What are some examples of adaptations veering from source material well?

[Benji]

Title.

[Mick]

Jurassic Park. 

In I think the late 80s, Michael Chricton met with Steven Spielberg about producing a script that Chricton had, called "Emergency Ward", a story about the craziness of a Chicago emergency room, an ER, if you will, based largely around Chricton's own experience as a medical student. Spielberg said at the end "Well, that's great Mike, are you working on anything else?" Cricton responded with "Oh, just a thing about cloning dinosaurs." "Wait, tell me about that."

So, Crichton polished up Jurassic Park, and the novel was a success. And the movie was a success. But they were the same in concept, character names and setting, but quite a bit was completely changed. Some characters were removed; even dinosaurs were removed. It's a very stark difference to the film. And the same almost applies to The Lost World, which, like JP, had a movie that was the same in concept, setting and character names (Well, two character names) and everything else was changed up. 

 

Another example would be Jaws. The novel and the film are, like Jurrasic Park, same setting, basic plot and characters. However, in the novel, the shark is the best character because everyone else is miserable piece of shit that deserves to be eaten. The asshole mayor won't close the beaches because he's in debt to the mob. Hooper is having an affair with Ellen Brody. Brody doesn't like Hooper because he suspects as much. Quint has some very colorful metaphors  . 

In fact, I'm just going to take most Spielberg adaptations and drop them here  

 

If we're going for just a movie that's not based on a novel, then a good example would be The Bird Cage, which was originally the French play and later film La Cage Aux Folles. Another French film for American Audience -- True Lies, adapted from La Totale!. Or then you have other fun rip offs, like taking Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Sanjuro and The Seven Samurai and making A Fistfull of Dollars, For A Few Dollars more and The Magnificent Seven. And then speaking of Kurosawa, I offer Ran into the pile, an adaptation of King Lear set in Sengoku Japan. 

....Shall I go on?   

 

 

[Colly]

Edgar Wright is in the process of a new version of the Running Man, which I think I heard will be closer to the original story. The Schwarzenegger film is lovely though, stupid and very 80s but still great, and absolutely miles from King's more grounded original.

Going comics-y, what James Gunn did to the Guardians of the Galaxy was superb. Picked and chose what he wanted to keep, added some things of his own and made some of the best bits of the MCU.

[Mick]

I like both, to be honest. I really really really hope in the new movie, they keep some of the more darkly comedic shit from the story, like having the people with heart problems seeing how far they can walk on a treadmill before dying. Really, if I directed that scene, I'd give up my salary just to include a promo for it set to "I'm Gonna Be". 

 

I also want to throw in National Lampoon's Vacation as an adaptation that differed from the source material. Read John Hughes’ Original National Lampoon Vacation Story That Started the Movie Franchise (hollywoodreporter.com)  Vacation '58, published in 1979. 

[Pooker]

Angels and Demons

After the success of The Da Vinci Code and it sticking pretty close to the book, I was super excited for Angels and Demons, as I thought it was a better book. The movie strayed so far from the book, that it didn't come close to comparing to The Da Vinci Code.

[Mick]

I'm going to go a non-mainstream route with this one. The Ruby Spears Mega Man cartoon. 

It does about as well as it can for what is essentially the same game released multiple times. It does give us this gem though: 
 

 

[Jimmy]

Drive My Car apparently doesn't have a great deal in common with Murakami short story it's based on. But then, it's probably easier to adapt a short story that veers away from the source material. 

I think Glazer's made a good career out of loosely adapting source material. Again, I've not read either but Under The Skin and The Zone of Interest are both incredible movies and I've heard both only vaguely resemble their books. 

[Mick]

I think it should be mentioned that The Godfather would not be nearly as well received today as it would have had the film included the constant narrative references to the size of Sonny's penis. There's literally an entire subplot dedicated to it. 

[Mad Jack]

Lord of the Rings movies not including the songs and Tom Bombadil.

[Mick]

2 hours ago, Mad Jack said:

Lord of the Rings movies not including the songs and Tom Bombadil.

Well, it was Tom Bombadil or Denethor's tomato. 

[Hellraiser]

The Shining. Kubrick veered quite a bit from the source material when he adapted the Stephen King novel. Which is why King hated it initially. Although he has since come around to it. If you want to watch an adaptation of The Shining that followed the book more closely and see for yourself why that is a bad idea, watch the mini series from 1997.

Forrest Gump as well. I never read the original novel, but the consensus among those who did seems to be that the book is awful. They apparently cut a lot of crap when writing the screenplay for the movie adaptation including Forrest becoming an astronaut, being put in a flight alongside a orangutan which crashes somewhere in New Guinea resulting with him having to deal with a tribe of cannibals.

