10 Writers Who Hated The Horrible Movie Adaptations Of Their Work

Being an author and watching your book get transformed into a film can be a grueling process. Suddenly the characters and worlds you created are no longer in your hands. Will these new artists properly handle your precious fictional realms? Will they imbue unwanted themes or toxic ideas into these creations? There are endless ways it can go wrong, creating movies that should never have happened, and it can easily outweigh all the fun possibilities for what goes right. Some authors have pleasant experiences with the artists who turn their texts into motion pictures, but unfortunately, Hollywood history is riddled with countless instances of writers having extremely complicated relationships with their adaptations.

These are 10 memorable examples of authors expressing righteous criticism toward film adaptations that skewered their source material. Just as every book is a little bit different, there isn’t a uniform reason authors get irritated at these ugly adaptations. Sometimes it’s because of how these movies deviated from the source material. Other times, it’s because the film is antithetical to the core themes of the original book. Maybe weirdest of all are the occasions where the author has good reason to be mad, but the critics loved the adaptation anyway. Read on to see the finer details of these examples and learn about the absolute worst-case outcomes for book-to-movie adaptations.

Nobody has more contempt in their heart than Alan Moore for the Hollywood adaptations of his graphic novels. For a multitude of reasons (including his loathing of corporations that own Hollywood studios, and the track record of his projects), Moore has been public in his hatred for adaptations like Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen” and the crummy Johnny Depp vehicle “From Hell.” That’s not surprising, given the transgressive nature of his texts. In Moore’s eyes, the very act of adapting his works into a commercial medium inevitably sands off their edges. Making the critically disastrous yet financially successful 2003 film “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” into one of Hollywood’s first attempts at his work certainly didn’t help his fury.

“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” was Sean Connery’s last movie before retirement, and it didn’t inspire the long-running franchise 20th Century Fox executives wanted, either. What it did inspire was a lawsuit alleging that Fox stole the project from an original pitch by Larry Cohen and Martin Poll. The whole endeavor was settled out of court, much to Moore’s chagrin, since he wanted to solidify once and for all in court that his 1999 comic series wasn’t stolen work. That nasty scenario amplified Moore’s contempt for “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which he prayed wouldn’t detract from its acclaimed source material. No wonder this comics legend has nothing but resentment for Tinseltown.

Just as the genius of Stephen King’s literature is indisputable, it’s equally unavoidable that many film adaptations of King’s works have been underwhelming. For every “Misery” and “The Life of Chuck” in King’s pantheon, there’s a deluge of lesser movies like “Cell” and “The Dark Tower.” These movies squander all the potential of King’s prose. Among these terrible films is 1990’s “Graveyard Shift” from director Ralph S. Singleton. The film follows John Hall (David Andrews) working the late night graveyard shift at a textile mill. He and other workers are forced to clean out a gargantuan basement, which contains a monster that threatens to kill them all.

“Graveyard Shift” has mostly vanished from memory. King, though, hasn’t forgotten the film’s transgressions. Years after its release, Stephen King declared that “Graveyard Shift” was among the worst movies ever made from his works, because it amounted to “a quick exploitation picture.” Rotten Tomatoes agrees with King’s assessment, giving the film a 0% score.

The best Stephen King books and movie adaptations go the extra mile in taking seemingly simple premises (evil clowns, fathers going insane, etc.) and imbuing them with depth in both their themes and scares. Meanwhile, “Graveyard Shift” settles for being a surface-level creature feature. It’s an example of how often King’s sagas have inspired truly abysmal cinema.

“The Dark Is Rising” by Susan Cooper hit bookshelves in 1973. This 216-page fantasy novel (the second entry in the “Dark Is Rising” series) was a distinctly British creation and carved out a nice following for itself. 34 years later, the “Harry Potter” movies inspired Hollywood studios everywhere to scramble for other youth-skewing fantasy books to turn into features. Thus, Cooper’s book was transformed into “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising,” a feature so clearly copying the “Harry Potter” aesthetic that it was commonly referenced in scathing reviews. Anything distinctive about the original text was removed to make it more appealing to the sensibilities of a modern family movie audience.

