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Taking a book and turning it into a motion picture is a practice almost as old as cinema itself. Since the days of Georges Méliès, who offered his cinematic takes on literary classics like Cinderella and From the Earth to the Moon, filmmakers have been taking stories from the page to the big screen, experimenting with how the differences between the written word and the cinematic language can be most effectively combined.
Sometimes, the books adapted belong to authors that have since passed away. Other times, the authors are still alive and kicking and commend these cinematic adaptations of their work, no matter how involved they were in their making. On a few noteworthy occasions, however, authors have been quite vocal about their intense dislike for a certain movie adaptation of a book of theirs. From novelists like Stephen King to comic writers like Alan Moore, these are authors who clearly didn’t think the cinematic medium did their work justice. For fairness’ sake, entries will be limited to only one per author. Otherwise, a list of this nature would end up being composed purely of King and Moore adaptations.
10
‘Tales from Earthsea’ (2006)
Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the greatest and most important American writers of her generation, known mainly for her work in speculative fiction. The collection of fantasy stories and essays known as Tales from Earthsea is perhaps her best-known work, and for good reason. Fans couldn’t have possibly been more excited when a Studio Ghibli adaptation of the first four books in the series was announced, which would be Gōro Miyazaki‘s (son of Hayao Miyazaki) directing debut. The rest is history, just not particularly pleasant history.
[Le Guin] felt like the film told a completely different story from the source material.
There are those who would go so far as to call Ghibli’s Tales from Earthsea one of the worst anime movies of all time. Le Guin herself probably would never have gone that far, but she did state that Miyazaki misunderstood the spirit of her books so terribly that she felt like the film told a completely different story from the source material. You’d be hard-pressed to find an Earthsea book fan who would disagree.
9
‘Charlotte’s Web’ (1973)
E. B. White, perhaps best-known as the creator of Stuart Little, was one of the greatest American children’s literature authors in modern history. He also wrote Charlotte’s Web, an illustrated book that, before being turned into a live-action film starring Dakota Fanning in 2006, was turned into a Hanna-Barbera musical cartoon in 1973.
Audiences today mostly remember it fondly as one of the movies that proved 1970s animation was by no means bad, but White wasn’t fond of the film at all. On the contrary, though the author was slightly involved in the movie’s story, he was generally displeased with the final product, calling it “a travesty.” He hated the fact that the movie was a musical, which he felt didn’t gel well with what he had written.
8
‘Rawhead Rex’ (1986)
Legendary British horror author Clive Barker is perhaps best known as the man who wrote the Hellraiser series. When it came time to turn the book into a film, he decided to write and direct it himself. The reason? Rawhead Rex, an adaptation of Barker’s short story of the same name directed by George Pavlou, from a screenplay by Barker himself.
The movie was a colossal failure, and is still remembered as one of the worst horror movies of the ’80s. Barker, obviously, felt that the elements were all there on the page for Rawhead Rex to have been quite a thrilling film. He felt, however, that Pavlou’s direction fell short, failing to provide the stylish oomph that would have made the movie as strong as the source material.
7
‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ (1997)
Following the success of Wes Craven‘s 1996 slasher classic Scream, many terrible rip-offs followed. Jim Gillespie‘s I Know What You Did Last Summer may be iconic, but there’s no way of denying that it’s just that: a terrible Scream rip-off. It didn’t have to be that way, though. The movie wasn’t based on a horror novel, but rather a well-regarded 1973 YA thriller by Lois Duncan.
Duncan’s daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette, was shot to dead in 1989. In a 2002 interview, the author revealed that as the mother of a murdered young woman, she was absolutely appalled by the fact that her novel had been turned into a silly, cheap slasher. It’s difficult to blame her, made even more difficult by the fact that the film isn’t even a good slasher to begin with.
6
‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ (1971)
As one of the most important voices in the modern history of children’s literature, Roald Dahl is someone who needs no introduction. Another person who needs no introduction is Willy Wonka, and fittingly, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, one of the best fantasy movie masterpieces of all time, has a reputation that precedes it. A lesser-known part of that reputation, however, is that Dahl hated the film.
In fairness, Dahl hated the vast majority of the movies based on his work, thinking that Hollywood had a tendency to twist his stories into things he had never intended. His dislike for Willy Wonka, however, was particularly strong. He disowned the movie and declared himself “infuriated” by its plot deviations, its being a musical, and its shifting the narrative’s focus from Charlie to Wonka. The original book purist, Dahl would have vastly preferred it if director Mel Stuart had stuck far more closely to what was already on the page, even if this has proven to age as one of the best family movies of all time.
