The Hobbit. Like, all of it

Literally everything about World War Z. Absolute travesty. The book is a unique and genuinely thought provoking new take on the zombie genre. The movie is an insult to every bit of world building Max Brooks created.

The Dark Tower. Good movie in its own right, especially if you like Idris Elba.

First, they took 8 Stephen King books, some of which were like 2" thick, and decided to turn it into a 90-minute PG-13 film. A single film.

Second, because the racist element was so offensive (a Black woman taken out of the 1970s, who has personally experienced racism toward her, is taken to a foreign world, an alternate reality, where she basically is led by an old white man (modeled after Clint Eastwood) and naturally she feels a certain type of way about that) they decided they were going to change it up. Make her white, and him Black. Hence casting Idris Elba as a guy based on Clint Eastwood. Then they dropped her character entirely. I will argue that Elba made a hell of a Gunslinger, but the reason they cast him was because they wanted to turn the whole racism plot on its head. For no good reason. It was fine in the books (this would be The Drawing of the Three, and The Waste Lands, the second and third books).

But for all that, it was an entertaining action flick with a bunch of Stephen King references. I quite like it. As a reader of the books and a fan of Stephen King, I shouldn't, but the movie itself was good.

Honestly that the movie exists at all is the worst change, though.

OK, here's the thing. Overall, Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy is extremely good. I think it's the best Tolkien adaptation we're likely to ever get.

HOWEVER.

The random "Arwen is dying!" subplot was incredibly fucking stupid and while it didn't ruin the movies for me, it did dampen my enjoyment of them. There had to be a better way to get more screentime for Liv Tyler, surely.

Stephen King - Dreamcatcher

In the book the character Duddits had the shining, yes that motherfucking shining.

In the movie they made him an undercover alien. Man what a let down.

The most egregious that i remember must be Artemis Fowl.

I remember liking the book quite a lot for making fairies into the opposite of pushovers. It also had a mean edge to it that other teen fantasy lacked.

The movie is just... Not that.

The Dark Tower by Stephen King. It was the book in name alone.

The book Annihilation centered on a "tower" that was a mysterious, fleshy, downward spiraling tunnel with creepy writing on the walls. The imagery was so unsettling.

For some reason it is entirely absent from the movie. Like... that was half of the point of the book - a "tower" that climbed down into the earth instead of towards the sky. Why would you cut that?

The Passage tv series. To be fair, I got about 10 minutes into the first episode before I decided there was no way they read more than the book blurb before they wrote the script, but maybe they pulled it back in?

Also Game of Thrones. The drift from source material started small but got pretty wild as they went on. I feel like Martin was pretty clear what the "Game of Thrones" was in the books and I don't understand how a show with him as one of the key production members was able to miss that almost in its entirety. The show didn't need a clear end, that's the game of thrones, it never ends, the same cycle happens just as it always did.

The Hobbit

From the shitty shoehorned romance to wholesale elimination of plot points in the original story. Yeah, there was definitely some drama in the whole production of the film, but nonetheless it was crap.

Can I flip the script? Black Hawk Down was the most faithful adaptation of a book I've ever seen. As to the book, the author wanted to tell the story of the Battle of Mogadishu, faithfully. He had unprecedented, at the time, access to Defense Department files, interviewed everyone involved, strived for perfect accuracy.

When those guys are on that street corner, that's what happened.

Ready Player One. So much about the movie adaptation of this book infuriates me, but the fact they replaced Wargames with the Shining is a crime against humanity!!!

TV adaptation of Wheel of Time was just fucking awful. Like every stupid character change and story change was done literally as stupidly as possible and seemingly with a view to ruin the actual story as it was written.

I genuinely think the showrunners hadn't read the series to the end by most of the changes they made and canned it when they caught up and realised how much they had fucked the story that was still to come.

So many stupid changes made for no conceivable reason. Not little things to make a character easier to write for TV or more relatable, but sweeping giant story changes that make great chunks of the original canon impossible.

I genuinely implore anyone who even got the slightest amount of joy out of the show to read the books. Learn the original and really very good story, and experience Jordan's writing, rather than Judkins' made-up-as-they-went-along shit erroneously accepted as passable work.

Just pick a scene from The Hobbit movies and there's your answer. Any scene.

I, Robot.

Asimov was explicitly trying to get away from the trope of "robots take over humanity". To be clear, the first short story that became I, Robot was published in 1940. "Robots take over humanity" was already an SF trope by then. Hollywood comes along more than half a century later and dives head first right back into that trope.

Lt Cmdr Data is more what Asimov had it mind. In fact, Data's character has direct references to Asimov, like his positronic brain.

Please don't fuck up project hail mary.. please don't fuck up project hail mary..

Personally, I'm still irritated at the end of Hannibal (the 2001 movie). Spoilers for the end of the film and book ahead:

In the book, Clarice Starling has gone as far as she can in her FBI career. She became famous for solving big cases, moved up the corporate ladder, but that glass ceiling kept her from advancing. Too many misogynistic "good ol' boys" at the top, who not only prevent her from excelling in her career, but take every tiny mistake and blow it up into a potentially career-ending scenario.

Enter Hannibal Lecter; the suave and highly intelligent cannibal serial killer. He's outraged that Clarice's coworkers and bosses are actively objectifying her and ruining her career.

Long story short, at the end of the book, Hannibal rescues Clarice and gives her misogynistic boss an impromptu (and tasty!) lobotomy. Clarice ends up running away with Hannibal, because she realized he's the only person who respects her as an intelligent human being and not a piece of ass.

The movie chose to keep her loyal to the FBI and combative against Hannibal, even though the FBI actively tried to destroy her life. Hannibal escapes alone and the film just kind of ends. It was a complete non-ending.

The whole point of Silence of the Lambs and its sequel, Hannibal, was that Clarice was a woman trying to survive in a "man's job," yet proved she could belong - and excel - through her own skill and intellect. Silence of the Lambs did a pretty good job showing that on the big screen, but Hannibal didn't get the point of the story and decided the hero shouldn't end up with a cannibal, period. They treated him as more of an irredeemable monster.

It's kind of the "man vs. bear" meme, except replace the bear with a cannibal serial killer, and the girl still chose the cannibal as the safer choice to her co-workers.

I Am Legend. Just the whole thing.

Not a movie, but I don't know what they were thinking with that 'adaptation' of Pratchett's Night Watch books with 'The Watch'. It was wrong on every level. That said, taken on it's own merits, the production design was kind of awesome, and the guy playing Vimes was great.