Random Super Popular Movies That Were Unfaithful Adaptations (12 items)

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  (#1) Captain America: Civil War

  • Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Don Cheadle, Jeremy Renner, Chadwick Boseman, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Rudd, Emily VanCamp, Tom Holland, Frank Grillo, William Hurt, Daniel Brühl

  Most superhero movies that are based on comics borrow elements from multiple stories so it's hard to call them direct adaptations. The third installment in Marvel Studio's Captain America series was not only the highest grossing film of 2016, but it was the first in the MCU to use the title and story of a single Marvel graphic novel, so it's fair to think of it as a straight adaptation, albeit with some crucial differences.

  Both the film and the Civil War crossover comic by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven split the heroes of the Marvel universe into two factions - led by Captain America and Iron Man - due to ideological differences on government intervention in superheroes' business. In the comics, the war isn't just reduced to one super-powered showdown at an airport, it goes on for weeks and involves the destruction of a ton of property and the death of multiple innocents. Because of complications with character rights, the film's big showdown couldn't compete with the comics' in terms of scale.

  Also in the comics, the war starts to begin with because of an incident where a third-rate superhero accidentally explodes and kills a school full of children. As happy as we are that the movie removed the death of a lot of children (very!), it does lose a little bit of the original comics' nuance. In the comics, a superhero loses control of his powers and causes an accident, which leads to the government stepping in to try to register and monitor superheroes. That's a reasonable response and leads to real conflict. In the movie, there's no accident; a bad guy (Zemo) dressed as someone else who was believed to be a bad guy (Winter Solider) to do a classic bad guy thing (blow people up). The comics told a story about heroes fighting heroes with people who are right on both sides of the issue and it unfolded naturally. The movie changed that and did another standard "Bad Guys vs Good Guys" thing.

  Finally, the most crucial difference is that the comic has Captain America surrendering, ending the conflict and then getting murdered on the way to jail, while the movie leaves Captain America alive by the end.

  Oh, also in the comics they built a Robot Thor. It's a long story and we're out of time.
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  (#2) The Shining

  • Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Barry Dennen, Barry Nelson, Anne Jackson, Danny Lloyd, Joe Turkel, Tony Burton, Philip Stone, Robin Pappas, David Baxt, Louise Burns, Lisa Burns, Lia Beldam

  Other than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Shining is perhaps the most famous example of a film being hailed as a great movie while also being detracted as a terrible adaptation. And, again similarly to LOTR, the biggest gripe comes from those closest to home: Stephen King himself.

  "The book is hot, and the movie is cold; the book ends in fire, and the movie in ice," King told Rolling Stone. "In the book, there's an actual arc where you see this guy, Jack Torrance, trying to be good, and little by little he moves over to this place where he's crazy. And as far as I was concerned, when I saw the movie, Jack was crazy from the first scene. I had to keep my mouth shut at the time." 

  That's the thing with Jack (and indeed most of Stephen King's villains); he's supposed to be sympathetic. You're supposed to be watching a man struggling to be good but failing in the face of his alcoholism. In the movie, Jack dies, freezing to death in an attempt to murder his son and wife. In the book, he sacrifices himself because he's possessed by ghosts and knows that he's a danger to his family. He lets himself blow up to save them and gets redemption (another classic King villain hallmark).

  But that nuance gets thrown right out the window when you mix the perfect, crazy cocktail of Kubrick and Jack Nicholson. Jack Nicholson is going to bring the crazy, right out of the gate, and he will not stop until he's dead or the movie's over, whatever comes first.
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  (#3) The Wizard of Oz

