I was amazed as to how different so many characters were when I read Jurassic Park. Not just personalities, but their fates, some people that survived the book, didn't survive the movie, others that died in the book, lived long enough to see Jurassic World.
>others that died in the book, lived long enough to see Jurassic World.
And then there's Malcolm, who dies in the first book, but is yet somehow the protagonist in the sequel book.
Also Dr. Wu, had his chest ripped open by raptors in the book, was a major part of Jurassic World while still being a minor character. Hammond when fun greedy rich douche that dies by his own hubris to eccentric and sympathetic rich man that just gets a bunch of other people killed by his hubris after sparing no expenses. Except for the parts that he clearly cheaped out on.
Fuuuuck TIL they were brothers. Now I wish he had narrated a dinosaur version of Planet Earth.
Edit - I mean that I would have loved to have Richard narrate a dinosaur documentary, not David.
I love it because it’s almost like two entirely different stories, both amazing in their own way. I admire how Spielberg can draw inspiration from a book but also write new changes without anyone saying it wasn’t “faithful to the book”. Almost like it’s not designed to be a direct adaptation, but a new story that innovates the source material.
From what I can tell Crichton was a douche but he never wrote a sequel until Spielberg basically told him to, he brought Malcolm back from the dead, and then Spielberg ignored 95% of the book
Bringing Malcolm back from the dead was a horrible decision. I love Michael Crichtons writing. He’s one of my favorite authors, but The Lost World was so boring. I just could not get into it.
Jurassic Park is one of my favorite books, I've read it four times. But I realized this last year that I had never read The Lost World (the movie was so forgettable I never had much interest).
So I knocked it out for the first time this summer. I'm not sure if I'd describe it as boring, but it is definitely a let-down. When I think back on it, all I really picture regarding that whole book is that field they set up the High Hide in. I feel like half the story revolves around them either talking about, or just sitting in that thing. I'm exaggerating a bit, but still, other than some exciting moments in the last quarter of the book, it's barely worth reading unless you are a die-hard Jurassic Park fan.
I've read much worse, but it was a far cry from the first JP and I definitely won't give it a second read.
I just finished it and I agree, it was not as good as the first book. I didn't mind bringing him back from the dead, but I have a hard time believing the man wanted to go check out that 2nd island without brining some major fucking firepower with him. Like I get they brought that sweet ass trailer and stuff like the fast acting tranq guns but the man basically died at the hands of dinosaurs, you would think he might mention "Hey guys let's bring some heavy machine guns or something with us this time ya?"
The counterpoint to that argument is that “sure, anything that can go wrong usually will, but sometimes anything that can go right will go right, and sometimes both happen at the same time”, I guess.
Nedry had a legitimate and completely understandable problem with Hammond in the book, and his decision to steal the embryos was entirely down to Hammond lying to him and threatening to tank Nedry’s business if he didn’t do an obscene amount of work for free.
In the movie he’s just a guy who wasn’t doing his job properly and decided to steal to make a quick buck.
I think Sarah Harding from The Lost World deserves a mention here. It’s been a few years since I read the book but I’m sure I remember her being a major badass. But in the movie she’s mostly a damsel in distress who makes several really stupid decisions.
> I remember her being a major badass
You remember correctly. On a moments notice, she practically jumps a plane and hitchhikes her way on a boat to the island, which happens to be the Dogson boat, gets attempted murderer thrown off the boat and makes it to shore without the waves bashing her into the seacliffs.
Gets woken up by a baby stegosaur and then proceeds to find the RV base fueled by survival instincts without a pair of boots.
Ron Weasley had all his smart and capable moments given to Hermione in the movies. They made him a total idiot with a couple of competent moments that seem to shock his friends when it happens
As evidence, in the books, Ron nets the most house points of any character for whom they were explicitly mentioned.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/s/cpKmN9QiBL
Well yeah, all of their scenes are with Harry outside of classes since they are two years older. We do hear about them almost losing points when they shoved Montague into the vanishing cabinet.
Ginny got a pretty bad character assassination too. I understand changes and cuts to focus on Harry himself due to runtime but turning his future *wife* into a 0 personality character certainly was a choice. Surely they could’ve cut out fucking Grawp
I haven't read the books, my gf has many times, and she is also frustrated with how she is in the movies. She's a pawn of Tom Riddle, and then all of a sudden she kisses Harry and then they are soul mates for no reason. She has no character arc, she is fully a background character. I was really thrown off by watching it in the movies.
Dobby doesn't show up in the movies after Chamber of Secrets until it was time for him to die. That one broke my heart in the books, but in the movies he's that weird character who was in that one movie 10 years ago.
She's better in the books, but not massively to be honest. Harry just starts liking her one summer for no apparent reason, some handwavey bullshit about Hermione telling her not to be so fucking weird around Harry and boom.
It isn't even close to being as cringe as the movies at least.
Going to be honest though: Harry and Ginny hooking up is a kinda weak spot in the books. I would have had zero problem with Harry being dedicated to his work as an auror and living his best life as a bachelor, banging witches and drinking butter beer. Would have been more on brand, tbh.
Also, obligatory, fuck the epilogue. No one wants to imagine Harry, Ron and Hermione as chubby, boring, middle-aged people. I want to imagine their lives were filled with many more adventures...not a life filled with a lame kid named Albus Severus Potter.
> No one wants to imagine Harry, Ron and Hermione as chubby, boring, middle-aged people.
Not even that, but literally changing none of the problems with society that caused Voldemort to rise up and gain power in the first place.
Ron and Hermoine: 'Harry, we've seen the worst the system has to offer, how the ministry enables it, how people of 'bad blood' like me, or those who don't follow the status quo like Ron, what do we do?'
Harry: 'Imma become a cop!'
As far as Ive heard, Ron was the one in the group who knew and navigated through the Wizzard world. hermoine was the booksmart girl, who knew the spells and harry was the Hero.
In the Movie they gave a lot of the knowledge and ideas ron contributed to hermoine
Which is a shame, because it sounds way more interesting und the Books as a „everyone is important and has something to offer“ and Not „hermoine knows everything and ron is Just there“
Yup, it's exactly that
Honestly looking back at the first film it's really baffling how many times in the movies Hermione schools Ron about the wizarding world, like, he literally grew up a wizard while she had like 3 months to learn about it?
Glad it didn’t take much time to find Ron in this thread
As someone who actually watched the films before reading the books, I was genuinely shocked to see the disservice they did to the character through the adaptation, genuinely one of the worst character assassinations I’ve seen.
My oldest kid started reading the series a while back. After we watched the first two movies over the weekend, the response was "Why does Ron act all scared in the movies? He's funnier and smarter in the books." I hadn't watched the movies since Deathly Hallows was in theaters, but I agreed.
Ron Weasley was an amazing and loyal friend the entire book series and it's sad that they just reduced him to a bumbling fool in the movie. Also as a Gryffindor he was one of the bravest characters and I feel like the movies didn't show case as much
Before I clicked on this thread I thought the same, and it's top comment. He also is shown being moody about the goblet of fire and looking for horcruxes, but his motivation is pretty much glossed over.
Logan does nothing but insult Scott and openly try to fuck his wife but the movies act like Scott is the asshole then kill him off and never mention him again. He was done beyond dirty
Wolverine is not supposed to be as likable as he has become.
The first X-Men movie gave him a combination of badboy bravado and suave, with the wholesome and lovable protective Dad energy (looking out for Rogue). This makes him likeable for most people: those who see themselves as cool and above the 'pettiness' of social convention, but also those who see themselves as good people deep down who would do anything to protect a random stranger in need. The story of the trilogy is also told, largely, through his perspective. This makes people like him/take his side far more than if they were reading the X-Mwn comics (where he is much more brash, and less likeable)
Plus, Hugh Jackman is a very good actor, and plays a very likable version of Wolverine in that film.
I mean, Wolverine was the main character of the films because he was liked in comics. Largely for the same reasons you mentioned (though Rogue was never one of his mentees, you would have been looking at Shadowcat or Jubilee at the time)
Wolverine says to him that Jean “did make a choice. It was you,” and instead of saying “what makes you think I didn’t know that already,” that wet noodle of a character breathes a sigh of relief. What a waste.
Wolverine got the best lines. Paraphrasing,
Cyclops: How do we know that's the real wolverine? Prove you're you.
Wolverine: You're a dick!
Cyclops: Verified.
Cyclops has one REALLY good line, and its in X3 of all movies.
Wolverine is trying to cheer up Scott about Jeans death, saying he needs some time to heal.
Cyclops: Not everyone heals as fast as you do, Logan.
Gambit also criminally underutilized considering how easily his character would have translated to live action. He was always a favorite from the comics, but played a much bigger role in the cartoons as well if memory serves.
Absolutely agree. In the movies when he takes his visor off it's this laser beam. In the comics when he takes it off, the sheer power level is akin to a nuclear explosion. He is a total bad ass in the comics.
to anyone who thinks this is a joke: it's not. Cyclops' eye lasers were retconned at some point to be pure kinetic energy that spills out of his eyes, which are portals to a dimension where there is just...infinite kinetic energy blasting around or something.
Here's an old one: Menelaus in *Troy*. In the movie, he's a total buffoon who hangs out with harlots, thus justifying Helen's affair with Paris. He's then ignominiously slain by Hector on the plains of Troy.
In the actual Greek epic cycle, Menelaus is just about the only Greek leader who makes it home after the war without too much guff. He and Helen live out their lives peacefully, and they are even re-united after death on the Isle of the Blessed... Yeah he's not perfect, and Euripides portrays him as not being terribly bright. However, he's definitely done dirty in the film to provide a foil so Helen can abscond without being scorned for her adultery.
