Ahem.
Lord of the Rings!
(leaves before any explosives can harm him)
I meant books into movies.
Phew.
I have a couple of examples of video games made into movies made into books. Resident Evil (twice). They weren’t great literature, but good for livening a boring train journey.
Video game made into a movie - Tomb Raider. For all I know they’ve made a book of the movie plots.
I’ve read a few books because there was a movie made of them - Black Hawk Down and Jarhead spring to mind, and I never even saw the Jarhead movie.
Also read Band of Brothers and a lot of other Stephen Ambrose titles after watching the Band of Brothers TV series based on the books.
Movie that was pretty much what I hoped for after reading the book - The Green Mile.
Video to movie - you missed MORTAL KOMBAT. Four times.
djm
WE TRY NOT TO REMEMBER.
One of the most made and remade movies from a book: Pride and Prejudice. Both book and most of the movies were wonderful.
And Wuthering Heights!
Plays into movies are really hard, because plays are,
well, stagey and movies don’t do well so confined.
The Winslow Boy was very good, I thought. David
Mamet directed.
Back to classic novels,
Sense and Sensibility, the movie written and
starring Emma Thomson, and also starring
Kate Winslet. Thomson won an academy award
for best screenplay adapted from a novel.
I love those books. And I thought the movies were really good—I really did enjoy them very much. But they made changes, for understandable reasons from what little I’ve heard about it, that I could not accept. So I couldn’t say that the movies were at the top of my list for a successful adaptation which for me would not change the way things were in the book, especially things I thought were quite important. Just my opinion.
LOTR is a perfect example. This is a fantasy world where you have to imagine everything in the books for yourself, and for the characters, you not only have to imagine the character, but often the character’s species, as well. I love Alan Lee’s visions for the artistic design of the movies (his Rivendale should have received an award or something), but I thought many of the characters miscast - naturally! I’m sure we each of us had different ideas than what was settled on in the films, and with such enormously widely-read books, you just get that many more opinions. Stuff like historical drama has a much more clearly defined set of rules of how things look, how people dress and behave, etc. but when you get into fantasy, the author paints just enough of a world to relate the tale. The rest is up to us.
And Cynth, I entirely agree with you on stuff having been cut from the LOTR films. Many agree, but seldom on the same parts. For me, it was cutting Tom Bombadil out completely. Not only is this character absolutely central to Tolkein’s enitre philosophy, but they had the perfect Bombadil in Rhys-Davies.
As I noted above for the Potter movies, films like LOTR can serve to flesh out visual ideas when we don’t personally have enough data to come up with our own clear images. The LOTR films certainly provide this imagery in spades. I guess the conflict only comes when we strongly disagree at points where our personal vision violently clashes with the films’.
djm
We know you only watch that for Chris Barrie anyways… 
Movie that was pretty much what I hoped for after reading the book - The Green Mile.
I really enjoyed The Green Mile when it came out, very “powerful” if you’ll pardon the pun, even “electrifying.”