  • Judy Garland, Margaret Hamilton, Frank Morgan, Billie Burke, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Pinto Colvig, Rolfe Sedan, Ken Darby, Billy Curtis, Adriana Caselotti, Meinhardt Raabe, Jerry Maren, Jack Haley, Billy Bletcher, Charley Grapewin, Elly Annie Schneider, Clara Blandick, Candy Candido, Ruth Duccini, Mitchell Lewis, Margaret Pellegrini, Harry Wilson, Oliver Smith, Charles Irwin, Tyler Brooke, Lois January, Buster Brodie, Mickey Carroll, nm0467071, Ethelreda Leopold, Pat Walshe, Robert St. Angelo, Eleanor Keaton, 'Little Billy' Rhodes, Abe Dinovitch, Tommy Cottonaro, Daisy Earles, Dona Massin, Harry Earles, Charles Becker, Bud Linn, Terry, Olga C. Nardone, Lee Murray, Elvida Rizzo, Lorraine Bridges, Helen Seamon, Jackie Gerlich, Paul Dale, Sig Frohlich, Rad Robinson, Jon Dodson, George Noisom, Ambrose Schindler, George Ministeri, Fern Formica, August Clarence Swenson, Amelia Batchelor, Jack Paul, Gracie Doll, Nita Krebs, Harry Cogg, Parnell St. Aubin, Dorothy Barrett, Yvonne Moray, Phil Harron, Sid Dawson, Ralph Sudam, Freddie Retter, Jimmy the raven, Johnny Winters

  The Wizard of Oz is one of Hollywood's most enduring classics. The 1939 fantasy film tells the story of Dorothy Gale, a girl from the black-and-white world of Kansas, who's life goes full Technicolor when she's swept away in a tornado to the land of Oz. To get back home, she seeks out the Wizard of the Emerald City with help from some peculiar characters.

  The Wizard of Oz is a musical adventure fit for light, family entertainment, but the original tale by L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is a much weirder fairy story in which Oz is a real place (not a dream), Dorothy deliberately murders the Wicked Witch as per the Wizard's request, and uses the not-so-"Cowardly" Lion as a mount. 

  Speaking of murder, the book was way more violent, featuring a scene where the Tin Man uses his axe to decapitate forty wolves and the Scarecrow snaps the necks of an entire flock of attacking crows. This is a far cry from the fun and whimsical tale we all know and love.

  Oh, and the ruby slippers are silver in the book. That feels fairly minor compared to all of the wolf murder, but it's still a change and we're just trying to be thorough here.
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  (#4) Frozen

  • Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Alan Tudyk, Ciarán Hinds, Jonathan Groff, Josh Gad, Edie McClurg, Maurice LaMarche, Santino Fontana, Robert Pine, Chris Williams, Stephen J. Anderson, Spencer Lacey Ganus, Eva Bella, Livvy Stubenrauch, Maia Wilson

  Really, this list could entirely be made up of Disney animated movies. The studio softens and removes so many of the gritty elements from the fairy tales and folklore it bases most of its movies on that there's even a word to describe the process: "Disneyfied." But for the sake of not being repetitive, let's just focus on Frozen. Not only is Frozen one of the company's biggest hits but it's also one of its most unfaithful adaptation.

  The character of Elsa and the Nordic setting of the film are inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and - though originally the frosty monarch was planned to be villainous as she is in the original story - she ended up being the film's misunderstood heroine along with her sister, Ana. Apart from that, the two works share absolutely nothing in common. Even the name, "Snow Queen," is never mentioned. 
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  (#5) The Lord of the Rings film trilogy

  Based on the pioneering fantasy epic by J.R.R Tolkien, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is not only an Oscar-winning, frequent haunt of iMDB's Top 10 movies of all-time, but continues to be beloved by an army of fans. No one can really argue that they are 'bad' or even 'not that great' films. 
  
  One particularly vocal detractor is the nephew of the book's author. “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25,” Christopher Tolkien has said. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.” 
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  (#6) Shrek

  • Cameron Diaz, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, John Lithgow, Vincent Cassel, Jim Cummings, Kathleen Freeman, Cody Cameron, Conrad Vernon, Chris Miller, Charles Dennis, Christopher Knights, Andrew Adamson, Elisa Gabrielli, Val Bettin, Jacquie Barnbrook, Peter Dennis, Simon J. Smith, Jean-Paul Vignon, Guillaume Aretos, Matthew Gonder, Patty Cornell, Bobby Block, John Bisom, Clive Pearse, Susan Fitzer, Michael Galasso, Calvin Remsberg

  Shrek is the multi-million dollar franchise that pretty much built DreamWorks. While the green ogre's empire has gradually fallen out of critical favor with each new film installment, the first film was praised for its tongue-in-cheek ribbing of fairy tale - and Disney - tropes. Lesser known is the franchise's origin in the illustrated children's book Shrek! by William Steig, which was published over ten years before the release of the first film.

