Movies That Didn't Match the Books

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How many people have been so excited to hear that their favorite book is being made into a movie, only to have your dreams crushed by terrible acting, missing scenes/characters, or scenes/characters that weren't even in the book in the first place!!

Eragon, LOTR, and the Hobbit come to mind for me either because much of it was not from the book, much of the book was left out, or the story was ruined to the point where it will be a while before a wanted remake is made in order for there to be a sequel.
It wasn't bad for the Hobbit with the extra content (maybe they were making up for leaving stuff out of LOTR) or LOTR itself. but I don't want to get started on Eragon or how Paolini could in anyway praise such a disgrace.

I can't think of a single movie that ever satisfactorily "matched" a book. I think for me, the things put into my mind by reading a story are too subjective to ever be matched by any movie; one huge part of my reading process is that I never imagine what any of the characters look like, so having actors and actresses with definite and distinctive looks in movie versions of books is bizarre and distracting to me. At least, that's true for books that I liked.

I think that books and movies should generally be kept separate. The fundamental elements of the genres are too different for transferring stories from one to the other.

I've noticed a few over the years.

The Lawnmower Man film had absolutely no resemblance to the short story by Stephen King.

Jumper invented characters and a whole storyline that wasn't in the book.

The Beach - changed characters from English to American and vice versa - made up a new ending (which I thought was a bit better than the ending in the book) - but added the stupid movie type plot line where boy gets girl...yawn...when in the book boy continues to lust after girl but girl doesn't want to know.

There are probably more but can't think right now, those are the three that have always stuck in my mind.

The lawnmower killing the guy in his house is from the short story, and the police officer saying that the man's remains can be found in the birdbath. That's pretty much it, though. They basically just added those scenes to justify calling it Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man. It was originally called Cyber God and someone noticed that they had the rights to the King story and decided to exploit the title. King sued to get his name taken off it.

Lame as the movie is, though, it's Citizen Kane compared to the sequel.

Regarding the Harry Potter franchise: The first two were EXTREMELY well-done, and followed the books, EXTREMELY closely. After that, the movies got worse, and worse. One of the reasons is that the writer (Steve Kloves) kept putting things into Hermione's mouth, that she didn't say (he said how much he loved the character), and thereby taking the line away from another character. I know it's, maybe, silly, but the fact that Hermione didn't have on a BLUE gown, in HP4, STILL drives me nuts, to-this-DAY!! HP5 was just ridiculous, in that the movie was SOOOO out of order (for instance: AFTER the scene where Harry arrives at the OotP, there's a scene, WAY later in the movie, where he asks Sirius if he grew-up there----HELLO?, are you friggin' kidding me----that's just INexcusable), and lines were added, that were not in the book----for instance: Harry says something about "your stupid mother"----Harry would never, ever, EVER say something like that. Basically, the movies were good, for about ONE thing: having a visualization of Hogwarts----that's IT!! Also, Dumbledore, the 2nd was absolutely HORRIBLE----I don't think Michael Gambon was even TRYING!!

"Moses". Read the book. Watch the movie. Decide for yourself.

A Clock Work Orange. Last chapter omitted and the movie pretty much misses the point of the book. Kulbrick's Shining is also quite different from the book but unlike A Clock Work Orange I think its superior.

Ella Enchanted. Like they didn't even read the book.
The Hobbit. There was a lot Legolas here for a book that didn't mention his name once.

Similarly, if they were going to be accurate then they probably should have re-cast Hermione before or after filming POA. Emma Watson was too good looking to pull that scene off.

I agree, but at least we know that he was alive during that time since in LotR it is mentioned he is a very old dude. What was with all the made up characters that were not in the book at all?

The Lorax movie...I liked it, but to me it didn't really capture the feel of the original book, since so much extra stuff was put in. But I do think the producers have a right to think of their own ideas. I don't tend to get too upset over movies being different from books.

Phantom of the Opera: The movie conveniently "forgot" to put his name in the film, Erik Destler. It made up a tragic back-story between Erik and Madame Giry, and also failed to mention Erik's friend the Daroga Nadir Khan, who was a policeman during Erik's job building palaces in Persia. Yeah...the movie doesn't include practically anything from the book.

True, I guess I lumped in Tauriel with the Legolas storyline. The latter stood out more to me, because it almost felt like a deleted scene of LotR.

The movie took its cue from the ALW musical instead of the book (which was darker). So the movie is consistent, while the musical was not.

Flowers in the attic, the movie didn't match the book at all, and they killed the mother off and in the series of books she was in them for about three books.

When I was around seven or eight years of age, I had found it odd that movies didn't exactly match books.

As I remember, I had gradually learned to focus on excellent story-lines, and the thoughtful movies based on a books story-lines i.e., movies that retained reasonable similarities to the book versions. In short, to treat both books, and their movie follow-ups on their own merits!