I am a very firm believer that when it comes to movie adaptations, the book is always better than the movie. I’m so serious about this belief that I actually took a course on the very subject and will physically fight anyone who tries to disagree with me.
With all the movie book adaptations in the recent years, there have been a few that stand out as worst of the worst… so bad that they deserve an entire article devoted to just how much they sucked.
1. The Percy Jackson series
I don’t think there is a single person on the face of this earth that actually enjoyed the Percy Jackson movies, and someone they managed to make not just one but two of them! The movie did well enough financially and critically but fans alike can agree that the Lightning Thief is one of the worst movie adaptations in history. The book had a very complex, multi-layered storyline that would not translate well into a film. This resulted in screenwriters leaving out a lot of very important plot points leaving non-book-readers very confused.
2. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay
I completely devoured the Hunger Games books in a week in high school and immediately fell in love with the storyline and the internal struggles of the main characters, and no book in the series demonstrated that better than Mockingjay. The films completely erased major struggles in Suzanne Collins novels: Peeta losing his leg, Gale and Peeta’s entire family, Finnick’s tragic backstory, downplaying just how revolutionary Rue’s death was and most upsetting Katniss’ PTSD. Katniss’ PTSD played a huge role in the final novel and helped shape her character to help her become the Mockingjay and defeat the capital.
3. The Host
This👏🏼 movie👏🏼makes👏🏼me 👏🏼so 👏🏼upset. Ok, here we go. The Host is the little-known novel by Twilight writer Stephenie Meyer. I loved this book. It tells the story of a dystopian world where these aliens had invaded earth and have populated the inhibits by taking over their bodies and using them as hosts. The story follows one “Soul”, Wanderer, as her human host refuses to cooperate with the takeover of her body. I’ve had to have read this giant 800+ page book 50 times throughout high school. I went to go see the movie with 2 of my friends who had never read the books if it was not for them sitting next to me I would have walked out of the theater.
Hollywood turned a complex tale of survival, finding a place or belonging, and the right to love into a cheap love triangle action film turning many of the 3-dimensional characters into prop pieces in order to get to a car chase.
4. Eragon
The only good thing about the Eragon movie was the adaptation of Sephira. I mean the book itself was written by a teenager and isn't the best book in the world, but even adaptation aside Eragon is just a terrible movie. The characters were not good representations their book counterparts, the Dialog was absolutely horrendous and the actors delivering it were horrible, and if it couldn't get worse major plot points from the books were glossed over, left out, or totally changed altogether. The result? An incredibly boring movie with a 16% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
5. The Last Song
Everyone say it with me now “stop making Nicholas Sparks books into movies, they never work!” The Last Song has to be the most NS film adaptation ever, or at least that I have seen. Writers sacrificed storylines of minor characters like Blaze and the main characters father so that they could put in 5 minutes of Miley Cyrus singing a song that’s, honestly, not even that good.
Hollywood just do everyone a favor and produce original material and stop giving this man money. And honestly his books aren't that long, you can buy them at CVS or Walmart just buy it and read it, you will enjoy it a lot more than the movie I promise you.
6. The Mortal Instruments
The Mortal Instruments film was problematic because it lacked many of the subtleties of plot that worked so well in the novels, that hit you in the movie, and frankly it just has bad casting. However, Mortal Instruments was recently remade into a TV series for ABC family called Shadowhunters that, in my opinion, works really well.
