5 Disastrous Book Adaptations, Ranked From Worst... to Even Worse
In these cases, it's better to spend more time reading the book than watching the adaptation.
Hollywood often adapts popular books. Sometimes these projects are huge, like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones, and sometimes they don't make it past the first movie... and for a reason.
5. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, 2016
Ransom Riggs' trilogy spent nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list. A fantastic story about children with amazing abilities quickly caught the attention of producer and director Tim Burton.
He filmed the first part in 2016, but the movie could not repeat the success of the novel, even with Eva Green and Samuel L. Jackson in the cast.
The movie turned out to be too traditional, and the audience did not see anything really strange and magical in it.
Fans of the original noticed a lot of unfortunate changes in the plot – from increasing the age of the characters to the exchange of superpowers.
4. The Girl on the Train, 2016
The thriller, based on the bestselling novel by Paula Hawkins, tells the complicated lives of three women: one suffers from alcoholism and rides the train from the suburbs to Manhattan; the other two sit at home and seem to be happily married.
The main character watches them every day from the train window, until one day one of the strangers disappears without a trace.
Somewhere along the way, however, the movie inevitably lost the suspense that the books had.
3. The Snowman, 2017
Fans of Jo Nesbo's detective noir series could not understand how such a good detective story could be so boringly adapted.
The case of married women who disappear every winter is retold in such a way that some of the storylines suddenly disappear, like the victims of an unknown madman.
Michael Fassbender as the alcoholic detective Harry Hole does not save the movie, and neither does the fact that the blood on the snow looks incredibly cinematic.
The saddest thing is that the movie's failure kills any hope of a long-running franchise.
2. Beowulf, 2007
The story of Beowulf, told in an Old English poem by an unknown author, has all the hallmarks of a 21st century movie based on a comic book – epic battles, heroic characters, battle scenes, monstrous villains, and even dragons.
The movie was shot using motion-capture technology and was heralded as a good way to bring ancient history to the modern world.
However, the distraction of elaborate special effects also meant that we received a comic book movie without any development or depth.
1. The Dark Tower, 2017
The summer of 2017 was a disappointment for fans of Stephen King: the first part of the Dark Tower series was released. The Dark Tower is horror and science fiction, fantasy and western at the same time.
Danish director and screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel took a chance, but did not receive praise from King's fans.
Rotten tomatoes flew one after another: the director did not understand the book and did not really reveal a single character.
The critics were not happy either: the movie has only 15% on the Rotten Tomatoes.