Right as “The Seeker” flopped at the box office, it was reported Cooper wasn’t pleased. Years later, Cooper would comment that claiming she didn’t like this motion picture were “a considerable understatement.”  Why wouldn’t she hold contempt for this would-be blockbuster? All the idiosyncratic traits of her text were ironed out in favor of a movie that didn’t work for newcomers or longtime “Dark Is Rising” fans. Aside from that curt comment, Cooper has abstained from further critiques of the movie. Instead, she’s remained focused on writing new books, like 2019’s “The Shortest Day.” It shows that “The Seeker” isn’t worth Cooper’s time, just as it wasn’t worth the time and money of the general audience.

If there was any fantasy book adaptation made to cash in on “Harry Potter’s” success that had the potential to actually click, it was “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.” This adaptation of Rick Riordan’s entry to the world of Percy Jackson lacked the artistry of its source material, even though it was helmed by “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” director Chris Columbus.

Unfortunately, Columbus’ talents couldn’t save this film. Once it landed in theaters in 2010, the feature failed to catch fire with critics. Audiences, meanwhile, were perplexed by the radical, unimaginative changes made to a book they loved so much, even noting details better left to the adults in the room. They weren’t the only ones enraged. Riordan himself shared their frustrations on his website.

In November 2018, Riordan also shared emails he’d sent to personnel involved in the film detailing his frustrations with how the film was turning out, particularly with the quality of the script. It wasn’t that the screenplay differed from his book. Riordan simply felt that the writing was weak and would alienate the fans who loved his fictional world so much. The whole experience was an understandably unpleasant one for Riordan. Witnessing characters and worlds he’d spent years creating getting butchered has to be heartbreaking.

After years in development hell, the first movie adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” hit movie theaters in July 2017 from director Nikolaj Arcel. This Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey vehicle was intended to spawn a franchise. Instead, it became a remarkable failure. Critics despised the feature (save for its casting) noting how it lacked any personality, an element that wasn’t in short supply in its source material.

In book form, the realm of Mid-World was full of endless possibilities. In the “Dark Tower” movie, Mid-World was abandoned for a third act set in New York City that bizarrely evoked the fish-out-of-water comedy of “Elf.” It went so far as to depict the last gunslinger, Roland Deschain (Elba), wackily interacting with subway passengers.

This weird scene and other baffling flaws led to “The Dark Tower” garnering a toxic reputation even for those unfamiliar with its source material. Less than two months after its debut, King laid the blame for its failure on two factors. The first was the decision to condense one of King’s lengthiest novels into such a short movie. The other was constricting this grim world into a sanitized, PG-13 blockbuster-style action piece. These problems ensured “The Dark Tower” faced severe obstacles from the start.

Studio Ghibli’s works don’t end with Hayao Miyazaki’s filmography. Ghibli has housed artists responsible for all kinds of films, including “Whisper of the Heart” and “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.” It’s also been the home for films from Miyazaki’s son, Gorō Miyazaki. Gorō’s directorial career kicked off with “Tales from Earthsea,” an adaptation of the beloved fantasy “Earthsea” novels from Ursula K. Le Guin. While, typically, Studio Ghibli movies are awarded rave reviews, “Tales from Earthsea” garnered negative marks. Critics largely found the feature emotionally aloof and way too derivative of past Studio Ghibli films. Certainly, it appears nowhere on our own list of best Ghibli films.

Le Guin also had severe reservations about how her material had been translated. Specifically, she was disappointed that “Tales from Earthsea” featured a traditional villain character who could be comfortably seen as the source of all evil. The emphasis on violence as a solution to said villain and any problems the characters encountered, meanwhile, also ran contrary to the ethos of her writing. 

In overhauling the “Earthsea” novels to function more like a traditional action-oriented fantasy epic, Le Guin’s dragon-centric realm lost much of its personality. She also echoed the general criticisms regarding “Tales from Earthsea” related to it falling short of the Studio Ghibli legacy. As either an adaptation or a new Studio Ghibli feature, “Tales from Earthsea” failed to soar.