The Godfather is another one. I read the novel it was based on. Puzzo and Coppola did a great job streamlining that story when writing the screenplay. Remember the woman that Sonny had sex with during the wedding at the beginning of the movie? She has her own subplot about how she is suffering from having a loose vagina and that Sonny is the only person who can satisfy her sexually because of his enormous penis. She is sent to Vegas by Tom Hagen to keep an eye on Fredo who is there to learn about the Casino and Hotel business and also to be the public figurehead without a crime record of one of the Hotels the Corleone family owns.. She eventually meets and falls in love with a surgeon who fixes her vagina and they live happily ever after.

And Die Hard as well. In the novel the movie is based on, the terrorist are actually terrorists and not robbers putting on an act. The protagonist visits the the big cooperation's headquarters to visit his estranged daughter and not his wife. She also falls to her death in the end alongside Gruber. The protagonist comes away from these events blaming the cooperation for the terrorist attack and his daughters death and comes to sympathize with the terrorist's cause a bit. Overall, the books tone is much more bleak. And a couple of Die Hard bonus facts: Because the book the movie is based on was a sequel to a book that was turned into a movie starring Frank Sinatra back in the 60s, they were contractually obligated to offer the lead role in Die Hard to Sinatra first. And before Willis got the role, one of the people they offered it to was Arnold Schwarzenegger with the pitch being that they would turn it into a sequel of Commando.

And last but not least, there is Oldboy. The plot twist at the and was created for the movie. In the manga,

Spoiler

Oh Dae-su's and Mi-do's counterparts are not related and no hypnosis is involved in their romance. They fall in love regularly. The reason why Lee Woo-jin's manga counterpart has Oh Dae-su's counterpart kidnapped is much stranger. They manga versions of those two also used to be classmates. Because of his perceived unfeelingness due to his emotionless demeanor, manga-Lee Woo-jin is mobbed by the other students. The only way he ever displayed his emotions was through his singing, for which he was also ridiculed. When manga-Oh Dae-su hears him sing, he is actually moved to tears by it. Manga-Lee Woo-jin perceived this as the greatest humiliation in his life and this incident is what sets the events of the story in motion. Suffice to say, the twist of the movie adaptation hits much harder.

 

Edited October 8 by Hellraiser

[Mick]

19 hours ago, Hellraiser said:

If you want to watch an adaptation of The Shining that followed the book more closely and see for yourself why that is a bad idea, watch the mini series from 1997.

 

Oh yeah, that was such shit. Not what I'd call Steven Weber's best roll. 

 

19 hours ago, Hellraiser said:

The Godfather is another one. I read the novel it was based on. Puzzo and Coppola did a great job streamlining that story when writing the screenplay. Remember the woman that Sonny had sex with during the wedding at the beginning of the movie? She has her own subplot about how she is suffering from having a loose vagina and that Sonny is the only person who can satisfy her sexually because of his enormous penis.

 

On 06/10/2024 at 10:12, Mick said:

I think it should be mentioned that The Godfather would not be nearly as well received today as it would have had the film included the constant narrative references to the size of Sonny's penis. There's literally an entire subplot dedicated to it. 

 

See guys, I wasn't making this part up  

[Skummy]

I completely get Stephen King's objections to The Shining - that it was a deeply personal book for him, that it was about how addiction can destroy families, and about how circumstance can drive an ordinary man to madness, while, as King himself pointed out, Jack Nicholson's performance in the movie is clearly stark-raving mad from the beginning. 

I'm not a huge King guy, but I quite like the book, and adore the film, so I'm thoroughly team Kubrick on that one.

[Mick]

Oh. Speaking of King. 

'Salem's Lot will never have a good adaptation  . I should read that again. 

[Gazz]

My Immortal

[The Kraig]

The Knights of the Old Republic. I found it way more interesting than the original Star Wars canon, the comics, novels, games all trump the general Star Wars flapdoodle.

[Mad Jack]

1 hour ago, The Kraig said:

The Knights of the Old Republic. I found it way more interesting than the original Star Wars canon, the comics, novels, games all trump the general Star Wars flapdoodle.

Shout out also to parts of the MMO The Old Republic, especially the Smuggler and Jedi Knight stories, which capture the whole "adventure stories on a galactic scale" vibe that A New Hope has and was promptly dropped in Episode 5 for the Skywalker family psychodrama the series became. The Trooper storyline too, probably does better to get across a shades of grey, "all sides are bad" storyline than any of the Disney+ stories have done when they've tried to do them.

[Lint]

In First Blood, aka Rambo, he only kills one person, and its by accident

In the novel First Blood, he's basically a murder machine who almost enjoys killing all the people who are coming after him

[Mick]

2 hours ago, Lint said:

In First Blood, aka Rambo, he only kills one person, and its by accident

In the novel First Blood, he's basically a murder machine who almost enjoys killing all the people who are coming after him

Plus the entire ending is different. They shot it, but I guess the test audiences didn't care too much for it (Not to mention it put the kabosh on sequels  )

[GhostMachine]

True Blood. Heidi was a fan of the books, and according to her the ONLY episode of the show true to the books was the pilot.

Spoiler

Lafayette gets murdered early on in the books. And while the series didn't tell you who Sookie ended up with, it was Sam in the books.