Worst Movie Adaptations

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Somar

I have amazing taste
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Since the new Jem and the Holograms movie came out this weekend and was (rightfully) panned by critics and fans alike, I figured now would be a good time to talk about terrible movie adaptations of things we love. It can be anything from books, tv shows, or video games just as long as the film adaptation is really bad.
For me I honestly can't decide between The Last Airbender and Dragon Ball Evolution, I hate the former more, but the latter got much more of it's source material wrong.
 
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The Book Thief, while not as horrible as a lot of adaptations, hit me hard because it's one of my favorite books. The way it's told really doesn't work as well in film as it does on paper.
Silent Hill Revelations 3D or whatever the fuck it was called also offended me on a deep and personal level. I appreciate the first one for what it is, and while I don't like what they did to the lore, it's really not as terrible as a lot of SH fans say.
The other movie though. Oh god.
 
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I like Eragon as a bad movie. The dragon is pretty and the acting is funny-bad. It has its boring moments, but overall I think it's worth a watch if you're into that sort of thing. Never read the book.

The Last Airbender is a masterpiece of awful. Not since Theodore Rex have I been so baffled by a director's choices. Whether or not you're a fan of the show, if you like bad films, it's a fantastic experience, like looking into the mind of a mad man. I think I kind of love it. Beautifully bad.

If you want a film that's legitimately awful... I guess I'd go with the first Michael Bay Transformers film, mainly because the film failed to meet my ridiculously low expectations. All I wanted was giant fighting robots. That was it. And what did I get? Incomprehensible action scenes wrapped around a wacky family sitcom starring Shia LaBeouf, co-starring a bunch of unfunny, unimportant human meat bags. You barely fucking see the Transformers.
 
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House of the Dead! the story and location had nothing to do with the games lol I kind of enjoy it as a bad movie though. It is so dumb.
 
That fucking Jonah Hex movie from 2010. I'm remiss to mention it here because this piece of shit barely qualifies as an adaptation and is an absolute insult to anyone who has ever read a Jonah Hex comic. The studio responsible deserved to lose tens of millions of dollars on it (lolCGI machine gun) but at the same time,it was such a bomb that we'll probably never see a good Jonah Hex movie down the road.

Also, I'll go ahead and say Transformers. Not that a live-action TF movie could ever be good, but holy shit, those Michael Bay turds got it wrong.
 
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Green Lantern. Way too create a 200 Million dollar bomb, that does not even manage to make a slight profit, because you idiots waste 100 million in advertisement extra. With wooden acting by the female lead and an aesthetic that made it look less like a movie from 2011 and more of 2000, this movie is in my opinion the worst DC Superhero movie of all time. Batman and Robin is better than this piece of shit.
 
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Abilene said:
World War Z. Wasted opportunity.
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The way I see it and the way Max Brooks sees it is that the movie is so unrelated to the book that it's not an adaptation at all. It's more like an entirely separate thing with occasional nods to the book but that's about it.
I think it was at comicon he said he wasn't upset that they'd changed things because they'd changed so much it was no longer his story. He had no connection to the thing on the screen.

This happens with a few Hollywood movies. Someone comes to them with an original script about, say, a zombie war and the script gets bought. But some suit decides that no one will give a shit about this movie unless it has a known IP attached to it. Because people are morons who are terrified by new things, apparently. So they take the name of a well known work and slap it on the movie, rework the script so it kind of looks like the work its named after and call it a day. This is what happened to the iRobot film too.

If I were to adapt World War Z I'd have made it into a mini-series framed like a series of interviews. The story would unfold like it does in the book but every once in a while it would jump back to the interview. I think that way you keep the original story, characters and framing device. An actual faithful adaptation.
 
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The recent Macbeth comes to mind. Moves along at a snail's pace and is utterly devoid of any humor. The film seems to have been made only to win the the Pomme Frites d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, bekerz itz sherksber
 
Furina said:
If I were to adapt World War Z I'd have made it into a mini-series framed like a series of interviews. The story would unfold like it does in the book but every once in a while it would jump back to the interview. I think that way you keep the original story, characters and framing device. An actual faithful adaptation.
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Alternatively, make it a mini-series where each episode is pretty much made up in the style of a tv-documentary. Like, take all the elements of the book that are involving a certain historical event in the zombie war (like the outbreak in China), out them all together, make a bit more of an overall narrative around it, add if necessary a few elements (like extra interviews) in it and you have an episode. Rince, repeat (with other themes from the book) and there you have it
 
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