  While the conceit of an ugly, green ogre leaving the comfort of his swamp, befriending a donkey and rescuing a princess are the same, critic Margot Mifflin bemoaned when Shrek was released that "the directors have traded the subversive misanthropy of Steig's 1990 book for a Hollywood ending." While she accepted that "embellishments" were needed to meet the run-time, she felt the adaptation's preachy shmultz was a betrayal of the original. "Steig's story is gently menacing, unsentimental and harmlessly deviant from start to finish. The movie is winking and cynical."
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  (#7) Edge of Tomorrow

  • Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson, Charlotte Riley, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Noah Taylor, Jonas Armstrong, Madeleine Mantock, Kick Gurry, Tony Way, Franz Drameh, Tommy Campbell, Masayoshi Haneda, Dragomir Mrsic, Matt Hookings, Jim Sturgeon, Ronan Summers

  2014's Edge of Tomorrow is one of few films that can call itself an adaptation of an adaptation. At least it could if it was faithful enough to either versions. The original work is a Japanese light novel called All You Need Is Kill, written by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and illustrated by Yoshitoshi ABe. This was then adapted into a manga by writer Ryōsuke Takeuchi and artist Takeshi Obata.

  All three versions were well-recieved and follow the same basic premise: a soldier battling alien invaders is forced to relive the same day over and over again until he can improve enough to find an escape. Aside from the whitewashing issue, Private Keiji Kiriya and Tom Cruise's Captain Bill Cage along with Rita Vrataski and Emily Blunt's Rita are completely different characters. Edge of Tomorrow also offers a heavily romanticized view on their relationship compared to their limited interactions and bloodsoaked end they meet in All You Need Is Kill.  
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  (#8) Starship Troopers

  • Neil Patrick Harris, Denise Richards, Amy Smart, Dina Meyer, Clancy Brown, Rue McClanahan, R. Lee Ermey, Michael Ironside, Dean Norris, Brenda Strong, Casper Van Dien, Jake Busey, Marshall Bell, Patrick Muldoon, Dale Dye, Anthony Ruivivar, Bruce Gray, Seth Gilliam, Robert David Hall, Greg Travis, Timothy Omundson, Brian Tochi, Julie Pinson, Blake Lindsley, John Cunningham, Kai Lennox, Denise Dowse, Parry Shen, Steven Ford, Eric Bruskotter, Stephanie Erb, Christopher Curry, Brad Kane, Lenore Kasdorf, Matt Levin, Ryan O'Quinn, Julianna McCarthy, Michael Gerald, Eric DaRe, Edward Neumeier, Jon Davison, Michael A. Valenzano, Mary Ann Schmidt, Jim Morse, Antonio Magrane, K. Harrison Sweeney, Steve Mora, Hunter Bodine, Dawn E. Anderson, Brooke Morales, Tami-Adrian George, Armand Darrius, Mara Duronslet, Justin Ward, Timothy McNeil, Zoë Poledouris, Mike Stokey, Teo, Dan Olivo, Patrick Bishop, Ungela Brockman, Mylin Brooks, Walter Adrian, Farnaz, Mohammad Faisal, Julia Self, Jason Thomas Campbell, Curnal Achilles Aulisio, Tony Scoville, Cole Nelson, Patrick Wolff, Alexi Lakatos, William Bradley, Tyrone Tann, David Beckett, Austin Sanderford, Ronald L. Botchan, Rhiannon Vigil, Matt Entriken, Nathaniel Marshall, Travis Lowen, Cari Vega

  According to director Paul Verhoeven, Starship Troopers is "the most expensive art movie ever made." While this didn't exactly come across to critics and audiences at the time, the film has garnered a reputation as a cult classic since it's release in 1997. Adapted from the classic sci-fi novel by Robert. A. Heinlein, it tells the story of a near-future war between humans and giant, alien bugs through the eyes of new recruits to the cause.