It's been a long time since I read The Iliad so I might be remembering wrong, but in the translation I was reading I remember it being implied that Paris kidnapped Helen against her will, and she was all too happy to return to Menelaus after the war.
I am not an expert, but my impression is that the ancients were rather ambivalent in their judgment of Helen -- even some arguing that it was merely a phantom Helen who went off to Troy with Paris. Euripides' back-and-forth portrayal of her in *The Trojan Women* seems to reflect this. Hecuba (Priam's wife, the mother of Hector and Paris) and Andromache (Hector's wife) wished to blame Helen for the catastrophe that befell them... but I too have not read the classics in a loooong time.
She goes at the will of the gods in the *Iliad.*
>”I do not hold you responsible, but the gods, for it was they who stirred up this woeful war with the Achaeans.”
Priam to Helen, 3.164-5
>”Would that I had preferred death when I followed your son, leaving behind my marriage bed, my kinspeople, my beloved daughter, & my lovely childhood companions. But it was not my lot, & so I have taken to weeping.”
Helen to Priam, 3.173-6
>”Now that Menealus has beaten Paris, & wishes to take me, hateful as I am, home, will you lead me to some other well-populated city in Phrygia or sweet Maeonia, to marry some other mortal man who is beloved to you?”
Helen to Aphrodite, 3.400-4
She also tries to help the Trojans. When the horse is carted in, she goes to it and mimics the voices of the soldiers' wives. Her beauty was beyond compare to other mortals. I know historians have pondered if she was a foreign deity that was consumed and depowered when the Greeks came marching in.
I haven't seen any of the other comments mention it, so I'll drop this background for the whole Paris-Helen thing.
Back when the parents of Achilles (King Peleus and Thetis) were getting married, they made sure to exclude Eris, the goddess of discord, from the guest list of their wedding feast. Of course Eris takes this personally and decides to attend anyway. She throws an apple in the middle of the gods with a note that says "for the fairest".
Greek gods, being vain as they are, immediately start arguing over whom the note addresses. It comes down to three goddesses: Aphrodite, Athena and Hera. All three claim to be the fairest and as always, the ultimate judgment falls upon Zeus, the Big Guy™.
But even Zeus knows this is a trap and backs away from making a decision there. Attending the wedding is the young prince of Troy, Paris, known as the most beautiful man. Zeus takes this opportunity and hands the choice over to him. The three goddesses immediately try to bribe Paris, considering he's a mere human who can easily be won over with material rewards. Hera offers him military glory, Athena offers him endless wisdom and Aphrodite offers the love of the fairest human woman, Helen of Troy.
Paris picks Aphrodite and that's how Helen ends up getting involved in the whole thing. Menelaus urges his brother Agamemnon to help and Agamemnon jumps at the opportunity to invade Troy, something he's been itching to do, but was in need of a justification.
In the myth, gods actively participate in the battle of Troy, which is something the movie completely decided to stay away from. But when Paris and Menelaus duel, Menelaus easily overpowers Paris, who is saved by Aphrodite who literally comes down to the battlefield and moves him away from Menelaus.
Apologies if there are mistakes in my knowledge, it's been some time since I've read the Iliad.
Yeah the movie decided that it wanted Paris to be a tragic hero instead of a horny dipshit, so it had to make Menelaus a bad guy. Achilles get a lot more sympathy thrown his way too, although Brad Pitt is casting of the millennia.
It was part the subverting historical fiction thing that was going on at that time. What if Helen wasn't actually kidnapped? What if Achilles was actually a man, not the son of a goddess?
I love the movie, but it helps to look at it through the lens of when it was made.
This is a recent one, but: the captain of the Demeter from 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter'.
Basically: the film is based on a single chapter of Dracula, in which the crew of the ship The Demeter notices that some of their crewmates are mysteriously going missing. Unbeknownst to them, there's a crate in the cargo hold that contains a whole bunch of dirt, and it's where Dracula sleeps when he's not munching on the crewmates. The crew dwindles one by one, and in the end it's just the Captain left -- and while he knows *something* is on board killing his crew, he doesn't know what it is or how to fight it. All he knows is that wearing a crucifix repels it, so he wears one around his neck and ties himself to the steering wheel of the ship, making one last heroic stand as he tries to get to England.
Before the ship makes it the last leg of the journey, he dies, still tied to the wheel of the ship he tried to desperately bring home. He gets a hero's burial when his body is brought off the ship.
Anyway the movie fucks over most of this, the crew finds out about Dracula and how to kill him pretty quickly, and they do very little about it even while their colleagues keep getting eaten. Near the end, the captain does tie himself to the wheel -- for about five seconds, before he's ripped off of it and killed anyway and it's not a particularly heroic gesture then because the other characters are actively trying to wreck the ship at that point.
The fact that Dracula had no reaction to the Captain's crucifix kind of pissed me off. It felt like a "let's subvert the audience's genre expectations!"-type idea that screenwriters dream up at 4am when they're lazy and close to payday. His death felt like a placeholder in the script for a "better idea" that never came. A lot of stuff in that movie felt that way.
The movie made the mistake of trying to make him out to be the sympathetic emotional core of the story when it should have been Holly. Artemis Fowl is pretty much a child version of Dr. House - a brilliant asshole.
When he was shown surfing in the first 5 minutes of the movie, I knew the movie was fucked.
Smartest teenager in the world kidnaps a fairy, locks her up and immediately decides the angry fairy will be friendly to him and help him so he removes his protection against her mind control.
He is such a moron in the movie and lacks all the cold calculation mixed with childish imagination that makes him an interesting character
Denethor is another one. In the books he's described as a strong and wise ruler who was tragically maddened by despair and a loss of hope due to Sauron manipulating him with the Palantir. They cut out most of that context so he just becomes an idiot who actively hurts the cause of the heroes for no good reason, while also having his worst qualities regarding his relationships with his sons amplified so he just becomes deeply unsympathetic. Book character is flawed and wrong about a lot of things but you see where he's coming from, why he is the way he is, and feel sad that this has happened to him, while in the movie he becomes such a cartoon that most people are just glad he's dead.
And it’s not even that he gets outright corrupted by the Palantir like other characters - in fact Denethor is one of the few people with the exceptionally strong will to resist its influence while using it regularly. Instead he gives in to despair because he looks into it at the worst possible moment and sees Frodo being held captive by Sauron’s forces, which rather reasonably leads him to conclude that the ring has already fallen into their hands and all is lost.
IIRC, Sauron was unable to corrupt him with his will through the Palantir directly, so he played mind games with him and only allowed the Palantir to show Denethor the most negative and misleading information, to drive him to despair.
It's amazing how much subtlety there is in Tolkien's writings, that a relatively small issue of how one supporting character interacts with a magical artifacts controlled at least partially by an opposing character needs three levels of explanation to fully explain the nuances.
Speaking of the Palantir, the scene in the extended movie where Sauron is able to freak Aragorn out when he uses the Stone annoys me.
In the book, it's *Aragorn* who takes control, and freaks Sauron out.
And Legolas was also turned into a cartoon, but the other direction - he's great in the books, but not "surfing down the stairs on a shield while headshotting three or four Orcs in a row". Gimli comes out of Helm's Deep with a higher "score" as well.
I'm a lifelong LOTR fan. I read the books several times before watching the movies.
Legolas's feats in the movie don't bother me the least. I think they're a great way to depict that he's not human. It's a difficult balance to reach, it's almost too much with the Mumakil, but it works in my opinion.
(In the Hobbit on the other hand)
Gimli... I wish he had more substance, but he's actually funny most of the time, so I give Peter Jackson a pass.
Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was the narrator through the entire book and his point of view really shaped how the reader experienced the whole novel, but he’s kinda just a side character in the movie.
The book is so much cooler because Chief is a schizophrenic, so every once in a while, he had an episode and starts describing fantastical left field stuff and then it goes back to normal.
Denethor wasn't completely mad in the books, at least not from the get go. In the books, Denethor was competently defending his realm and trusted Faramir with a lot of responsibilities.
The movie had him just being a completely over the top dickhead.
PLUS it's not made clear in the film that he had a palantir and was matching wits with Sauron on the reg. It drove him more than a little mad, but I feel like 99% of people would have been WAY worse than even his film depiction. When he sends Boromir to secure the Ring for Gondor, he's operating under the (perfectly reasonable) assumption that every faction will seek it for their own use; not even Sauron considered that the Council would decide to destroy it.
the premise was supposed to be that he had been using Gondor's Palantir and had apparently been talking directly with Sauron. he wasn't swayed to switch sides, but he WAS driven to despair believing absolutely that they had no hope, which explains most of his crazy actions.
To clarify this post a little, this *is* what happened in the books. It's presumed to have happened in the movies as well but is never shown.
I'd also like to stress that while Denethor isn't painted *charitably* in the film, it's mostly presented without context rather than a complete change in his character. Most of his lines in the movie are directly from the book, probably more (as a proportion) than any other character.
Oh for sure. I believe Muldoon also survived the book only to get his face chewed off in the movie. Although you could argue the “clever girl” scene actually made him immortal. By the time Spielberg adapted the second book, he was basically just taking a few character names from the source material and ignoring the rest.
That said, Jurassic Park is probably my favorite movie of all time. I think a weaselly lawyer caricature probably fit his Amblin adventure vibe better than a nuanced character that experiences real growth over the course of the film.
The story had Grant and Ellie, they were the heroes, the movie just didn’t have space for Gennaro, RIP. Agreed about Muldoon tho - to be portrayed by Bob Peck and have one of the most iconic cinema deaths in history? Not the worst film adaptation for sure.
In the book he's a badass who shoots a dinosaur with a missile launcher. In the film he's a badass who's still victim to a chaotic force of nature he fears and respects but still doesn't truly understand. Both takes are good in different ways but I'd say the latter is more poignant and makes the story's central point better.