Believe it or not, the trash horror movie saga “I Know What You Did Last Summer” begins with a Lois Duncan novel of the same name. That text is largely a footnote in the franchise’s history, now that the movie has spawned three sequels and a one-season TV show on Amazon Prime Video. Being such an immensely influential pop culture property, though, wasn’t enough to ensure Duncan enjoyed how the original 1997 “I Know What You Did Last Summer” movie translated her material to the big screen.

Duncan was open about how crushed she was seeing her original 1973 work transformed into a slasher film (a style of horror cinema that hadn’t even been popularized by “Halloween” when the novel first came out). Duncan’s text was more invested in crafting an ominous atmosphere and building up a complicated mystery narrative. As a movie, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (produced after “Scream” gave the slasher genre a new lease on life) was largely fixated on inventive kills and jump scares. Despite the drastic differences between these two versions, Duncan’s novel is now forever intertwined with a popular but critically derided horror film she didn’t care for.

Hudson Talbott initially loved the idea of Amblimation (an animation studio partially founded by Steven Spielberg) making a film adaptation of his children’s book, “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story.” However, as he later recounted on the Look Back Machine podcast, the ordeal turned into a nightmare. When Talbott visited the Amblimation offices deep into the feature’s production, he was horrified at how the distinctive dinosaur designs from his book were transformed into generic, toy-friendly kid’s cartoon creations. In a meeting, Talbott was astonished to hear Spielberg say he kept telling the “Dinosaur’s Story” team to return to the source material for inspiration, since nothing about the resulting film echoed his work.

Once “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story” hit theaters over Thanksgiving of 1993, Talbott was given a private New York screening. Having already seen the project once before, he knew it was an embarrassment that wasn’t reflective of his art. Before the screening, he made sure to tell his friends and family that he was solely responsible for the book and the movie was its own creation. As Talbott continues to tell the LBM podcast, his closest friends thanked him for this disclaimer. They couldn’t believe his name was attached to something so shoddy. A dream come true ended up as a nightmare for these dinos.

Over 50 years after its release, the original animated “Charlotte’s Web” movie doesn’t have the greatest reputation in the modern world. Today, the project is sometimes regarded as too cutesy for its own good compared to its unabashedly gutting source material. The film’s attempts to mimic classic Disney animated features (including hiring “Mary Poppins” and “The Jungle Book” songwriters The Sherman Brothers to pen original musical numbers) also garnered criticism. Those Disneyesque elements inspired “Charlotte’s Web” author E.B. White to publicly express his displeasure with the project, particularly regarding how often Wilbur (Henry Gibson) and friends kept breaking into song.

Four years after it debuted, White declared the animated film “a travesty” in a letter. It was just the tip of the iceberg of the grievances he had. White also explained that he had a personal hatred for musical numbers, which made the transformation of “Charlotte’s Web” into a musical infuriating. He was further disappointed that grounded locales like The Blue Hill Fair had been overhauled to be more grandiose in this feature film version. There was no end to the issues White had with the animated film. White died in 1985, so at least he didn’t live to see the animated feature he despised spawn an inexplicable sequel, “Charlotte’s Web 2: Wilbur’s Great Adventure.”

Many authors have disagreements with movies based on their books, but writer Clive Cussler took this phenomenon to a whole other level with his hostility toward “Sahara,” the 2005 movie that adapted his novel of that name. Shortly before the theatrical debut of “Sahara,” Cussler filed a lawsuit against the title’s producers. He’d later allege that he’d been deceived over how much creative control he’d have over the movie. 

Cussler lost the original legal battle, but the verdict was soon overturned, inspiring him to return to the courtroom battlefield with further legal maneuvers. All of this chaos would finally end in late 2013, with neither party getting anything amounting to a “victory,” although Cussler would recoup around $22 million in legal fees. Over this lengthy process, Cussler made his thoughts on the “Sahara” movie no secret. He declared that the folks behind this Breck Eisner directorial effort “tore the heart out of” his writing, which resulted in a critically despised box office bomb.  

Cussler laid particular blame for the movie at the feet of screenwriter Josh Friedman, whose “Sahara” draft marked (in Cussler’s eyes) a significant downward spiral that the production never escaped. At least Cussler is in good company with the rest of the authors on this list.