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When were adaptations good in your experience? How did, say, Hitchhiker's Guide and Princess Bride pull it off whereas other adaptations didn't? And are there truly more worse adaptations (or a higher percentage), or just a chunk of high-profile... well, not flops, since a lot of what I'd consider "bad adaptations" are still popular and making bank, as you yourself say.
Was a radio show before it was a book. (Or at least the first two books were - the rather obscure later series of the radio show were based on the later books).
The BBC TV show is supposed to be an adaptation of the radio show, not the book. I'm not sure about the other material in the franchise.
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Making a good adaptation is hard. Making a faithful adaptation is hard. Making a good adaptation that is faithful to the source material is a Herculean task.
Faithful adaptations are hard because when you shift medium, you lose tools that are available to the source material. The easiest example is a book written in first person. Even if you try to approximate that experience in film with tools like narration, you lose the immediacy of the written experience. This is why Stephen King film adaptations almost universally suck, for example.
At the same time, making a good adaptation is hard because you run straight into the problems of Hollywood filmmaking. Writing about things is cheap. Putting them on a screen requires money for fim crews, sets, special effects, actors, insurance, and God only knows what else. At the same time there are extensive pressures at every level for people to "put their mark" on the property, which is compounded by industry-wide disrespect for a lot of fiction (see: The Witcher).
To get both, you need a talented, obsessive individual with a ton of industry clout, fuck-you money, and a willingness to put his own ego aside in service to the original property. Good luck finding many of them.
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Let's have a look at what Rotten Tomatoes considers the 300 best movies of all time:
That's just from the top fifty: according to ChatGPT, 29% of the list are adaptations of one kind or another.
Counterpoint - just because something is a good movie doesn't make it a good adaptation. Have you read the original Wizard of Oz? The movie changed a ton of things for better or worse. Dorothy is younger in the books and they're generally more silly and childlike, almost more akin to Alice in Wonderland just in some of the whimsical scenarios that come up. Wizard of Oz is one where actually the movie had more staying power and firmly grounded itself in the public consciousness, probably thanks to all those syndicated network broadcasts over the years.
Point taken, although I took @thejdizzler's point to be "Hollywood no longer knows how to make adaptations that are good movies" rather than "Hollywood no longer knows how to make faithful adaptations".
Roughly yes. I don’t mind if an adaption strays from the canon as long as the changes reinforce the themes that I think the story is aiming for.
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I liked Hitchhiker's Guide for capturing the atmosphere of the book(s) really well. The Lord of the Rings I also really enjoyed. Anything Kubrick has done (other than Clockwork Orange) is a good adaption in my books. The first Jurassic Park movie is a really good adaption as well.
I think 2001: A Space Odyssey is particularly interesting as an example of a movie and novel that were co-written simultaneously, so neither is directly an adaptation of the other.
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Harry Potter. It had flaws including attempts to cram too much in, but the movies were pretty good.
Strong disagree. The Harry Potter movies are AWFUL. They are like a highlights reel of all the books' best action and dramatic moments (or entirely invented action and dramatic moments, like the burning of the Burrow) without any of the plot threads or character development that actually make those moments MEAN something. They are impossible to follow if you have never read the novels.
Only the first two are good, precisely because they stick close to the source material.
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