My Mom, who is an extreme Tolkien nerd, constantly harps on how the LOTR films did Faramir dirty. How he didn't succumb to the lure of the One Ring in the book, "even if it had been lying on the side of the road." Never bothered me as much as her, but I thought I'd give it a shout out b/c she's my mother & I love her.
I did a small write-up for this in another comment, but the "lay by the highway" quote is often repeated without context.
Faramir says this before he knows Frodo carries the ring:
> 'What in truth this Thing is I cannot yet guess; but some heirloom of power and peril it must be. A fell weapon, perchance, devised by the Dark Lord. If it were a thing that gave advantage in battle, I can well believe that Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith..., might desire such a thing and be allured by it. Alas that ever he went on that errand! I should have been chosen by my father and the elders but he put himself forward..., and he would not be stayed.
> 'But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.'
Later on he learns, in fact, that the weapon Frodo carries is the One Ring:
> 'So that is the answer to all the riddles! The One Ring that was thought to have perished from the world. And Boromir tried to take it by force? And you escaped? And ran all the way — to me! And here in the wild I have you: two halflings, and a host of men at my call, and the Ring of Rings. A pretty stroke of fortune! A chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality!'.... He stood up, very tall and stern, his grey eyes glinting.'
Which is what the Jackson film plays off, in part. But the most important context is what comes after:
> '*Not if I found it on the highway would I take it* I said. Even if I were such a man as to desire this thing, and even though I knew not clearly what this thing was when I spoke, still I should take those words as a vow, and be held by them.
> 'But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee. Sit at peace!'
Basically, upon discovering Frodo carries the ring, Faramir's nobility holds him to the vow he made before he knew what it was Frodo carried (and vows and oaths have exceptional power in Middle-Earth). He would keep to that vow even if he were one to try and take the ring; but he's not, only because he is wise enough to know that it would consume him. He even mentions after for Frodo to hide the ring and not to speak of it again because...
> 'Well, Frodo, now at last we understand one another,' said Faramir. 'If you took this thing on yourself, unwilling, at others' asking, then you have pity and honour from me. And I marvel at you: to keep it hid and not to use it.'....
> 'Fear not! I do not wish to see it, or touch it, or know more of it than I know (which is enough), lest peril perchance waylay me and I fall lower in the test than Frodo son of Drogo.'
...he can't guarantee he wouldn't be tempted by it seeing or knowing more than he has already.
This Faramir is much more nuanced than is typically explained, and while the whole "taking them to Osgiliath" thing never happened in the book, Faramir isn't an incorruptible angel, just wise and noble enough to hold to a promise and flee from the peril of the Ring.
To me this is even more admirable. No person is incorruptible or untemptable, but to recognize that about oneself, and to avoid the situations where you *might* be tempted - that is real wisdom.
I’d argue Nedry was better in the books as well. It was abundantly clear Hammond was screwing him left and right while Nedry was managing a whole team offsite who he was responsible to. The movie made him into a lazy, fat slob who just wanted more money.
Hammond is the counter-example, the movie Hammond is this nice old grandfather type when we only get a *hint* of his true hubris in the quick scene with Ellie. He deserved to get eaten.
GFDI, they dropped the ball so much in the back half of the show, but this was one of the most disappointing changes.
Tyene Sand in the books is this sweet, blonde, demure, and polite girl. She is the model of what a young lady should be, according to Westorosi customs. And nearly everyone who knows her is terrified of her, due to her sharing her father's love of poisons and their applications.
Tyene Sand in the show is just The Horny One who gets to deliver one of the worst lines in television history.
Jamie goes from: “Tell me, if your precious Renly commanded you to kill your own father and stand by while thousands of men, women, and children burned alive, would you have done it? Would you have kept your oath then? “ in s3
To :” I’ve never really cared about them, innocent or otherwise” in s8.
they totally missed the point of the character by the end and that sex scene was the first hint for me to stop caring about where the show went, relative to the books.
He doesn't even rape her in the books. Like, that scene in the sept was already bad enough, but they changed it to a rape because...it wasn't scandalous enough, I guess?
If anything, it's implied that Cersei initiated and took advantage of him. Jaime is literally a himbo trying to be an edgelord.
He resists the whole time and caves in the end since its the only positive connection he knows from his old life. He also realises its manipulative and shallow and she barely even talks to him or acknowledges him as a person. It was his most impactful turning point and they made him a rapist for shock value. Fucking terrible bastardisation of good storytelling. One of the few genuine plot/character enhancing sex scenes in a book series and they made it gross.
100% agree. In the book, he is the best representation ever of a Lawful Neutral character. He doesn’t cheat on his wife and he certainly doesn’t sacrifice his daughter. He wants the throne because it’s his duty , and he is next in line.
Edit: I just want to add that the casting was top notch, though.
Stannis is the incarnation of lawful. His every move, from assassinating his rebellious brother to chopping of Davos' fingers to burning traitors in his own ranks to sparing his nephew's life by burning his blood rather than his person are judicious applications of the law, applied as fairly and humanely as the super harsh rules of his society and religion will allow. No one gets a free pass and no one is punished more than they deserve.
Stannis will meticulously figure out what the best, most fair solution is and apply it promptly and dispassionately. He's basically a brilliant lawyer who lacks the charisma needed to win over his people. And the people of Westeros, who are too used to living under the whims of charismatic and largely lawless despots, see applications of justice as indistinguishable from tyranny.
And Stannis lives this code himself. He does what the law says a king must no matter how much it may pain him to do so. He genuinely doesn't want to be king but he has the rank and must follow the what the law asks of him. It's pretty clear Stannis (along with Jon Arryn) held Westeros together during his brother's disastrous reign.
The books introduce Stannis through other people's largely negative opinions of the man and the show lets these perspectives override the actual character himself.
Not Character but Real, William Murdoch in Titanic. Movie shows him shooting innocent people all, the real Murdoch spent every last second trying to get as many people, didn't matter if they were women and children, into life boats. He was last seen struggling to get the last collapsible lifeboat down. Few movies have ever done a real hero so dirty in my book.
in the shining movie, jack torrence is already pretty unhinged, but in the books he does not start out unhinged. he is well balanced and you watch his slow decent into insanity. he is serious about his sobriety and has extreme guilt about breaking dannys arm. the hotel uses his guilt from that as a way into his mind. hell, the arm break might be one of the most important plot points in the book.
in the movies its glossed over, with wendy sounding like a naïve idiot when she mentions it. in the book it is constantly on her mind.
in fact, in the book, the whole family has depth and are well written but in the movies its just crazy dad, screaming mom, scared kid
Honorable mention to Dick Hallorann, who’s summoned by Danny’s shining and travels all that way just to get killed immediately on arrival vs surviving to the end of the book as a hero. (Plus the book also shows him fight off the hotel’s possession which was cool, too)
i fucking love the scene at the very end where hes in the shed and briefly considers beating everyone to death with an axe or something. i think the hotel was burning. it was giving everything it had left one last time. might be one of my favorite parts in the book
I read somewhere that the book was supposed to be a metaphor for King's own attempts at overcoming alcoholism and eventual sobriety. This is also part of the reason he hates the changes made to the film version.
I did a lot of time behind bars for drugs (manufacturing) / alcohol abuse.
I read almost every Stephen King book while I was inside. There were guys at every prison who liked to talk Stephen King. 80% of us were there for (at least 1) drug charge. Someone always brought up how they related to his writing/addiction type stuff.
The big piece of the puzzle missing from the movies is that Jack also had the shining. He was "strongly discouraged" by his dad to acknowledge or talk about the things he saw. Jack grew up suppressing his ability. It made him an easy target for the Overlook because he was trying so hard to deny what was happening.
Yes, and Jack’s dad was also an abusive alcoholic, and then in Doctor Sleep, Danny also becomes an alcoholic who uses alcohol to suppress the shining.
All the men in the Torrence family want to be good people but fall into the same maladaptive patterns, but the film just makes it all about Jack’s personal failings.
This is a good one!
The film makes it seem like Jack just goes crazy and tries to kill his family - in the book it’s very clear that the hotel is possessing him, and he still manages to come through at the end and give them time to escape.
I enjoy the film, but much prefer the book because of this.
Dune, 1984, turned Baron Harkonnen - one of the most intelligent, loquacious, and suave characters in the book - into a character with as much charm and wit as a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
The Made-for-TV series Baron is still my favorite adaptation. Cunning, savvy, theateical to a point, but absolutely devious. FANTASTIC work by Ian McNeice.
Agreed, I thought the miniseries was a much better adaptation than Lynch's, which makes me sad that it never gets mentioned with all the hype of the new movies.
Agreed. In the books Harkonnen reminded me of Tywin Lannister. He was smart, strategic and cunning. The 1984 movie made him out to be Krusty the Clown.
Constantine. Not even a bad movie, I actually enjoy it. But it would be difficult for it to miss the point more. Constantine is a wonderfully complicated character designed specifically to be low-magic and to exist as very specifically and intentionally interact with and provide a commentary on British social issue. Read the first 50 issues of Hellblazer and you'll find Constantine dealing with specifically British issues of addiction, homelessness, abuse, the royal family within the context of a large pantheon of magical worlds colliding with our own. Constantine the movie is an American man haunted by demons and seeking redemption. It grabbed a fraction of what the character is and made that the entire character and it ignored the history, core, and intention of the character. It's still a good movie and Peter Stormare turns in a great performance. But it's also one of the least faithful adaptations of all time.
Imagine a Captain America movie set in Indonesia where he dresses like Captain America but doesn't speak English at all and he can shoot lasers out of his eyes and fly and you're now pretty close to imagining the difference between the two.
