Almost all good movies are adapted from good books. Just ask Walt Disney, who built an empire by pilfering the classics and transporting them on to the silver screen.

After the movie, there’s always some pretentious asshole who has read the book too, and he’s like ‘the book was far superior.’ Yeah, well you know what I liked about the movie? It was two hours long and didn’t require any reading, so fuck that guy. But sometimes he’s right, and a good book is just raped and ruined by it’s film counterpart to the point of no return. So we’ll take a look at some of the worst offenders of bad movies made from good books.

Start the list

1. The Cat in the Hat

Never has all the charm and enjoyment been so thoroughly drained from a piece of children’s literature as in The Cat in the Hat. Mike Myers is so atrocious as the lead character that he didn’t appear on-screen for another five years after this film was made. Somewhere, the good Dr. Seuss is still rolling over in his grave.

2. Battlefield Earth

The book was penned by Scientologist creator L. Ron Hubbard, and some would say that it isn’t any good either. But it did top every best-seller list in the country, including The New York Times, so it was atleast popular. The reason this movie scores so high is that it is considered by many to be the worst film ever made. Period. John Travolta pushed like crazy to get the film produced for twenty years, and when it finally did hit theaters, it was such a colossal failure that it put Franchise Pictures out of business after they had to lie about budget to recoup some costs. A giant mess.

3. Pinocchio

Calm down, not the Disney version, but the live action 2002 edition starring fifty year old Roberto Benigni in the title role. He is so horribly miscast and the whole film is such a garrish nightmare that it’s hard to watch, If Pinocchio were a real boy, I’d kick him in the junk and make him sit through his own unbearable movie.

4. Big Bounce

The author of the book of the same name, Elmore Leonard, is King of the modern novel. His works have been adapted in to undeniably kick ass movies like Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, and 3:10 to Yuma. So what happened here? A strong cast featuring Morgan Freeman, Gary Sinise and Owen Wilson fail miserably to even come up with anything resembling entertainment. Owen Wilson spends most of the movie attempting to be charming, and appears to be simply killing time on-screen. Nothing happens, and at the end, you just wish you had your hour and a half back.

5. Sound of Thunder

Ray Bradbury wrote a chilling story about futuristic tourists who travel back in time so they can participate in a T-Rex hunt. Except something goes wrong on one of the trips, and when they return their world is drastically changed. The writing works off the premise that even the tiniest of alterations, like a crushed butterfly, will ripple over time and change the future dramatically. The movie works off the premise that Ed Burns can act. Which he can’t. If Sound of Thunder were alive I would strangle it in public.

6. Dune

Dune is by no means even close to the worst movie on this list, but it was panned relentlessly by fans of the book, and even the director, David Lynch, eventually had his named removed from the project. What should have been a mind-bending trip through space, turned in to an ugly, stilted disaster. Frank Herbert must have been pissed.

7. The Scarlet Letter

A classic American novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and set in Puritan Boston, The ScarletLetter was a powerful story about sin, guilt, and repentance. The movie starred Demi Moore and strayed from the original script with disastrous results. It was nominated for every Raspberry award that year, and failed miserably at the box office results. To be honest I have no idea if this film was any good. I slept through the entire thing.

8. Island of Dr. Moreau

If H.G. Wells were alive he would have pistol whipped Frankenheimer for adapting his novel so poorly. What was a social commentary on genetic engineering and it’s imoral implications, is instead a tragic deluge of CG effects, over-wrought direction, and second rate acting, despite the presence of Marlon Brando, who plays the title role.

9. Around the World in 80 Days

The 2004 vesion was a monumental failure. It veered so wildly from the Jules Verne novel, and seemed to make chronological mistakes on purpose for the sake of comedy. Jackie Chan weas added as a wacky sidekick to the circumnavigator Phileas Fogg, who for some reason was transformed in to a wacky inventor. The original film with David Niven was good, so watch that if you would like to see a respectful adaptation of the incomparable Verne.

10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Wildly inventive and humorous tale by Douglas Adams about a human who escapes a doomed earth and travels the galaxy with the help of an intergalactic handbook. The only good part of the movie was when it ended. Horribly cast and poorly executed. Watch it and vomit.