this time tried to be a more direct adaptation of the source games.
Except they make the utterly BIZZARE choice to adapt the first 2 games into a single less than 2 hour movie, instead of just adapting the first game by itself. This leads to a movie that just kind of rushes through plot elements to get through all the story of those two games as well as ommitting so much plot from Resident Evil 1 they might as well have just adapated the second game by itself. In fact they also bring in plot elements from Resident Evil 3 And Resident Evil Code Veronica too, so there’s FOUR GAMES worth of material in a movie that’s only an hour 50 minutes.
Ditto for some adaptations of Alice in Wonderland. I’ve been tempted to nominate Tim Burton’s “version” for this thread, and the only thing holding me back is that it’s not really supposed to be a direct adaptation. Still, I hated it. It got the tone all wrong. A movie based on the Alice books should have a similar tone to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Ed Harris? Keep looking towards the right of Harris, I’m pretty sure that’s Tom Savini!
Yes, that is definitely Savini. Stephen King and his missus have an amusing cameo as spectators.