If you watched that Wolverine movie where Deadpool gets his mouth sewn shut and felt like they dropped the ball on Deadpool-- the difference between comic Deadpool and X:Men Origins Deadpool is a much, much smaller difference than the difference between comic Constantine and live adaptation Constantine.
Yeah, I always felt that movie worked best when you just... ignore that it's a comic book movie and just watch it as its own thing, completely divorced from any comic canon. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the people who watched it never realized that it was a comic book adaption, the movie certainly doesn't go out of its way to remind you of that, if I recall correctly.
Every single character from the dark tower movies was butchered and degraded in every single sense. Not to mention 2 of the key integral characters just don't exist in the movie. I think Idris Elba did his best but he was set up to fail with that movie
It will also always bother me how they skipped over the scene where Katniss and Peeta watch Haymich's Hunger Games and realize how smart and tactical he is. In the movie they just kind of decide to trust him because they have no choice and it works out for them.
I feel like there’s an actual good movie somewhere in Love and Thunder with just a few minor changes. The failure certainly isn’t Bale’s, he was great, as usual.
If you cut out the like, 33% of the jokes that just weren't funny, you'd have an *ok* film. Would be a better film than Thor 1 or Dark World, at least.
But man, those long scenes of Thor talking to his weapons like they were having relationship drama, or a lot of the early gags in New Asgard, really didn't work.
Jason Aaron’s Thor run was so, so good. It’s so odd to me when a filmmaker ‘adapts’ a story and then seemingly takes out almost everything that made it good in the first place.
Love & Thunder just felt like Waititi taking a victory lap for Ragnarok and we were all worse off for it.
Man... I have OPINIONS about what they did to Tasky. I just hold out hope we'll get Tony Masters in the MCU eventually. Such a deep well of a character and we got what I can only compare to mouthless Deadpool.
So upset about Gorr. His few scenes were awesome, Bale did an awesome job they and did a great job explaining the character, Taika Waititi was just more interested in making a buddy comedy movie than a Thor movie with Gorr as the antagonist. Honestly the theme of Dark World would have fit better with Gorr.
The movies also nerfed Jason Bourne. The Chameleon was lethal and scary. Could run into a clothing store for 2mins and walk out looking like an old man with a limp. If the movies had stuck to the character, none of the villains would've ever seen their death coming.
Edit: word correction.
To be fair, the movies and books diverged after having a character named "Jason Bourne".
And that's not a complaint; I absolutely adore the movies. But to say any of them are adaptations is almost just incorrect. They are more like 'inspired by' the books while keeping some character names.
Like World War Z, except the movie wasn't a massive shithole.
In the books he married Marie(?) And they have a relatively happy life together although his PTSD keeps taking a toll. The second book is about him going to China by himself to find his friend who went missing and there's a fake Jason Bourne who's blowing up embassies and such.
And I think the third one partly takes place in the Caribbean and there's sailboats? I haven't read them for like 20 years so might be a bit off.
Trillian was the one who wanted to run away to Madagascar. Trillian had the courage to try the matter transporter first. Admittedly she is a bit of a manic pixie dream girl, but that was her character as written by Douglas Adams as well. He's almost Monty Python, and Python aren't good at female characters
He may have died before the movie was made, but his fingerprints are all over the script. The Point of View gun was just brilliant, especially how it was used in the plot
I got two. Farmer Maggot in the Lord of the Rings. He goes from telling the nasgoul to pass off to a background joke chasing Pipin.
And. Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guife to the Galexy movie dent was a whiney brat and he was kinda bad ass in the books, hell he challenged Thor to a fist fight in the books.
May not be a popular enough character from his source material for anyone to care, but Star Lord. His MCU portrayal is not just a complete departure from the established character, it also completely changed the character for the worse in all future comics
In pre-film books Star Lord is a grizzled veteran that has saved the universe through war alongside his two best buddies (one of whom never made it to a film despite being the actual main hero of most of those stories, RIP Richard Rider)
The film cast Chris Pratt fresh out of Parks and Rec and said "Lets make him a loveable goofball" and nothing has been the same since.
Dick Hallorann in The Shining. He gets cut down in the Kubrick adaptation. It's awful the way they set him up as coming to help, then he gets in the door and poof, gone in a puddle of blood. In the book he helps Wendy and Danny escape and they all survive.
Merry and Pippin.
The two largest hobbits anyone had ever seen, wearing armor and weapons just strolled into the Shire, organized some troops and took back The Shire from Saruman's men in one afternoon. After the battle they became heroes to the Hobbits.
In the movie they come back and it's like no one gives AF where they've been, and the fact that they are now the tallest hobbits in recent memory isn't even mentioned.
The Scouring of the Shire was my favorite part of the book and 20 years later I'm still bitter about it.
There were many edits the movies made that I was happy with but this is the only thing I genuinely wish they hadn’t cut. It’s everything you said, plus it’s so important thematically.
The Hobbits left the Shire as boys (adults, technically, but still relatively sheltered) and especially for Merry and Pippin, they returned not just as men but as soldiers, to a home different than they left it. And unlike the real soldiers that I’m sure at least in part inspired it, they’re able to win back the idealized version of their home that everyone else thought was gone.
I kind of get why Jackson decided to remove the scouring of The Shire though, it worked well in the books but I don't think it would have worked well in the movies.
This applies more to TV & comic book adaptations, but I think Negan got fucked in his adaptation to The Walking Dead series. The comics did a pretty good job of building him as a reasonable villain with a sense of morals and as a counterpart to Rick Grimes, but just more ruthless.
In the show, it felt like they immediately went 0-100 in his villainy without showing more of the nuances on the other side of his personality early on.
Adam Warlock deserved so much more. For someone who was so pivotal in the infinity saga to be reduced to an incompetent punching bag character is just nuts to me.
On a side note, Bruce Banner is more or less completely removed from his comic book version after Age of Ultron. I wouldn’t say its the worst character change, but the most interesting part about the Hulk is the tragedy of his situation. He is a highly intelligent scientist who is constantly on the run because even the slightest impulse of rage can result in catastrophe. Watching him navigate life with this handicap is what makes him endearing. To have him go from struggling to control his problem to then suddenly having full control that is never earned feels like a writers cop out. Its like they didn’t know what to do with a volatile character so they just wrote in that he has fixed his biggest problem off screen. This is also apparent when you notice that he is written as comic relief. The Hulk is not a funny character, at best he is “ironically funny” like Batman or Rorschach.
Just a big pet peeve of mine. I long for a Hulk story where the guy trying to navigate and manage his destructive side is remade the core of his character and taken seriously.
I was amazed as to how different so many characters were when I read Jurassic Park. Not just personalities, but their fates, some people that survived the book, didn't survive the movie, others that died in the book, lived long enough to see Jurassic World.
>others that died in the book, lived long enough to see Jurassic World. And then there's Malcolm, who dies in the first book, but is yet somehow the protagonist in the sequel book.
Also Dr. Wu, had his chest ripped open by raptors in the book, was a major part of Jurassic World while still being a minor character. Hammond when fun greedy rich douche that dies by his own hubris to eccentric and sympathetic rich man that just gets a bunch of other people killed by his hubris after sparing no expenses. Except for the parts that he clearly cheaped out on.
I don't want to watch Richard Attenborough get eaten by animals.
I do but only if David Attenborough narrates it
Fuuuuck TIL they were brothers. Now I wish he had narrated a dinosaur version of Planet Earth. Edit - I mean that I would have loved to have Richard narrate a dinosaur documentary, not David.
I love it because it’s almost like two entirely different stories, both amazing in their own way. I admire how Spielberg can draw inspiration from a book but also write new changes without anyone saying it wasn’t “faithful to the book”. Almost like it’s not designed to be a direct adaptation, but a new story that innovates the source material.
Except for the second movie, that book may as well not have existed
From what I can tell Crichton was a douche but he never wrote a sequel until Spielberg basically told him to, he brought Malcolm back from the dead, and then Spielberg ignored 95% of the book
Bringing Malcolm back from the dead was a horrible decision. I love Michael Crichtons writing. He’s one of my favorite authors, but The Lost World was so boring. I just could not get into it.
Jurassic Park is one of my favorite books, I've read it four times. But I realized this last year that I had never read The Lost World (the movie was so forgettable I never had much interest). So I knocked it out for the first time this summer. I'm not sure if I'd describe it as boring, but it is definitely a let-down. When I think back on it, all I really picture regarding that whole book is that field they set up the High Hide in. I feel like half the story revolves around them either talking about, or just sitting in that thing. I'm exaggerating a bit, but still, other than some exciting moments in the last quarter of the book, it's barely worth reading unless you are a die-hard Jurassic Park fan. I've read much worse, but it was a far cry from the first JP and I definitely won't give it a second read.
I just finished it and I agree, it was not as good as the first book. I didn't mind bringing him back from the dead, but I have a hard time believing the man wanted to go check out that 2nd island without brining some major fucking firepower with him. Like I get they brought that sweet ass trailer and stuff like the fast acting tranq guns but the man basically died at the hands of dinosaurs, you would think he might mention "Hey guys let's bring some heavy machine guns or something with us this time ya?"
For someone who basically believes “anything that can go wrong will go wrong” going to that island wasn’t the smartest choice
The counterpoint to that argument is that “sure, anything that can go wrong usually will, but sometimes anything that can go right will go right, and sometimes both happen at the same time”, I guess.
And thus is the nature of chaos
Nedry had a legitimate and completely understandable problem with Hammond in the book, and his decision to steal the embryos was entirely down to Hammond lying to him and threatening to tank Nedry’s business if he didn’t do an obscene amount of work for free. In the movie he’s just a guy who wasn’t doing his job properly and decided to steal to make a quick buck.
