Kenneth Johnson's The Incredible Hulk. Aggressively strove to be as unlike the comic as possible, but still a beloved adaptation to this day.
Three generations of female viewers had a crush on Bill Bixby.
I'm not crazy about the thread title. A divergent adaptation isn't automatically a bad one.
I'd have used the word "inaccurate" instead of "bad." Some inaccurate adaptations make for a better movie, and some don't. Others are half-and-half.
I might get raked over the coals for this but I preferred the movie adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 over the book.
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Also the ending left me cold. It seemed depressing that Montag and the others were going to spend the rest of their lives walking around in the winter snow memorizing/reciting books and not interacting with one another. In that respect they seemed to have become just as cold and mechanical as the people and society they left behind.
Dystopian science fiction isn't noted for happy endings. The exception to this that I can think of is the movie version of
The Handmaid's Tale. It had an upbeat ending, whereas the novel had an ambiguous ending in which the reader is left unsure as to Offred's ultimate fate - and the reader never even gets to know her real name. I'd have preferred the movie end with the news report, instead of the final scene, as that would have been more in keeping with the "did she get away or didn't she?" of the novel.
One thing the movie did better than the novel, though, was to sort everything out to make the story more linear, instead of meandering back and forth between Offred's memories and her present reality.
I think the film Logan's Run is very interesting, even though it has some serious flaws. I'm glad it was made the way it was and not more faithfully to the book, because I'm glad to have seen it. I can't say whether a more faithful adaptation of the book would make a good film, because it's been a very long time since I've read it.
It would have been interesting to see the rest of the world that was written about in the novel, but I'm guessing that it would have been prohibitively expensive to do it that way.
The most obvious differences between novel and movie were the way in which Lastday was enforced worldwide vs. only in the domed city, and the 21-year lifespan vs. 30-year lifespan. It would have been difficult to find actors who looked 21 who could really do justice to the roles, in my opinion.
In keeping with my preference for "inaccurate" instead of "bad," I'm going to mention
The Crow. The movie was adapted from the graphic novel, and the TV series
The Crow: Stairway to Heaven was mostly adapted from the movie, but with some parts of the graphic novel included (ie. the Skull Cowboy character).
Some people absolutely loathed the TV series - they thought it was too bright and cheerful, and Draven wasn't constantly killing people. But that would have made for one very short series if he had. The focus was changed from revenge to redemption and justice... and when you look at the series as a whole, the gang actually
was being killed off one by one, though not because Draven planned it that way. I suspect that if the series had been allowed to continue (it was renewed but behind-the-scenes crap led to its cancellation), eventually the other gang members would have received their ultimate comeuppances.
Over the years I've heard some Dune fans say they'd love to see an adaptation of
God Emperor of Dune. In my opinion, any adaptation of that would have to be an inaccurate one, because so much of it is just various characters listening to Leto II pontificating and yapping about his Other Memories or some self-aggrandizing praise. This is one time in which I'd have to favor more action and less talk, because the talking part of the book is just so damn
boring (I really don't like Leto II
).
Another movie that is quite different in places from the novel is
Contact (based on the novel by Carl Sagan). The movie pares Ellie's family right down to nothing, whereas in the novel her mother is still alive and there's family tension about her father. The romance between Ellie and Palmer Joss doesn't exist in the novel (the two characters have a wary mutual respect, but no romance). And the movie completely misses the interesting stuff about the character of S.R. Hadden (it helps to have a bit of a background in classical history, as the character was named after an Assyrian king).
I don't think the changes really take much away from the basic story, though, and this remains one of my favorite movies.
