The 15 Worst Movies Based On Books

"The Maltese Falcon," "The Godfather," "Jaws," "Die Hard," and many other film classics are literary adaptations. Clearly, there is a longstanding and fruitful path of turning books into excellent movies — and sometimes the movies are better than the books they're based on.

But are these wonderful films the exception or the rule? Does something inherently get lost in translation from book to film? Is a successful adaptation purely a case-by-case, filmmaker-by-filmmaker, book-by-book basis? Or is the decision to turn a best-seller into a motion picture just another indication of Hollywood's cynical churning of familiarity into intellectual property?

I don't have the answers. What I have are some stunning examples of what happens when everything in any of these processes goes terribly, startlingly wrong. Some are entertaining in their camp, some are jaw-dropping failures, and all are dreadful adaptations. Here, then, are the 15 worst movies based on books. Push up your reading glasses, get your best nerdy voice, and repeat after me: "The book was better."

"Artemis Fowl," the book from Eoin Colfer, is a beloved piece of fantasy storytelling that kicked off a series concerning the title character, a master criminal with increasing wrinkles to his villainy, and elf policewoman Holly Short.

Kenneth Branagh directed the live-action film adaptation for Disney in 2020. All of that seems like a slam dunk, right? Well, if you've watched "Artemis Fowl" on Disney+, you'll know it's more like an attempt at a half-court three-pointer that bounces off the head of the mascot before hitting the shooter in the nuts.

"Artemis Fowl" is an astounding failure, striking in its crassness, borderline incompetent in its construction, and often full of CGI gags that cross into the grotesque. As Artemis himself, Ferdia Shaw does as decent a job as he could have, given that he was surrounded by the repercussions of some of the most ludicrous decisions made by filmmakers in recent years.

Many people know "Battlefield Earth" as one of the greatest misfires in movie history, a benchmark in the Bad Movie Canon. But did you recall that it started life as a book?

"Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000" was published in 1982 by L. Ron Hubbard, a name you might recall as the founder of Scientology. Hubbard's work concerns an Earth taken over by an evil alien race called Psychlos, and the heroic efforts of young human Jonnie Goodboy Tyler to bring the planet back to order. As you might imagine, it's a very strange read.

The movie is, somehow, stranger. Released in 2000, it stars Barry Pepper as Jonnie and John Travolta as lead Psychlo Terl; it was a bit of a passion project for noted Scientologist Travolta. In the hands of director Roger Christian, it's a cacophonous assortment of canted angles, ugly color correction, and miserable performances. It's like if "Batman Forever" got hit in the head with a big hammer.

After watching "Blonde," Andrew Dominik's adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel, I didn't feel like I understood its subject, Marilyn Monroe, any better. In fact, I felt more confused than before. It's a film that offers negative knowledge, anti-insight, and emotional atrophy.

Oates' novel isn't a traditional biography of the iconic actor, and neither is Dominik's take. "Blonde" seems to be more interested in vaulting familiar moments of cultural iconography into the realm of classical tragedy or avant-garde melodrama. It wants to mean something so bad, and it has no idea how.

Its attempts involve shifting aspect ratios, switching between film stocks and color temperatures, pulverizing sound design, and placing its lead (Ana de Armas, innocent) through a litany of degrading horrors. It feels like the worst impulses of Oliver Stone and Darren Aronofsky smushed together into a kind of edgy film-bro slop. It's a horrifying, ugly dream. I don't recommend it!

Here is another notorious Hollywood flop, so publicly disastrous that it inspired a notable book of film journalism, "The Devil's Candy," written by Julie Salamon.

The novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities," written by Tom Wolfe, is a biting, thorough study of the excesses and problems bubbling throughout the elite society of 1980s New York. Wolfe uses a trio of characters with high-profile jobs — a bond trader, an assistant district attorney, and a journalist — to interrogate racism, class, crime, and ambition. It's more "Baz Luhrmann's 'The Great Gatsby'" than his actual adaptation.

The film version had so much going for it. Its director, Brian De Palma, is one of my favorites, and its star-studded cast (Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman, F. Murray Abraham) stuns to this day. But in execution, it's shallow, obvious, and clearly sanitized for fans of the book. Salamon's book details the many inside-baseball problems with the production, and Hanks, long seen as Hollywood's nicest guy, agrees that this is the crappiest movie he's ever made.

Daisy Ridley was the hero of the new "Star Wars" trilogy. Tom Holland was the Spider-Man of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But when their stars collided in an action sci-fi adaptation of a popular YA novel, everything that could go wrong did.

"Chaos Walking" adapts "The Knife of Never Letting Go," the first book of Patrick Ness' "Chaos Walking" trilogy. Holland plays Todd Hewitt, a young kid who lives in a dystopian world without women and with constant, telepathic access to the universe's thoughts. But when Viola Eade (Ridley) crash-lands on their planet, the two must team up, escape persecution, and reveal unforeseen truths.