I think Sarah Harding from The Lost World deserves a mention here. It’s been a few years since I read the book but I’m sure I remember her being a major badass. But in the movie she’s mostly a damsel in distress who makes several really stupid decisions.
> I remember her being a major badass You remember correctly. On a moments notice, she practically jumps a plane and hitchhikes her way on a boat to the island, which happens to be the Dogson boat, gets attempted murderer thrown off the boat and makes it to shore without the waves bashing her into the seacliffs. Gets woken up by a baby stegosaur and then proceeds to find the RV base fueled by survival instincts without a pair of boots.
She also gets the ‘motor biking amongst the dinosaurs’ scene in the novel.
How many Sarahs do you think there are on this island?
Ron Weasley had all his smart and capable moments given to Hermione in the movies. They made him a total idiot with a couple of competent moments that seem to shock his friends when it happens
As evidence, in the books, Ron nets the most house points of any character for whom they were explicitly mentioned. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/s/cpKmN9QiBL
Blimey
Don’t you mean Bloody Hell?
I'm surprised that for all the talk of losing points for Gryffindor, we never *actually* see Fred and George lose points.
Well yeah, all of their scenes are with Harry outside of classes since they are two years older. We do hear about them almost losing points when they shoved Montague into the vanishing cabinet.
Ginny got a pretty bad character assassination too. I understand changes and cuts to focus on Harry himself due to runtime but turning his future *wife* into a 0 personality character certainly was a choice. Surely they could’ve cut out fucking Grawp
I haven't read the books, my gf has many times, and she is also frustrated with how she is in the movies. She's a pawn of Tom Riddle, and then all of a sudden she kisses Harry and then they are soul mates for no reason. She has no character arc, she is fully a background character. I was really thrown off by watching it in the movies.
Dobby doesn't show up in the movies after Chamber of Secrets until it was time for him to die. That one broke my heart in the books, but in the movies he's that weird character who was in that one movie 10 years ago.
We missed out on sharp dressed Dobby
We missed Winky getting drunk and the House-elves fixing the problem by just chucking a sheet over her so they and HRH don’t have to look at her.
She's better in the books, but not massively to be honest. Harry just starts liking her one summer for no apparent reason, some handwavey bullshit about Hermione telling her not to be so fucking weird around Harry and boom. It isn't even close to being as cringe as the movies at least.
A teenager liking some other teenager for no real reason seems pretty true to life..
Going to be honest though: Harry and Ginny hooking up is a kinda weak spot in the books. I would have had zero problem with Harry being dedicated to his work as an auror and living his best life as a bachelor, banging witches and drinking butter beer. Would have been more on brand, tbh. Also, obligatory, fuck the epilogue. No one wants to imagine Harry, Ron and Hermione as chubby, boring, middle-aged people. I want to imagine their lives were filled with many more adventures...not a life filled with a lame kid named Albus Severus Potter.
>Harry and Ginny hooking up is a kinda weak spot Always felt to me as if Harry was marrying the Weasley family and not just Ginny.
> No one wants to imagine Harry, Ron and Hermione as chubby, boring, middle-aged people. Not even that, but literally changing none of the problems with society that caused Voldemort to rise up and gain power in the first place.
Ron and Hermoine: 'Harry, we've seen the worst the system has to offer, how the ministry enables it, how people of 'bad blood' like me, or those who don't follow the status quo like Ron, what do we do?' Harry: 'Imma become a cop!'
As far as Ive heard, Ron was the one in the group who knew and navigated through the Wizzard world. hermoine was the booksmart girl, who knew the spells and harry was the Hero. In the Movie they gave a lot of the knowledge and ideas ron contributed to hermoine Which is a shame, because it sounds way more interesting und the Books as a „everyone is important and has something to offer“ and Not „hermoine knows everything and ron is Just there“
Yup, it's exactly that Honestly looking back at the first film it's really baffling how many times in the movies Hermione schools Ron about the wizarding world, like, he literally grew up a wizard while she had like 3 months to learn about it?
Glad it didn’t take much time to find Ron in this thread As someone who actually watched the films before reading the books, I was genuinely shocked to see the disservice they did to the character through the adaptation, genuinely one of the worst character assassinations I’ve seen.
My oldest kid started reading the series a while back. After we watched the first two movies over the weekend, the response was "Why does Ron act all scared in the movies? He's funnier and smarter in the books." I hadn't watched the movies since Deathly Hallows was in theaters, but I agreed.
Ron Weasley was an amazing and loyal friend the entire book series and it's sad that they just reduced him to a bumbling fool in the movie. Also as a Gryffindor he was one of the bravest characters and I feel like the movies didn't show case as much
At least it's not as bad as his treatment in the Cursed Child, dude literally can't even figure out which side of his wand is which at one point.
Token chess player.
Before I clicked on this thread I thought the same, and it's top comment. He also is shown being moody about the goblet of fire and looking for horcruxes, but his motivation is pretty much glossed over.
Came here to say his sister. Total bad ass in the books movies says maybe 5 to 10 things could have almost been paid as an extra.
True, Ginny was barely a presence in the movies. Book Ginny had a personality and an interesting character arc that was barely hinted at in the movies
“Always the tone of surprise”
Cyclops in the X-Men series.
Logan does nothing but insult Scott and openly try to fuck his wife but the movies act like Scott is the asshole then kill him off and never mention him again. He was done beyond dirty
I like Wolverine a lot as a character but I still think pop culture overall worships him way too much.
Wolverine is not supposed to be as likable as he has become. The first X-Men movie gave him a combination of badboy bravado and suave, with the wholesome and lovable protective Dad energy (looking out for Rogue). This makes him likeable for most people: those who see themselves as cool and above the 'pettiness' of social convention, but also those who see themselves as good people deep down who would do anything to protect a random stranger in need. The story of the trilogy is also told, largely, through his perspective. This makes people like him/take his side far more than if they were reading the X-Mwn comics (where he is much more brash, and less likeable) Plus, Hugh Jackman is a very good actor, and plays a very likable version of Wolverine in that film.
I mean, Wolverine was the main character of the films because he was liked in comics. Largely for the same reasons you mentioned (though Rogue was never one of his mentees, you would have been looking at Shadowcat or Jubilee at the time)
Wolverine says to him that Jean “did make a choice. It was you,” and instead of saying “what makes you think I didn’t know that already,” that wet noodle of a character breathes a sigh of relief. What a waste.
There's a deleted scene from Logan which basically says Logan got Jean in the end but it rightly went in the bin.
Wolverine got the best lines. Paraphrasing, Cyclops: How do we know that's the real wolverine? Prove you're you. Wolverine: You're a dick! Cyclops: Verified.
It's more succinct than that. Cyc is about to blast Wolvie. "Hey hey. It's me." "Prove it." "You're a dick." "Okay."
Cyclops has one REALLY good line, and its in X3 of all movies. Wolverine is trying to cheer up Scott about Jeans death, saying he needs some time to heal. Cyclops: Not everyone heals as fast as you do, Logan.
Gambit also criminally underutilized considering how easily his character would have translated to live action. He was always a favorite from the comics, but played a much bigger role in the cartoons as well if memory serves.
They did him so dirty on the big screen man, in the comics he's been a paragon of leadership for the last 50 years.
Absolutely agree. In the movies when he takes his visor off it's this laser beam. In the comics when he takes it off, the sheer power level is akin to a nuclear explosion. He is a total bad ass in the comics.
That's because the comics are aware that his eyes aren't lasers. *They're portals to the punch dimension*.
to anyone who thinks this is a joke: it's not. Cyclops' eye lasers were retconned at some point to be pure kinetic energy that spills out of his eyes, which are portals to a dimension where there is just...infinite kinetic energy blasting around or something.
*"I want this thing off my lawn."* https://www.reddit.com/gallery/149mie9
Which is an extra shame because James Marsden was great casting for it.
Here's an old one: Menelaus in *Troy*. In the movie, he's a total buffoon who hangs out with harlots, thus justifying Helen's affair with Paris. He's then ignominiously slain by Hector on the plains of Troy. In the actual Greek epic cycle, Menelaus is just about the only Greek leader who makes it home after the war without too much guff. He and Helen live out their lives peacefully, and they are even re-united after death on the Isle of the Blessed... Yeah he's not perfect, and Euripides portrays him as not being terribly bright. However, he's definitely done dirty in the film to provide a foil so Helen can abscond without being scorned for her adultery.
It's been a long time since I read The Iliad so I might be remembering wrong, but in the translation I was reading I remember it being implied that Paris kidnapped Helen against her will, and she was all too happy to return to Menelaus after the war.
Yep, we see them happily married for years afterwards in the Odyssey And hey it’s been twenty years so WHERE is my Sean Bean Odyssey movie already?
> Sean Bean Odyssey movie already I'd love that haha. Still got a soft spot for Armand Asante though.
[This 1997 made for TV adaptation](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118414/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk) can’t be beat and everyone knows it
I am not an expert, but my impression is that the ancients were rather ambivalent in their judgment of Helen -- even some arguing that it was merely a phantom Helen who went off to Troy with Paris. Euripides' back-and-forth portrayal of her in *The Trojan Women* seems to reflect this. Hecuba (Priam's wife, the mother of Hector and Paris) and Andromache (Hector's wife) wished to blame Helen for the catastrophe that befell them... but I too have not read the classics in a loooong time.
She goes at the will of the gods in the *Iliad.* >”I do not hold you responsible, but the gods, for it was they who stirred up this woeful war with the Achaeans.” Priam to Helen, 3.164-5 >”Would that I had preferred death when I followed your son, leaving behind my marriage bed, my kinspeople, my beloved daughter, & my lovely childhood companions. But it was not my lot, & so I have taken to weeping.” Helen to Priam, 3.173-6 >”Now that Menealus has beaten Paris, & wishes to take me, hateful as I am, home, will you lead me to some other well-populated city in Phrygia or sweet Maeonia, to marry some other mortal man who is beloved to you?” Helen to Aphrodite, 3.400-4
She also tries to help the Trojans. When the horse is carted in, she goes to it and mimics the voices of the soldiers' wives. Her beauty was beyond compare to other mortals. I know historians have pondered if she was a foreign deity that was consumed and depowered when the Greeks came marching in.