  The movie was never going to be an accurate representation of the book considering a version of the script (entitled Bug Hunt At Outpost Nine) existed before the name Starship Troopers was even licensed, and more crucially because Verhoeven gave up reading the book because it was "quite bad." The source text has been criticized as being fascist military propaganda so in this case, it's probably for the best that Verhoeven - who was raised in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands - claims his version is instead a satire of these themes.
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  (#9) The Bourne Identity

  • Matt Damon, Clive Owen, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, Walton Goggins, Franka Potente, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Gabriel Mann, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Demetri Goritsas, David Bamber, Josh Hamilton, Anthony Green, Tim Dutton, David Gasman, Roger Frost, Eric Moreau, Vincent Franklin, Hubert Saint-Macary, Orso Maria Guerrini, Daniel Kobby Erskine, Nicky Naude, Thierry René, Denis Braccini, Arnaud Henriet, Emanuel Booz, David Selburg, Rainer Werner, Roberto Bestazzoni, Elwin Chopper David, Kait Tenison, Delphine Lanson, Jean-Yves Bilien, Joe Montana, Russell Levy, Alain Grellier, Joshua McNew, William Cagnard, Joseph Beddelin, Michael Rix, Philippe Durand, Houston Williams, Gwenaël Clause, Katie Thynne, Harry Gilbert, Troy Lenhardt, John Pawlikowski, Andrew Webster, Brad Rizer, Aaron Lilly, Ronald Benefield, Bradley J. Goode, Ludovic Boulnois

  The Bourne movies are good enough to blow even a spy icon like James Bond out of the water. The first three films starred Matt Damon as the amnesiac CIA assassin and revolutionized the way action movies were shot from 2002 onwards (hint: lots of shaky cam) but how did they fare as adaptations? The original book series was written by Robert Ludlum who drew inspiration from his own experience of losing his memory for a 12-hour period.

  Both the novels and films follow the titular Jason Bourne as he tries to recover the missing pieces of his life, and delves into a labyrinthine web of secrets and espionage. In the films, Bourne gets a nationality change and faces completely different threats. The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman revealed in the DVD commentary that he and screenwriter Tony Gilroy threw out everything beyond the premise in order to use the story as a critique of American foreign policy at the time.
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  (#10) Who Framed Roger Rabbit

  • Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd, Bob Hoskins, Mel Blanc, Frank Welker, Jim Cummings, Joel Silver, Joanna Cassidy, Amy Irving, June Foray, David Lander, Russi Taylor, Charles Fleischer, Richard LeParmentier, Richard Ridings, Wayne Allwine, Mike Edmonds, Tony Anselmo, Lou Hirsch, Stubby Kaye, Alan Tilvern, Betsy Brantley, Edwin Craig, Lindsay Holiday, Paul Springer

  Who Framed Roger Rabbit is such a groundbreaking and well-loved film that most people are unaware that it has a literary origin. Gary K. Wolf's 1981 book, Who Censored Roger Rabbit? has much the same premise as the 1988 film adaptation: a hardboiled detective named Eddie Valiant - who lives in a world shared by 'toons - teams up with a two-dimensional comic foil, Roger Rabbit. 

  Director Robert Zemeckis saw a detective story set in a world where toons and humans interact and thought "Cool, I'll make a movie out of that" and tossed out everything else from the book. Here's a partial list of iconic movie characters that are not in the book: Benny the Cab, the weasel gangsters, Judge Doom (!!!), and Teddy (ya know, Eddie's brother, whose death formed the cornerstone of Eddie's personality). The amazing relationship between Jessica and Roger Rabbit in the movie (he's relentlessly devoted to her and she adores him because he makes her laugh) is nowhere in the book: instead, she will literally have sex with anyone for money or influence.

