Adapting a great book into a movie is a difficult challenge. Take a look at a book like Stephen King’s It for example. The story of a malevolent presence from another dimension that takes the form of a clown (as well as children’s fears) takes over 1,000 pages to complete. Now how could anyone possibly fit everything into a two-hour movie? Or even two movies? The answer is they can’t and there’s literally no way anyone will ever make a movie that lives up to this iconic book. The same goes for many other popular books.
These are the 10 most awful, hard-to-watch movies that were made from really good books. Check them all out below.
Photo: New Line Cinema
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Books Better Than Movies
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‘Breakfast of Champions’ by Kurt Vonnegut
Besides Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions is perhaps Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved novel. It tells the story of fictional Midland City, Ohio residents Dwayne Hoover (a car salesman) and Kilgore Trout (a science fiction writer). It’s too strange, surreal, and madcap to be made into a movie, but for some reason it was. Back in 1999, they made a movie that literally nobody saw that starred Bruce Willis.
Photo: Hollywood Pictures
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‘Choke’ by Chuck Palahniuk
If you ever read Fight Club, you probably followed that with Choke, a book about a sex addict named Victor who, in an effort to pay for his mother’s nursing home, decided to pretend he’s choking to get people to feel sorry for him and give him money (among other cons). The book was classic Palahniuk. Even with the casting of Sam Rockwell in the lead role, the movie was so unmemorable that none of Palahniuk’s other books have been made into a movie since.
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'Congo' by Michael Crichton
If you didn’t read Congo before you saw the movie, you might laugh at someone for saying they enjoyed it. That’s because the movie version of the book was so cheesy and laughably bad nobody could believe that the book could be good. It told the story of an investigation into the mysterious deaths of a diamond mining expedition in the jungles of the Congo and actually was a really good book.
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‘Dune' by Frank Herbert
This story takes place in the distant future, but somehow everyday life has returned to feudal society throughout the universe in which noble families control planets. Paul Atreides and his family live on one of these planets. The story is long, complex, sometimes confusing, and definitely didn’t work as a movie in 1984. Maybe the 2020 version will be better.
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‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradybury’s 1953 novel tells the story of Guy Montag a “fireman” whose job surrounds finding and destroying books in a society where literature is outlawed. Montag figures out that destroying art is definitely not helping society and decides to change. HBO made a movie a few years ago that looked and felt like a money grab. It starred Michael Shannon and Michael B. Jordan, but was way to futuristic and convoluted for anyone to care about.
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‘Pet Semetary’ by Stephen King
Throughout his career, Stephen King has had countless works made into films. Most of them haven’t come close to living up to the excitement and fear incited by the books. Directors have attempted to make film versions of Pet Semetary twice. Both have tried and failed to tell the story of Louis Creed and the ominous wooded area behind his home.
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‘The Giver’ by Lois Lowery
The book The Giver has been read and enjoyed for three decades. In it, a preteen named Jonas lives in a dystopian society where “sameness” is the most important thing. Nobody is unique and everything is the same. That is, until Jonas decides that isn’t right and changes everything. Due to its popularity, a film version was made in 2014. Even though Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges gave great performances, the movie overall was a bit of a dud.
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'The Hobbit' by J.R.R. Tolkien
Peter Jackson did an amazing job creating the world of Lord of the Rings. The first three movies (made from three books) are some of the most watchable and true-to-source-material films ever made. That’s why it seems like a money grab that even though The Hobbit was only one (relatively short) book, it should be made into three drawn-out, boring movies.
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‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ by H.G. Wells
The Island of Doctor Moreau was published in 1896 and tells the story of Edward Prendick who ends up shipwrecked on a strange island inhabited by Doctor Moreau and his army of human-animal hybrids. It’s so strange that nobody should have ever attempted to make a movie version of it. But there have been three film versions and by far the strangest and most terrible is the 1996 movie starring an albino version of the doctor played very lazily by the late Marlon Brando.
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'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road was so well received that it even won a Pulitzer prize. The writing, almost more poetry than prose, paints the bleak picture of a father and son traveling throughout a landscape covered in ash and death after some kind of horrific event. Viggo Mortenson’s acting was impressive as the main character but the movie itself seemed to drag on without much happening at all. Except for eating babies. It definitely had that.
