Worst Movie Adaptations

As the resident Hitman fan (okay, there may be others but dammit I'm posting here first), I'm gonna say the Hitman movies. Haven't seen Agent 47 yet, but I'm pretty sure I can figure out it is a movie set up on spectacle and explosions.

Anyone who is an actual fan of the Hitman franchise knows damn well Agent 47 actively tries to avoid spectacle and explosions. He is supposed to be a phantom, an urban legend. He doesn't get the girl, and he doesn't go around with companions. He is a stone-cold professional. They should play like a crime drama, not a Die Hard movie. And for fuck sake Hollywood. I like Timothy Olyphant just fine, but why not get David Bateson, the voice of Agent 47 to play the role since he looks almost exactly like Agent 47 anyway?

Also? League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It takes talent to fuck up things on that great of a scale.
 
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I'm a pretty big Resident Evil fan. I saw the first 3 movies and the only one that even remotely got close to the games was the second one and even then it was shit.

Come to think of it, most if not all movies that are video game adaptations are pretty shitty... at least the ones I've seen.
 
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AnchuentProphecy said:
I'm a pretty big Resident Evil fan. I saw the first 3 movies and the only one that even remotely got close to the games was the second one and even then it was shit.

Come to think of it, most if not all movies that are video game adaptations are pretty shitty... at least the ones I've seen.
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I'm not even that big into Resi and I think the movies are shit too. Don't even get me started on Alice.
 
I actually love the Van Dam Street Fighter as a cheesy fun movie. You can tell its an American adaptation because Guile is the main focus, and Ryu and Ken are supporting characters. That movie has a lot of crazy trivia, like the fact that Van Dam was on cocaine the whole time, and says he doesn't even remember being in the movie, and that Raul Julia was literally dying from cancer at the time.

Dragonball Evolution, is a movie nobody wanted, especially not fans of the manga/anime. What's funny is Fox actually bought the rights to make a Dragonball movie long before Dragonball Evolution, and the fans knew about this, so for years and years, fans would speculate on that fucking movie, until it came, and went. It wasn't even so bad its good, just forgettable, so in my opinion it couldn't even get being a bad movie right.
 
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Furina said:
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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You just said everything I was about to say. Bravo.

UglyOldJafar said:
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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Also, the cast should be international, acordding to the nationalities of the characters. It would be cool if the interviews were in other languajes, if necessary (I wouldn't buy an American actor talking with a bad accent or not trying at all [like Scarlett Johanson playing Black Widow]). But I'm aware that Americans don't like to read subtitles.
 
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Between the 2 Street Fighter adaptations, I found the Legend of Chun-Li to be way worse. I actually kind of like the first one because it's at least funny bad. As sad as it is for that film to be Raul Julia's last film, I thought he was the best part of the movie for how much he hammed up M. Bison.

The Legend of Chun-Li was just boring. It tried to make something as ridiculous as Street Fighter and make it gritty. You know it took me a really long time to figure out the Irish mob boss was in fact M. Bison.

Someone already mentioned but also the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Just remember guys, Sean Connery said yes to Highlander II and the Avengers, but THIS was the movie that made him retire
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
The movie adaptation of The Neverending Story, while most think it's good (including myself), can be argued to be a pretty bad adaptation because it leaves out half the story. It appears that the author of the book hated the film.
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The third movie in the series arguably counts here, and anyone who's seen it knows why. I don't think it's a coincidence it was released around the same time as the author of the book died.

My own picks here would be the Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Ron Howard Grinch. Both films are awful - in the latter's case, I knew it was awful even when it came out and I was barely out of diapers - and I think liking either of those films is a sign that something is wrong with you.

I also have another one that's kind of personal - the 2007 Underdog movie, which has barely anything in common with the source material and could have easily been a generic "superhero dog" film with no changes. This one makes it mainly because it was filmed in my home state. It's why I'm glad that Seth MacFarlane set a TV series there - so we don't have to boast, "They filmed the Underdog movie here."
 
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The Last Airbender and particularly Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant. I was a huge fan of the book series and I was gutted that even John C Reilly couldn't save that boring movie.

Other ones that come to mind are all those that stick classic characters in the "real world" or modern day like The Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks series. The plots always seem to revolve more around the secondary character's struggles rather than the characters we actually came to see.
 
Farcry. Put it on. Forgot about it.

Didn't watch it because it was so boring.
 
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TheLateGreatBate said:
Other ones that come to mind are all those that stick classic characters in the "real world" or modern day like The Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks series. The plots always seem to revolve more around the secondary character's struggles rather than the characters we actually came to see.
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How about just putting "Any movie adapted from a cartoon"? Excepting the Jay Ward-based ones, which aren't that bad.

I wonder, when we get to our parents' age, will the executives be trying to mooch off our childhood nostalgia by greenlighting terrible live-action movies based on the shows we grew up with?
 
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Of recent ones, my least favorite is hands-down The Giver. The original book is really something special, and now there are hundreds of thousands out there who think it's nothing more than a poor man's Twilight. They'll likely never even bother reading the book because of how bad the movie sucked.
 
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