Movies That Didn't Match the Books

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The movie L.A. Confidential had deviated from the book in many aspects, primarily because the book was so sprawlingly huge that a great deal of the meat had to be cut down to the bare bone. And because so much had been cut away, some new story lines had to be created by the screen writers in the movie to make up for said lost material. But that said, the movie actually had worked out pretty well, and was still a pretty decent adaption, that even the novel's author, James Elroy, had liked.

I only saw half of the Harry Potter movies before I stopped being a fan, but I know entire scenes were shortened and certain characters were giving smaller roles or left out entirely. Like Campin_Cat said, good for visualization, but not much else.

Eragon, too. Between that and the way it was so badly received, is probably why the other books for that franchise were never made into movies. I don't care if they do or don't, I've lost interest in Eragon, too.

When I read The Shining, I was disappointed to see what was left out of the movie.

One that comes to mind that hasn't been mentioned yet is the original Jurassic Park movie. I've seen the movie plenty of times and I have read and listened to the book. I think no more than 20% of the movie is actually from the book.

To me though, just because a film version of a book doesn't fully match the original book, doesn't automatically make it bad. I mean, Jurassic Park is still a very successful movie and book.

Another is the TV series Under The Dome. While I haven't read the book yet (I do have a hardcover copy), I do enjoy the TV series despite all that I have heard that it doesn't share much if anything in common with the book. Once again, I don't think that the series is bad because it isn't 100% based on the book.

Some others that I know of are the 1953 and 2005 versions of The War Of The Worlds, the 1916 film version (and the Disney version) of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and The Lincoln Lawyer.

Something that had always bothered me as a kid was how much willy wonka and the chocolate factory strayed from the book it was based on and for that reason I never really liked it growing up unlike soo many others. I actually thought that Tim Burton's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory was closer to the book and a better movie overall watching it as a teen. Not that it was flawless, but willy wonka wasn't perfect either. The main problem that I had with both movies was their portrayals of Wonka himself. Both Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp seemed to take one particular aspect of Wonka from the book and focus all their attention on that. Wilder's portrayal focused too much on the charming, whimsical Wonka while Depp's portrayal focused too much on the eccentric, mischievous a**hole side of Wonka. Nothing would be wrong with this necessarily except that they crank both of these portrayals up to 11 to the point where Wilder's Wonka made me feel uncomfortable and Depp's Wonka just got grating. For me the proper Wonka would need a balance of both sides to work.

bridge to teribithia was a good movie but never really seemed to follow the book entirely