  Oh also Roger Rabbit is dead in the book. He dies pretty early on and a temporary doppleganger of Roger Rabbit teams up with Valiant to solve the murder of the real Roger. And it turns out that a previously unseen and never-discussed magic genie was the one who killed Roger. "Virtually no scene in the book has a mirror in the movie," Tasha Robinson wrote in her comparison piece for the A.V Club.   We're thinking that might be a good thing.
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  (#11) There Will Be Blood

  • Daniel Day-Lewis, Ciarán Hinds, Paul Dano, Paul F. Tompkins, Jim Downey, Jim Meskimen, Kevin J. O'Connor, David Warshofsky, Kevin Breznahan, Russell Harvard, Mary Elizabeth Barrett, Arne Starr, Barry Del Sherman, Randall Carver, Dillon Freasier, Hans Howes, Brad Carr, Coco Leigh, David Willis, Erica Sullivan, Beau Smith, Hope Elizabeth Reeves, Colleen Foy, Rhonda Reeves, Joy Rawls, Steven Barr, Vince Froio, Sydney McCallister, Bob Bock, Kathryn A Davis, Jacob Stringer, Stockton Taylor, David Williams, Phil Shelly, Robert Barge, Amber Roberts, Barry Bruce, Louise Gregg, Colton Woodward, Bob Bell, Robert Caroline, Ronald Krut, John Burton, John W. Watts, Dan Swallow, Huey Rhudy, Robert Arber, Martin Stringer, John Chitwood, Christine Olejniczak, Kellie Hill, Harrison Taylor, Irene G. Hunter, Joseph Mussey, Robert Hills, Matthew Braden Stringer, Tom Doyle

  Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is loosely based on the 1927 novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Set at the turn of 20th century, both tell the tale of a greed-driven, aspiring tycoon who leaves the American silver mining industry in search of his fortune in the oil boom. The film - particularly Daniel Day-Lewis' lead performance - garnered widespread critical adoration and earned 8 Oscar nominations in 2007.

  Calling the movie an "adaptation" is really stretching the definition of the word though, something that Anderson agrees with. "The book is so long that it's only the first couple hundred pages that we ended up using... We were really unfaithful to the book," he told the A.V Club in 2012. "It was like having a really good collaborator, the book." Certain character names and scenes ring true to Upton Sinclair's story but otherwise, There Will Be Blood is an entirely separate work.
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  (#12) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

  • James Earl Jones, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, Sterling Hayden, Shane Rimmer, Peter Bull, Glenn Beck, Tracy Reed, Jack Creley, Gordon Tanner, Hal Galili, Laurence Herder, Roy Stephens, Paul Tamarin, Robert O'Neil, Frank Berry, John McCarthy

  Dr. Strangelove - considered to be one of the greatest films ever made - was born out of an idea Stanley Kubrick had to make a serious thriller about the Cold War. It wasn't until he began researching nuclear warfare that one of his expert sources recommended Red Alert by Peter George as a basis for the film. The book tells the story - in alarmingly accurate detail - of how a nuclear war could accidentally begin between two enemy superpowers, with a bomb eventually being dropped on Russia.

  Unlike in Dr. Strangelove, the bomb fails to detonate in the novel. (It also doesn't get rode to the ground like a mechanical bull, either.) But, aside from key plot details, Kubrick also realized early on that his adaptation needed a total genre-switch to work. 

  "As I tried to build the detail for a scene I found myself tossing away what seemed to me to be very truthful insights because I was afraid the audience would laugh. [...] After all, what could be more absurd than the very idea of two mega-powers willing to wipe out all human life because of an accident, spiced up by political differences that will seem as meaningless to people a hundred years from now as the theological conflicts of the Middle Ages appear to us today? And it was at this point I decided to treat the story as a nightmare comedy."

   

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