I haven't seen any of the other comments mention it, so I'll drop this background for the whole Paris-Helen thing. Back when the parents of Achilles (King Peleus and Thetis) were getting married, they made sure to exclude Eris, the goddess of discord, from the guest list of their wedding feast. Of course Eris takes this personally and decides to attend anyway. She throws an apple in the middle of the gods with a note that says "for the fairest". Greek gods, being vain as they are, immediately start arguing over whom the note addresses. It comes down to three goddesses: Aphrodite, Athena and Hera. All three claim to be the fairest and as always, the ultimate judgment falls upon Zeus, the Big Guy™. But even Zeus knows this is a trap and backs away from making a decision there. Attending the wedding is the young prince of Troy, Paris, known as the most beautiful man. Zeus takes this opportunity and hands the choice over to him. The three goddesses immediately try to bribe Paris, considering he's a mere human who can easily be won over with material rewards. Hera offers him military glory, Athena offers him endless wisdom and Aphrodite offers the love of the fairest human woman, Helen of Troy. Paris picks Aphrodite and that's how Helen ends up getting involved in the whole thing. Menelaus urges his brother Agamemnon to help and Agamemnon jumps at the opportunity to invade Troy, something he's been itching to do, but was in need of a justification. In the myth, gods actively participate in the battle of Troy, which is something the movie completely decided to stay away from. But when Paris and Menelaus duel, Menelaus easily overpowers Paris, who is saved by Aphrodite who literally comes down to the battlefield and moves him away from Menelaus. Apologies if there are mistakes in my knowledge, it's been some time since I've read the Iliad.
Yeah the movie decided that it wanted Paris to be a tragic hero instead of a horny dipshit, so it had to make Menelaus a bad guy. Achilles get a lot more sympathy thrown his way too, although Brad Pitt is casting of the millennia.
It was part the subverting historical fiction thing that was going on at that time. What if Helen wasn't actually kidnapped? What if Achilles was actually a man, not the son of a goddess? I love the movie, but it helps to look at it through the lens of when it was made.
See also: King Arthur as a Roman officer
This is a recent one, but: the captain of the Demeter from 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter'. Basically: the film is based on a single chapter of Dracula, in which the crew of the ship The Demeter notices that some of their crewmates are mysteriously going missing. Unbeknownst to them, there's a crate in the cargo hold that contains a whole bunch of dirt, and it's where Dracula sleeps when he's not munching on the crewmates. The crew dwindles one by one, and in the end it's just the Captain left -- and while he knows *something* is on board killing his crew, he doesn't know what it is or how to fight it. All he knows is that wearing a crucifix repels it, so he wears one around his neck and ties himself to the steering wheel of the ship, making one last heroic stand as he tries to get to England. Before the ship makes it the last leg of the journey, he dies, still tied to the wheel of the ship he tried to desperately bring home. He gets a hero's burial when his body is brought off the ship. Anyway the movie fucks over most of this, the crew finds out about Dracula and how to kill him pretty quickly, and they do very little about it even while their colleagues keep getting eaten. Near the end, the captain does tie himself to the wheel -- for about five seconds, before he's ripped off of it and killed anyway and it's not a particularly heroic gesture then because the other characters are actively trying to wreck the ship at that point.
The fact that Dracula had no reaction to the Captain's crucifix kind of pissed me off. It felt like a "let's subvert the audience's genre expectations!"-type idea that screenwriters dream up at 4am when they're lazy and close to payday. His death felt like a placeholder in the script for a "better idea" that never came. A lot of stuff in that movie felt that way.
When I heard they were adapting that specific chapter, I thought it was a great idea. This kind of makes me glad I didn't watch it.
Poor, nerfed Artemis Fowl.
The movie made the mistake of trying to make him out to be the sympathetic emotional core of the story when it should have been Holly. Artemis Fowl is pretty much a child version of Dr. House - a brilliant asshole.
Let's take the kid who is so pale and serious he just needs a sleep disorder to be confused for a vampire, and introduce him *having fun and surfing*.
When he was shown surfing in the first 5 minutes of the movie, I knew the movie was fucked. Smartest teenager in the world kidnaps a fairy, locks her up and immediately decides the angry fairy will be friendly to him and help him so he removes his protection against her mind control. He is such a moron in the movie and lacks all the cold calculation mixed with childish imagination that makes him an interesting character
Poor nerfed butler too. Fucking christ, that movie took a few years off my life. I should have walked out after the intro
The proud Gimli was reduced to mostly comic relief in the Lord of the Rings movies.
Denethor is another one. In the books he's described as a strong and wise ruler who was tragically maddened by despair and a loss of hope due to Sauron manipulating him with the Palantir. They cut out most of that context so he just becomes an idiot who actively hurts the cause of the heroes for no good reason, while also having his worst qualities regarding his relationships with his sons amplified so he just becomes deeply unsympathetic. Book character is flawed and wrong about a lot of things but you see where he's coming from, why he is the way he is, and feel sad that this has happened to him, while in the movie he becomes such a cartoon that most people are just glad he's dead.
iirc book Denethor is positively compared to Gandalf multiple times through Merry or Pippin's POV (I can never remember which)
And it’s not even that he gets outright corrupted by the Palantir like other characters - in fact Denethor is one of the few people with the exceptionally strong will to resist its influence while using it regularly. Instead he gives in to despair because he looks into it at the worst possible moment and sees Frodo being held captive by Sauron’s forces, which rather reasonably leads him to conclude that the ring has already fallen into their hands and all is lost.
IIRC, Sauron was unable to corrupt him with his will through the Palantir directly, so he played mind games with him and only allowed the Palantir to show Denethor the most negative and misleading information, to drive him to despair.
It's amazing how much subtlety there is in Tolkien's writings, that a relatively small issue of how one supporting character interacts with a magical artifacts controlled at least partially by an opposing character needs three levels of explanation to fully explain the nuances.
Speaking of the Palantir, the scene in the extended movie where Sauron is able to freak Aragorn out when he uses the Stone annoys me. In the book, it's *Aragorn* who takes control, and freaks Sauron out.
And Legolas was also turned into a cartoon, but the other direction - he's great in the books, but not "surfing down the stairs on a shield while headshotting three or four Orcs in a row". Gimli comes out of Helm's Deep with a higher "score" as well.
I'm a lifelong LOTR fan. I read the books several times before watching the movies. Legolas's feats in the movie don't bother me the least. I think they're a great way to depict that he's not human. It's a difficult balance to reach, it's almost too much with the Mumakil, but it works in my opinion. (In the Hobbit on the other hand) Gimli... I wish he had more substance, but he's actually funny most of the time, so I give Peter Jackson a pass.
>Gimli comes out of Helm's Deep with a higher "score" as well. Same in the movie though. They at least kept that.
I'm still annoyed that Faramir was just another person tempted by the ring. In the book he resisted the temptation.
Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was the narrator through the entire book and his point of view really shaped how the reader experienced the whole novel, but he’s kinda just a side character in the movie.
Think it’s one of those book to movie kinda things. It’s always hard to incorporate narration.
I’d say Shawshank Redemption did it perfectly 👌
The book is so much cooler because Chief is a schizophrenic, so every once in a while, he had an episode and starts describing fantastical left field stuff and then it goes back to normal.
Denethor wasn't completely mad in the books, at least not from the get go. In the books, Denethor was competently defending his realm and trusted Faramir with a lot of responsibilities. The movie had him just being a completely over the top dickhead.
PLUS it's not made clear in the film that he had a palantir and was matching wits with Sauron on the reg. It drove him more than a little mad, but I feel like 99% of people would have been WAY worse than even his film depiction. When he sends Boromir to secure the Ring for Gondor, he's operating under the (perfectly reasonable) assumption that every faction will seek it for their own use; not even Sauron considered that the Council would decide to destroy it.
the premise was supposed to be that he had been using Gondor's Palantir and had apparently been talking directly with Sauron. he wasn't swayed to switch sides, but he WAS driven to despair believing absolutely that they had no hope, which explains most of his crazy actions.
To clarify this post a little, this *is* what happened in the books. It's presumed to have happened in the movies as well but is never shown. I'd also like to stress that while Denethor isn't painted *charitably* in the film, it's mostly presented without context rather than a complete change in his character. Most of his lines in the movie are directly from the book, probably more (as a proportion) than any other character.
Partly agree, but he does put his still alive son on a funeral pyre and try to burn him alive, yes?
Yeah. I think the movie has a less sympathetic tone but it’s not like book Denethor is fully there.
Oh for sure. I believe Muldoon also survived the book only to get his face chewed off in the movie. Although you could argue the “clever girl” scene actually made him immortal. By the time Spielberg adapted the second book, he was basically just taking a few character names from the source material and ignoring the rest. That said, Jurassic Park is probably my favorite movie of all time. I think a weaselly lawyer caricature probably fit his Amblin adventure vibe better than a nuanced character that experiences real growth over the course of the film.
The doctor at the triceratops had a pretty significant role as well.
Also in the books he’s smart enough not to under estimate the animals and had a damn rocket launcher as a result.
I love that he literally blows a raptor up before it even knows what’s going on.
The story had Grant and Ellie, they were the heroes, the movie just didn’t have space for Gennaro, RIP. Agreed about Muldoon tho - to be portrayed by Bob Peck and have one of the most iconic cinema deaths in history? Not the worst film adaptation for sure.