Doug Liman directed the adaptation, and even in his history of difficult productions, "Chaos Walking" stands alone. They started shooting in 2017, got terrible test screenings, couldn't start reshoots until after Ridley and Holland were done filming "Rise of Skywalker" and "Far From Home," and eventually had said reshoots directed by Fede Álvarez. The resulting mess, finally released in 2021, is, in a word, chaotic. Why can't Daisy Ridley catch a break beyond "Star Wars"?

Stephen King is maybe our most popular author with a whole cinematic universe of adaptations of his many works. Some of them, like "The Shining" or "Christine," are masterpieces. And then there's "The Dark Tower."

For one, the 2017 adaptation attempted to combine several titles of King's eight-book series into one 95-minute action-thriller. I love a short film as much as anyone, but to adequately convey King's genre-blending, mythologized world and characters, one needs room. Nikolaj Arcel's film offers his own material as little room as possible, smushing together iconic figures like sharpshooter Roland Deschain (Idris Elba) and the villainous Walter Paddick (Matthew McConaughey) into a frenzy of ugly images and generalized pablum.

However, King himself kind of enjoyed "The Dark Tower" adaptation, saying that he thought co-screenwriter "Akiva Goldsman did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I thought was a pretty good movie." And that's better than what he said about Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining."

"The Electric State," released in 2018, is an elegant, intriguing, and satirical graphic novel following a young girl and her robot companion across a dystopian, hyper-consumerist America to reunite with her brother. Simon Stålenhag's work is completely different — and way better — than the Netflix movie.

The Russo Brothers' film adaptation, released in 2025, is the apotheosis of the literal worst ways to interpret all of this wonderful material. It cynically strips the basest cores of Stålenhag's ideas, like "consumerism," and blows it up into a garish, CGI-addled, "Ready Player One" cornucopia of bloat and misplaced celebration.

Red flags began to rise when the Russos talked about their creative process publicly. Of the graphic novel's original narrative, Anthony Russo literally said that "it's kind of hard to understand it... You can tell there's a much larger world behind what [Stålenhag's] telling you in the graphic novel that you can only guess at." Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't trust a storyteller who says out loud that he's guessing at how to tell a story he doesn't understand.

"The Giver" was an essential childhood text for me (and Kate McKinnon in "Barbie"). Lois Lowry's 1993 masterpiece sensitively but scarily introduces her young readers to a dystopian world hiding under the guise of perfection. It suggests that imagination, empathy, and individuality are our greatest tools in the fight against oppression, a beautiful and haunting sentiment.

The movie version of "The Giver" doesn't do any of this crap. Instead, director Philip Noyce flattens everything out into a generic, junkily shot "Hunger Games" knockoff. Lowry's prose is already cinematic, even suggesting color and the lack thereof as key benchmarks to understanding the hidden truth of this derelict society. But the movie sidesteps all of these intrigues and wrinkles, instead stating its themes and subtexts directly, filling in what played better elliptically with patronizing bluntness.

In writing "The Giver," Lowry trusted her young readers with complicated thoughts and shades of gray. The adaptation trusts no one, blasting the viewer with full-color, generic simplicity.

Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" is a novel with a wide purview. When a terrorist attack at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art kills his mother, young Theo Decker manages to escape with Carel Fabritius's "The Goldfinch," a painting, at the insistence of a dying man in the museum's rubble. We then follow Theo through his young adult life as he struggles with the tragedy, attempts to reconnect with troubled people from his past, and discovers how far a goldfinch can fly.

Its film adaptation, however, has clipped wings from the start, despite Academy Award-winning Peter Straughan being the screenwriter behind the translation. Director John Crowley knows how to make images look technically beautiful, but in his construction of "beautiful images," he removes any actual life from the complicated material. "The Goldfinch" becomes a pretty piece of nothing, a toothless, slow-paced, and ultimately empty piece of prestige-coded trash.

As for Tartt, well, she dropped her literary agent after the film's release because she couldn't get a screenwriting or producing credit, so that probably tells you what she thinks of the final film product.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the Hulu television adaptation of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," one of the best sci-fi books of all time. Before that show became the "Handmaid's Tale" adaptation, the bizarre but admittedly intriguing team of director Volker Schlöndorff and writer Harold Pinter took a stab at a 1990 feature film.

This film stars Natasha Richardson as Kate, a woman struggling to fight against the sexist, totalitarian government known as the Republic of Gilead (formerly known as the United States of America). Richardson is basically left out to dry in the work, functioning less as a character than a cypher to endure terrible acts of sexual trauma and violence before any sense of late-film, obligatory activation or intention. Atwood's text is upsetting; Schlöndorff's film is what I might call "icky."