5
‘The NeverEnding Story’ (1984)
Wolfgang Petersen‘s first English-language film, The NeverEnding Story is one of the most iconic family films of the ’80s, even if some find it to traumatizingly dark that its “family film” status is not uncontested. It was based on German writer Michael Ende‘s 1979 book of the same title, and it was a hit both with critics and at the box office.
Someone it wasn’t a hit with, however, was Ende himself. The author only got to see the script days before the movie’s premiere, and claimed to have been “horrified” by what he saw. He felt that Petersen completely changed the essence and spirit of the book, and later called the film a “gigantic melodrama of kitsch, commerce, plush and plastic.”
4
‘Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief’ (2010) and ‘Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters’ (2013)
Of the many book series that tried to be the next Harry Potter, few came as remarkably close with something as original, fun, and genuinely high-quality as Rick Riordan‘s Percy Jackson & the Olympians book series. But out of every book-to-film adaptation that’s nothing like the books, few cases are as egregious as The Lightning Thief and Sea of Monsters, the movies based on the first two installments in the saga.
Riordan was extremely vocal about how he felt about these movies. He said the writing was terrible, and not just because it deviated tremendously from the source material. He shared email recommendations for script changes that he sent to the people behind the movies—recommendations that clearly went unheard. Most of all, the author was bothered because he knew that these adaptations would anger and disappoint fans. It’s no wonder why Riordan became far more directly involved with the new Disney+ TV series adaptation of Percy Jackson.
3
‘Mary Poppins’ (1964)
Mary Poppins is widely recognized as one of the most perfect live-action Disney movies of all time, a marvelously magical and beautifully nostalgic musical bolstered by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke‘s lead performances. It’s based on Autralian-British writer P. L. Travers‘ Mary Poppins book series, and Walt Disney‘s repeated decades-spanning attempts to buy the film rights to her books made for such an arduous production process that it became the subject of the Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson-starring Saving Mr. Banks.
Contrary to what the ending of Saving Mr. Banks depicts, however, Travers did not, in fact, like what Disney did with her books. Travers famously cried at the movie’s premiere due to how distorted and saccharine her story and characters had become as a result of their Disney-ification. She hated the animated segments, she objected to the musical numbers, and she disliked the casting of Julie Andrews in the titular role. Audiences, of course, have disagreed with Travers over the course of the film’s existence; but one can only sympathize with her sadness.
Another author who famously hates pretty much any and every film that’s ever been made about their work is Alan Moore. The writer is of the vehement opinion that it’s impossible to turn a comic book into a film that properly captures its essence, and as a result, adaptations of his work—from Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen to James McTeigue‘s V for Vendetta—rub him the wrong way. But out of every movie adaptation of his oeuvre, Moore had the most contempt for Stephen Norrington‘s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
In all fairness to Moore, this is far and away one of the most abysmal superhero movies ever made, so it’s difficult to blame him for disliking it. What really added salt to the wound, however, was the lawsuit brought forward against 20th Century Studios by Larry Cohen and Martin Poll, who claimed that the studio had plagiarized their script. Moore got tangled up in the whole ordeal, and that only made League all the more of an unpleasant experience.
1
‘The Shining’ (1980)
As one of the authors whose work is most often adapted by Hollywood, and not often with good results, Stephen King is someone with a long track record of being critical of big-screen adaptations of his work. But the most notorious King adaptation that he despised, and perhaps the most notorious case of an author hating a movie based on their work, is Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining. Based on the third novel King ever wrote, many think of this ’80s classic as one of the greatest horror movies ever made, complete with one of the scariest movie villains of all time—but the author himself disagreed.
King’s dislike for Kubrick’s movie has become a subject of study itself, with fans having spent the last 46 years diving deep into why King might have felt such an aversion to this version of The Shining. He once said that it was the only adaptation of his novels that he could truly remember hating, calling it “maddening, perverse, and disappointing.” He admitted to Kubrick’s brilliance as a director, but felt that the film twisted the message and essence of what he had written as an allegory for alcoholism (with many autobiographical elements) into something he couldn’t recognize. Knowing King’s deeply personal connection to the story, it becomes impossible to blame him for hating what even the film’s biggest fans must admit is vastly different from the source material.
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Diego Pineda Pacheco
Almontather Rassoul