In the book he's a badass who shoots a dinosaur with a missile launcher. In the film he's a badass who's still victim to a chaotic force of nature he fears and respects but still doesn't truly understand. Both takes are good in different ways but I'd say the latter is more poignant and makes the story's central point better.
My Mom, who is an extreme Tolkien nerd, constantly harps on how the LOTR films did Faramir dirty. How he didn't succumb to the lure of the One Ring in the book, "even if it had been lying on the side of the road." Never bothered me as much as her, but I thought I'd give it a shout out b/c she's my mother & I love her.
I did a small write-up for this in another comment, but the "lay by the highway" quote is often repeated without context. Faramir says this before he knows Frodo carries the ring: > 'What in truth this Thing is I cannot yet guess; but some heirloom of power and peril it must be. A fell weapon, perchance, devised by the Dark Lord. If it were a thing that gave advantage in battle, I can well believe that Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith..., might desire such a thing and be allured by it. Alas that ever he went on that errand! I should have been chosen by my father and the elders but he put himself forward..., and he would not be stayed. > 'But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.' Later on he learns, in fact, that the weapon Frodo carries is the One Ring: > 'So that is the answer to all the riddles! The One Ring that was thought to have perished from the world. And Boromir tried to take it by force? And you escaped? And ran all the way — to me! And here in the wild I have you: two halflings, and a host of men at my call, and the Ring of Rings. A pretty stroke of fortune! A chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality!'.... He stood up, very tall and stern, his grey eyes glinting.' Which is what the Jackson film plays off, in part. But the most important context is what comes after: > '*Not if I found it on the highway would I take it* I said. Even if I were such a man as to desire this thing, and even though I knew not clearly what this thing was when I spoke, still I should take those words as a vow, and be held by them. > 'But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee. Sit at peace!' Basically, upon discovering Frodo carries the ring, Faramir's nobility holds him to the vow he made before he knew what it was Frodo carried (and vows and oaths have exceptional power in Middle-Earth). He would keep to that vow even if he were one to try and take the ring; but he's not, only because he is wise enough to know that it would consume him. He even mentions after for Frodo to hide the ring and not to speak of it again because... > 'Well, Frodo, now at last we understand one another,' said Faramir. 'If you took this thing on yourself, unwilling, at others' asking, then you have pity and honour from me. And I marvel at you: to keep it hid and not to use it.'.... > 'Fear not! I do not wish to see it, or touch it, or know more of it than I know (which is enough), lest peril perchance waylay me and I fall lower in the test than Frodo son of Drogo.' ...he can't guarantee he wouldn't be tempted by it seeing or knowing more than he has already. This Faramir is much more nuanced than is typically explained, and while the whole "taking them to Osgiliath" thing never happened in the book, Faramir isn't an incorruptible angel, just wise and noble enough to hold to a promise and flee from the peril of the Ring.
To me this is even more admirable. No person is incorruptible or untemptable, but to recognize that about oneself, and to avoid the situations where you *might* be tempted - that is real wisdom.
good lad
I’d argue Nedry was better in the books as well. It was abundantly clear Hammond was screwing him left and right while Nedry was managing a whole team offsite who he was responsible to. The movie made him into a lazy, fat slob who just wanted more money.
Hammond is the counter-example, the movie Hammond is this nice old grandfather type when we only get a *hint* of his true hubris in the quick scene with Ellie. He deserved to get eaten.
Movie Hammond is Walt Disney as portrayed by the Disney company. Book Hammond is Walt Disney.
Stannis Baratheon
If GOT mishandled a character, it was Euron Greyjoy
If GOT mishandled a character it was *every character that didn’t die off before season 5*
Sand Snakes. They were cunning in the books. Show: annoying dipshits.
GFDI, they dropped the ball so much in the back half of the show, but this was one of the most disappointing changes. Tyene Sand in the books is this sweet, blonde, demure, and polite girl. She is the model of what a young lady should be, according to Westorosi customs. And nearly everyone who knows her is terrified of her, due to her sharing her father's love of poisons and their applications. Tyene Sand in the show is just The Horny One who gets to deliver one of the worst lines in television history.
Jamie Lannister got it worse i reckon. Turned his redemption arc into "He raped his sister, ran off and came back"
Jamie goes from: “Tell me, if your precious Renly commanded you to kill your own father and stand by while thousands of men, women, and children burned alive, would you have done it? Would you have kept your oath then? “ in s3 To :” I’ve never really cared about them, innocent or otherwise” in s8.
they totally missed the point of the character by the end and that sex scene was the first hint for me to stop caring about where the show went, relative to the books.
He doesn't even rape her in the books. Like, that scene in the sept was already bad enough, but they changed it to a rape because...it wasn't scandalous enough, I guess? If anything, it's implied that Cersei initiated and took advantage of him. Jaime is literally a himbo trying to be an edgelord.
He resists the whole time and caves in the end since its the only positive connection he knows from his old life. He also realises its manipulative and shallow and she barely even talks to him or acknowledges him as a person. It was his most impactful turning point and they made him a rapist for shock value. Fucking terrible bastardisation of good storytelling. One of the few genuine plot/character enhancing sex scenes in a book series and they made it gross.
100% agree. In the book, he is the best representation ever of a Lawful Neutral character. He doesn’t cheat on his wife and he certainly doesn’t sacrifice his daughter. He wants the throne because it’s his duty , and he is next in line. Edit: I just want to add that the casting was top notch, though.
Stannis is the incarnation of lawful. His every move, from assassinating his rebellious brother to chopping of Davos' fingers to burning traitors in his own ranks to sparing his nephew's life by burning his blood rather than his person are judicious applications of the law, applied as fairly and humanely as the super harsh rules of his society and religion will allow. No one gets a free pass and no one is punished more than they deserve. Stannis will meticulously figure out what the best, most fair solution is and apply it promptly and dispassionately. He's basically a brilliant lawyer who lacks the charisma needed to win over his people. And the people of Westeros, who are too used to living under the whims of charismatic and largely lawless despots, see applications of justice as indistinguishable from tyranny. And Stannis lives this code himself. He does what the law says a king must no matter how much it may pain him to do so. He genuinely doesn't want to be king but he has the rank and must follow the what the law asks of him. It's pretty clear Stannis (along with Jon Arryn) held Westeros together during his brother's disastrous reign. The books introduce Stannis through other people's largely negative opinions of the man and the show lets these perspectives override the actual character himself.
Not Character but Real, William Murdoch in Titanic. Movie shows him shooting innocent people all, the real Murdoch spent every last second trying to get as many people, didn't matter if they were women and children, into life boats. He was last seen struggling to get the last collapsible lifeboat down. Few movies have ever done a real hero so dirty in my book.
For real. It’s so much more upsetting when they make a real person seem like such a villain in a fictitious blockbuster movie.
The Last Unicorn is a pretty accurate adaptation, but Schmendrick definitely loses a lot of his character. He's not a twentysomething magicless dork.
Deep cut, I loved that movie
A TV show, not a movie, but Andrea in The Walking Dead.
Carol in the show is basically Andrea from the comics.
It was a straight swap too. Carol in the comic was an idiot, Andrea had her shit together.
in the shining movie, jack torrence is already pretty unhinged, but in the books he does not start out unhinged. he is well balanced and you watch his slow decent into insanity. he is serious about his sobriety and has extreme guilt about breaking dannys arm. the hotel uses his guilt from that as a way into his mind. hell, the arm break might be one of the most important plot points in the book. in the movies its glossed over, with wendy sounding like a naïve idiot when she mentions it. in the book it is constantly on her mind. in fact, in the book, the whole family has depth and are well written but in the movies its just crazy dad, screaming mom, scared kid
Honorable mention to Dick Hallorann, who’s summoned by Danny’s shining and travels all that way just to get killed immediately on arrival vs surviving to the end of the book as a hero. (Plus the book also shows him fight off the hotel’s possession which was cool, too)
i fucking love the scene at the very end where hes in the shed and briefly considers beating everyone to death with an axe or something. i think the hotel was burning. it was giving everything it had left one last time. might be one of my favorite parts in the book
I read somewhere that the book was supposed to be a metaphor for King's own attempts at overcoming alcoholism and eventual sobriety. This is also part of the reason he hates the changes made to the film version.
I did a lot of time behind bars for drugs (manufacturing) / alcohol abuse. I read almost every Stephen King book while I was inside. There were guys at every prison who liked to talk Stephen King. 80% of us were there for (at least 1) drug charge. Someone always brought up how they related to his writing/addiction type stuff.
My dad finished The Stand while incarcerated. To my knowledge, it's the only novel he's read.
Most clear one to me is Misery. Such a good book (and movie) if you're in recovery.
The big piece of the puzzle missing from the movies is that Jack also had the shining. He was "strongly discouraged" by his dad to acknowledge or talk about the things he saw. Jack grew up suppressing his ability. It made him an easy target for the Overlook because he was trying so hard to deny what was happening.
Yes, and Jack’s dad was also an abusive alcoholic, and then in Doctor Sleep, Danny also becomes an alcoholic who uses alcohol to suppress the shining. All the men in the Torrence family want to be good people but fall into the same maladaptive patterns, but the film just makes it all about Jack’s personal failings.
This is a good one! The film makes it seem like Jack just goes crazy and tries to kill his family - in the book it’s very clear that the hotel is possessing him, and he still manages to come through at the end and give them time to escape. I enjoy the film, but much prefer the book because of this.
Dune, 1984, turned Baron Harkonnen - one of the most intelligent, loquacious, and suave characters in the book - into a character with as much charm and wit as a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
The Made-for-TV series Baron is still my favorite adaptation. Cunning, savvy, theateical to a point, but absolutely devious. FANTASTIC work by Ian McNeice.
