I thought id start this cuz i dont think ive seen it in the forums. There are two that come to my mind immediately:

Harry Potter books-Pretty good representation of the books, but i dont know about the fourth one, from what ive seen in the trailers. And why do they keep switching the directors?

Dreamcatcher-I loved the book, but the movie totally ruined it, especially the ending. It did have a couple redeeming qualities: Jason Lee as Beaver, and the cabin was pretty good

Bad: "The Beach". If you remember this Leonardo DiCaprio movie, you'll remember it sucked. The book however was great.

Also Bad: "The Ninth Gate". Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp are great, but they ruined one of my favorite books in recent times, "The Club Dumas" by Arturo Perez-Reverte. They completely eliminated a major subplot of the book.

Good: "High Fidelity". Though some of the story was reorganized, and they obviously had to relocate it to Chicago, I thought it definitely captured the spirit of Nick Hornby's novel.

Great. Love or hate the movie, I have to say "Fight Club" was a dead-on adaptation of the book, Pehaps one of the best I've seen.

As much as I love "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Kesey's novel is far superior.

Also, Irvine Welsh's "The Acid House" really wasn't a book that should have been turned into a film.

I thought Smilia's Sense of Snow did a good job of embracing the book. Considering the amount of material and limited film time, it was better than I expected. A cable mini-series might have done it better, or not.

Embraced - P. Jackson, I like to think, did everything good to do the book justice. And I do think it worked for Lord of the Rings, but there is only so much you can do to live up to, what some cosider, the best book of all time.

Disgraced - I Am Legend. Just go read the book.

quote:

Originally posted by Edgy:
As much as I love "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Kesey's novel is far superior.

No way, the film version is much, much better.

Most comic-based movies completely strip the characters of what made them awesome in the first place, making people think that comics suck or some such garbage.

A comic-based movie that was actually better than its book?
"Blade"- they took a crappy character and made him awesome! Did you know that he wasn't half vampire in the comics? He was basically a black Van Helsing that used 70's slang. Could you imagine if they had stayed "true" to the original work?

As good as their books?
"Sin City"- Almost word-for-word and panel-for-panel!
"Batman Begins"- It was recently voted as The Best comic adaption EVER!
"Hellboy"- Del Toro worked very closely with Mignola (the comic creator) to stay as true to the characters as he could!

Ones that disgraced the books they were based off of?
"Daredevil"- I always have to point out that the director's cut DID improve the story A WHOLE LOT!
"X-Men"- Too many changes from the comics to list here.
"Constantine"- Screwed up his origin and his name!
"Fantastic 4" & "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer"- They SHOULDA been better!
Bunches and bunches of others.

As for straight films:
"Jaws" was better than the book for me because of the end. I've never been more disappointed in an ending as I was when I read the last few pages of such a wonderful story! (Yes. I know it was a 'Moby Dick' reference or homage or whatever you wanna call it, but DANG! It was just too exciting to have ended the way it did! I actually went back and reread the last coupla pages because I thought I had missed something. )