peter Jackson was dragged in kicking and screaming years after preproduction started. it was destined to be a studio driven mess from the start

The hobbit movies should have fleshed out the dwarf characters better with all that extra time, give each of them a substory spread out over the trilogy so they would be more memorable. They did that with only one of the dwarves and it's a silly love triangle that barely goes into the character of said dwarf. With the movie we got, ask any average person directly after seeing the movies to name the dwarves, i bet hardly anyone can.

Warner Bros didn't want to make the Hobbit. They wanted to make another Lord of the Rings movie, and had to use the Hobbit for it. The Hobbit is very much NOT a Lord of the Rings story, despite the shared setting. Square book, round movie.

Also, they knew there wasn't enough content, but Warner Bros had to split the profits of the first movie five ways. They didn't have to do that for the second movie, and then they added a third to squeeze out even more.

Full CGI ruined the hobbit for me. The costume and make up work was so good in LotR. That and the whole movie operated as if in a physics-free zone. Nothing made sense.

I never watched the other two, I imagine they are just as bad.

See, I think the high frame rate would look great if what you were looking at was real. But what you're looking at is a room of actors in nylon beards and Martin Freeman in rubber feet.

And where did the spare barrel come from?

The original cut of the 2007 ended with Will Smith's character realizing he had been abducting and murdering conscious, aware creatures. The ending has the vampires doing a rescue mission, visibly terrified of Smith, and then he allows the one he abducted to rejoin her society.

Test audiences apparently didn't like it or didn't understand it

I read the book on a whim in high school. I think it was one of those random Barnes and Nobles finds. The ending was an amazing horror twist, with Neville realizing he's the monster and the audience realizing that they've been rooting for the villain The whole time, and the acceptance of the transition to the new society.

The only adaptation I've seen was the Will Smith movie which was generic zombie movie nonsense.

When I went to community college, I'd arrive early to one theater class, and sitting there already (from a previous class, I believe) were two girls/women who somehow managed to fill 75% of their conversation, every time, with "Eragon was such a bad movie adaptation."

Which taught me that the movie was so bad they it genuinely hurt fans of the novel.

Yeah. I guess this post is now about bad movie adaptations in general.

You are 100% right about the Eragon movie. I loved those books as a kid and I was so excited for that movie and it was just so bafflingly terrible. It was like they didn't even try.

Related in name only. I loved the book and got curious about the movie.

What a boring useless mess of tropes. Brad Pitt travels the world and saves everyone. There, I just saved you 90 minutes.

It's not even a bad movie. But it's only very tangentially related to the source material.

I partly expected that this particular movie would come up in such a thread, as most people seem to be quite disappointed by it. Sure it was different from what everyone expected, and it could have been much better. I still appreciate it though because, like all adaptations/versions of H2G2, it tells a slightly different story, with the same humour and satire that is characteristic of Douglas Adams. And the effects were quite nifty IMO. Too bad DNA did not live to see the completed film...

Luckily there's the radio series, books, TV show, comic, play, and game to get me through :-)

Don't forget the BBC TV series, it was not bad either ;-)

Hard disagree here. I'm a rabid wheel of time fan who has read the books at least 6 times.

Ir would be downright impossible to "stick to the source" for book one (or really, any if them) and have it be good on film. It just wouldn't work on film, there is too much going on. The story would feel like it drags and is being forcefully stretched out, because the book is rather repetitive. That repetition works in a book because you are getting to read the characters inner thoughts, and in paper it adds tension that, for example, Rand and Mat are unsure whether the next place they stay will be full of dark friends.

But after the third time they get chased out by dark friends a TV audience would be like "OK they did this already get on with it." Repetition on TV gets boring FAST.

And the magic system is all kinds of messy in the books. They're diving into it a bit more now, but it's still got Tobe simplified for screen. You can't convey characters thoughts on screen, which basically neuters the whole system. The book is VERY exposition heavy, and that gets boring real quick on screen. Look at the LOTR theatrical VS extended editions. There is a reason that Bilbo talking about Hobbits at the beginning got cut. I like that scene, but it also is too much exposition to drop on the viewer right after the intro, which is also exposition. EOTW is like half exposition, and most of the books are at least a third exposition. That all has to get cut or reworked to be actually fun to watch without being super preachy. It's

Listen to Brandon Sanderson talking about the adaptation of Mistborm he has been working in for ages now. He has said that he had to make big, fundamental changes to the characters and story to make it work on film. He said his first draft was closest to the book, and that it was quite bad.

The biggest fuckup season 1 of the show did was not including the prologue. Idk why they cut it, it's such a good intro. Besides that, I thought they did alright. Season two has been much better so far, and has shown that they really do understand the core of this story and all of the characters in it.

They even ignored Brandon Sanderson who offered free advice on how to write the story FFS. Even the show runner had the gall to say he's a fanboy of the series.

Doesn't that make it the BEST bastardization of the book then? :)

I haven't watched or read it. Are you saying the movie is better than the book in spite of bastardizing it?

I can give Starship Troopers a pass though. Making it into a satire of fascism works better than it being straight up fascist propaganda. The book is basically a social experiment and people who read books will most likely get the point. People who don't read on the other hand...

What made me mad at RP1 movie was they put the Easter Egg in Atari Adventure. Which is mentioned in chapter 0 of the book, and again in the fake town (not put in the movie) because it's so obvious, nobody who cared about games at all would hide anything there.

And no Tomb of Horrors.

Instead Spielberg put a bunch of lame movie references in, because he's too senile to understand the game references.

And the actors are far too pretty for the "but you're beautiful inside" plot.

TIL How to Train Your Dragon is originally a book. Thank you.