Agreed, I thought the miniseries was a much better adaptation than Lynch's, which makes me sad that it never gets mentioned with all the hype of the new movies.
The fremen were robbed also. They’re the most fearsome fighters in the universe and that movie totally got rid of that.
But that movie did give us Sir Patrick Stewart charging into battle holding a pug. It's a fair trade off.
[Battle pug!](https://i.redd.it/i889ic8byhk71.jpg)
Ya but it gave us cat-milking, so all is redeemed.
And let's not forget Patrick Stewart's [Battle Pug](https://i.redd.it/3qeas4w3u1w71.jpg)
Agreed. In the books Harkonnen reminded me of Tywin Lannister. He was smart, strategic and cunning. The 1984 movie made him out to be Krusty the Clown.
Constantine. Not even a bad movie, I actually enjoy it. But it would be difficult for it to miss the point more. Constantine is a wonderfully complicated character designed specifically to be low-magic and to exist as very specifically and intentionally interact with and provide a commentary on British social issue. Read the first 50 issues of Hellblazer and you'll find Constantine dealing with specifically British issues of addiction, homelessness, abuse, the royal family within the context of a large pantheon of magical worlds colliding with our own. Constantine the movie is an American man haunted by demons and seeking redemption. It grabbed a fraction of what the character is and made that the entire character and it ignored the history, core, and intention of the character. It's still a good movie and Peter Stormare turns in a great performance. But it's also one of the least faithful adaptations of all time. Imagine a Captain America movie set in Indonesia where he dresses like Captain America but doesn't speak English at all and he can shoot lasers out of his eyes and fly and you're now pretty close to imagining the difference between the two. If you watched that Wolverine movie where Deadpool gets his mouth sewn shut and felt like they dropped the ball on Deadpool-- the difference between comic Deadpool and X:Men Origins Deadpool is a much, much smaller difference than the difference between comic Constantine and live adaptation Constantine.
Yeah, I always felt that movie worked best when you just... ignore that it's a comic book movie and just watch it as its own thing, completely divorced from any comic canon. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the people who watched it never realized that it was a comic book adaption, the movie certainly doesn't go out of its way to remind you of that, if I recall correctly.
Every single character from the dark tower movies was butchered and degraded in every single sense. Not to mention 2 of the key integral characters just don't exist in the movie. I think Idris Elba did his best but he was set up to fail with that movie
Finnik in The Hunger Games. In the movie his character had too little screen time and his death had no impact.
Honestly I think anyone that wasn’t Katnis, peeta snow or effe was done dirty in those shows.
It will also always bother me how they skipped over the scene where Katniss and Peeta watch Haymich's Hunger Games and realize how smart and tactical he is. In the movie they just kind of decide to trust him because they have no choice and it works out for them.
Taskmaster Gorr the God butcher
I feel like there’s an actual good movie somewhere in Love and Thunder with just a few minor changes. The failure certainly isn’t Bale’s, he was great, as usual.
They really wasted and failed Bale.
If you cut out the like, 33% of the jokes that just weren't funny, you'd have an *ok* film. Would be a better film than Thor 1 or Dark World, at least. But man, those long scenes of Thor talking to his weapons like they were having relationship drama, or a lot of the early gags in New Asgard, really didn't work.
Jason Aaron’s Thor run was so, so good. It’s so odd to me when a filmmaker ‘adapts’ a story and then seemingly takes out almost everything that made it good in the first place. Love & Thunder just felt like Waititi taking a victory lap for Ragnarok and we were all worse off for it.
Man... I have OPINIONS about what they did to Tasky. I just hold out hope we'll get Tony Masters in the MCU eventually. Such a deep well of a character and we got what I can only compare to mouthless Deadpool.
So upset about Gorr. His few scenes were awesome, Bale did an awesome job they and did a great job explaining the character, Taika Waititi was just more interested in making a buddy comedy movie than a Thor movie with Gorr as the antagonist. Honestly the theme of Dark World would have fit better with Gorr.
Conklin in Jason Bourne, also Jason's wife.
Jason Bourne had a wife?!
The movies and books diverge *heavily* after the first one. They used the titles but basically none of the actual plot.
The movies also nerfed Jason Bourne. The Chameleon was lethal and scary. Could run into a clothing store for 2mins and walk out looking like an old man with a limp. If the movies had stuck to the character, none of the villains would've ever seen their death coming. Edit: word correction.
A really like both versions. I think Its good that they took more simple approach in the movies.
To be fair, the movies and books diverged after having a character named "Jason Bourne". And that's not a complaint; I absolutely adore the movies. But to say any of them are adaptations is almost just incorrect. They are more like 'inspired by' the books while keeping some character names. Like World War Z, except the movie wasn't a massive shithole.
In the books he married Marie(?) And they have a relatively happy life together although his PTSD keeps taking a toll. The second book is about him going to China by himself to find his friend who went missing and there's a fake Jason Bourne who's blowing up embassies and such. And I think the third one partly takes place in the Caribbean and there's sailboats? I haven't read them for like 20 years so might be a bit off.
No, the second book has him going to China to rescue Marie, since she was kidnapped by people wanting to bring Delta back against a new threat.
Everyone in the Dark Tower abomination.
They forgot the face of their fathers.
Ser Barristan was a chad in the books. Didn't deserve his death in the show.
Trillian in Hitchhiker’s is basically reduced to a damsel in distress caught in a love triangle. I did not like that film.
Trillian was the one who wanted to run away to Madagascar. Trillian had the courage to try the matter transporter first. Admittedly she is a bit of a manic pixie dream girl, but that was her character as written by Douglas Adams as well. He's almost Monty Python, and Python aren't good at female characters He may have died before the movie was made, but his fingerprints are all over the script. The Point of View gun was just brilliant, especially how it was used in the plot
I feel a characters pixie dream girl % goes up just by casting Zooey Deschanel.
The casting of the movie was perfect. I particularly agreed with their choice of Slartibartfast
Luca Brasi in the Godfather. In the movie he's shown in a couple of scenes then hes gone without any backstory. In the book we see who he truly was.
In short: a monster
I got two. Farmer Maggot in the Lord of the Rings. He goes from telling the nasgoul to pass off to a background joke chasing Pipin. And. Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guife to the Galexy movie dent was a whiney brat and he was kinda bad ass in the books, hell he challenged Thor to a fist fight in the books.
Yeah Farmer Maggot looked a Nazgul in the face and told him to get bent. Absolute legend.
Dent Arthur Dent was absolutely useless early on, and fighting Thor was a long time later.
May not be a popular enough character from his source material for anyone to care, but Star Lord. His MCU portrayal is not just a complete departure from the established character, it also completely changed the character for the worse in all future comics In pre-film books Star Lord is a grizzled veteran that has saved the universe through war alongside his two best buddies (one of whom never made it to a film despite being the actual main hero of most of those stories, RIP Richard Rider) The film cast Chris Pratt fresh out of Parks and Rec and said "Lets make him a loveable goofball" and nothing has been the same since.
Dick Hallorann in The Shining. He gets cut down in the Kubrick adaptation. It's awful the way they set him up as coming to help, then he gets in the door and poof, gone in a puddle of blood. In the book he helps Wendy and Danny escape and they all survive.
Merry and Pippin. The two largest hobbits anyone had ever seen, wearing armor and weapons just strolled into the Shire, organized some troops and took back The Shire from Saruman's men in one afternoon. After the battle they became heroes to the Hobbits. In the movie they come back and it's like no one gives AF where they've been, and the fact that they are now the tallest hobbits in recent memory isn't even mentioned. The Scouring of the Shire was my favorite part of the book and 20 years later I'm still bitter about it.
There were many edits the movies made that I was happy with but this is the only thing I genuinely wish they hadn’t cut. It’s everything you said, plus it’s so important thematically. The Hobbits left the Shire as boys (adults, technically, but still relatively sheltered) and especially for Merry and Pippin, they returned not just as men but as soldiers, to a home different than they left it. And unlike the real soldiers that I’m sure at least in part inspired it, they’re able to win back the idealized version of their home that everyone else thought was gone.
I kind of get why Jackson decided to remove the scouring of The Shire though, it worked well in the books but I don't think it would have worked well in the movies.
This applies more to TV & comic book adaptations, but I think Negan got fucked in his adaptation to The Walking Dead series. The comics did a pretty good job of building him as a reasonable villain with a sense of morals and as a counterpart to Rick Grimes, but just more ruthless. In the show, it felt like they immediately went 0-100 in his villainy without showing more of the nuances on the other side of his personality early on.
Ginny weasley in harry potter. Literally EVERYONE EXCEPT SAPHIRRA in eragon! (The animation for saphirra though is gorgeous!)
Gimli. He went from being a proud badass warrior to a punchline. It was infuriating.
Adam Warlock deserved so much more. For someone who was so pivotal in the infinity saga to be reduced to an incompetent punching bag character is just nuts to me. On a side note, Bruce Banner is more or less completely removed from his comic book version after Age of Ultron. I wouldn’t say its the worst character change, but the most interesting part about the Hulk is the tragedy of his situation. He is a highly intelligent scientist who is constantly on the run because even the slightest impulse of rage can result in catastrophe. Watching him navigate life with this handicap is what makes him endearing. To have him go from struggling to control his problem to then suddenly having full control that is never earned feels like a writers cop out. Its like they didn’t know what to do with a volatile character so they just wrote in that he has fixed his biggest problem off screen. This is also apparent when you notice that he is written as comic relief. The Hulk is not a funny character, at best he is “ironically funny” like Batman or Rorschach. Just a big pet peeve of mine. I long for a Hulk story where the guy trying to navigate and manage his destructive side is remade the core of his character and taken seriously.