For his part, Pinter basically disowned the final product, telling his director that he could contact Atwood herself if any script changes needed to be made. His reasoning, in his own words: "I didn't think an author would want to f*** up her own work."

Released one year before "The Hunger Games" blew the door open on Hollywood YA adaptations, "I Am Number Four" pushed on a door that clearly said "Pull". Originally written by the collective pseudonym Pittacus Lore (a combination of up to three authors, including the controversial James Frey), the lore (pun intended) of "I Am Number Four" concerns young John Smith, an alien caught in the crossfire between two warring species. There's a lineage of nine powerful children who must be killed in sequential order, and well, John is number four.

That's an interesting, if grim, hook to lay a story's hat on. But the film, directed by vulgar auteur D. J. Caruso, complicates and obfuscates this central hook with all kinds of loud nonsense. It's an overpowered watch, resulting in no power at all (beyond the power to give one a headache).

In 2024, Frey said that a reboot of "I Am Number Four" was in the works from, puzzlingly, the original screenwriting that made this mess, though nothing of substance has been announced since.

Let's begin our survey of this film with the indelible words of iconic film critic Roger Ebert. Of "North," he said in his review, "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."

So, uh, yeah! "North," not such a good movie! Based on a novel by humorist Alan Zweibel, the Rob Reiner-directed adaptation casts Elijah Wood as the title character, a young child who wants to "divorce" his parents and travels across the world to find better ones (it also features Scarlett Johansson in her acting debut).

This is a strange premise for a film, and it is made even stranger, though not in any way more endearing, in execution. It's mean-spirited, tonally boggling, and features Bruce Willis in multiple, broadly-pitched characters meant to function as supernatural advisors to North. One of them is the Easter Bunny. It's really bad.

A piece of required reading in many high school English classes, Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel "The Scarlet Letter" concerns Hester Prynne, a woman in a Puritan colony who conceives a child out of wedlock and is forced to wear a red "A" on her chest to mark her as an adulterer. It's a thorough examination of guilt, dogma, and human desire.

It has a great film adaptation: 2010's "Easy A," a high school comedy version of the tale starring Emma Stone as a teen who decides to sew an "A" on herself when rumors of promiscuity start to spread. But it also has a terrible, and more literal, film adaptation: 1995's "The Scarlet Letter," starring Demi Moore as Hester Prynne and Gary Oldman as the Reverend with whom she has an affair. Directed by Roland Joffé, the film veers into cheesy erotic thriller territory, changing many essential parts of Hawthorne's work along the way — including, most annoyingly, its ending.

It's a colossal failure in adaptation, but Moore defended some of its changes, saying, "We take the audience on such a sad and tragic journey of loss and pain that the ultimate message of Hester Prynne would have been lost if we'd stayed with the original ending." Just don't expect to find her "ultimate message" by watching this movie.

"The Snowman" feels, without exaggeration or snark, like an unfinished film. And that's because it literally is. Based on a novel by Jo Nesbø, and greenlit in the newly burgeoning American appreciation of "Nordic noir" like "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," the thriller follows Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender), a detective trying to find a killer who makes snowmen at his crime scenes. On paper, it's a little silly, maybe, but it sounds at least like a serviceable crime flick, right?

Wrong, in every conceivable way. It's incomprehensibly edited, disorienting the viewer with a bizarre lack of causal effect and some dreadfully poor performances from an ensemble cast full of ringers. As it turns out, director Tomas Alfredson didn't have a chance to actually shoot the entire screenplay, missing as much as 15% of the story when it came time to edit. He placed the blame on abruptly shortened production schedules and lack of funding, explaining to the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation "our shoot time in Norway was way too short, we didn't get the whole story with us and when we started cutting we discovered that a lot was missing. It's like when you're making a big jigsaw puzzle and a few pieces are missing so you don't see the whole picture."

In other words, and to borrow from its poster, they were not given all the clues.

"The Woman in the Window" is such a maligned Netflix film that it inspired a separate, satirical Netflix series, "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window". The original novel from A. J. Finn will remind many of "Rear Window" — an agoraphobic woman watches the outside world through her window and sees her neighbors commit a murder. Can she move past her fears and stop them? Will anyone believe her along the way?

The adaptation has a litany of incredible talent: direction from Joe Wright, a screenplay from Tracy Letts, an incredible cast including Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Bryan Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Julianne Moore. If this team wanted to knock off a serviceable suspense thriller, I'd bet it would be pretty rad. Instead, everything is overcranked into the realm of unintentional comedy, camp, and incoherence. The film feels like everyone involved was conked on the head before shooting, and conked once more in the editing bay for good measure. It's undeniably fascinating and undeniably awful.