Beloved Book-to-Movie Adaptations That Disappointed Fans and Left a Lasting Impact

Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series has been a hit with readers since his first book, “The Lightning Thief,” was published in 2005. Five years later, the film adaptation was made, but fans were disappointed at how far removed the movie was from the book, as Hollywood aged characters and sped up plotlines. Although it was a major stepping stone in Alex Daddario’s transformation, it didn’t earn her much critical acclaim.

“Obviously art is subjective … but to me ‘The Lightning Thief’ is a sloppy, poorly-written, bland movie that there really isn’t any reason to watch over any other YA adaptation,” one Redditor wrote. Another fan of the book shared, “I think the director just looked up Percy Jackson on Wikipedia.”

It wasn’t just the fans who were disappointed in the on-screen version of “The Lightning Thief” and the following 2013 film, “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: Sea of Monsters.” Riordan was vocal about his stories being unrecognizable, telling a fan in a now-deleted tweet (per Variety), “Well, to you guys, it’s a couple hours’ entertainment. To me, it’s my life’s work going through a meat grinder when I pleaded with them not to do it.” The author told the publication, “After the movie experience, I basically wrote off Hollywood for a long, long time. I really didn’t want to have anything to do with the film industry.”

“Confessions of a Shopaholic,” by Sophie Kinsella is a delightful read that follows Becky Bloomwood and her penchant for impulse spending, which gets her into a deep financial hole, all while providing witty commentary in the first person. The book, which became a series, takes place in London, which is essential, as Bloomwood references famous landmarks like Oxford Street and Boots. However, the filmmakers decided to completely change the setting to New York City. While still a fabulous location, fans of the series railed against the switch-up.

“I adore adore this book series and have read every other book Sophie Kinsella has put out. About to start her latest actually. But I HATED the movie! They made far far too many changes,” one fan wrote on Reddit. Another stated, “I was and am upset they Americanized it for the film. The excuse was they wanted to combine ‘Confessions’ and ‘Takes Manhattan’ but it ended up not good. Great cast, terrible execution.”

Eoin Colfer’s fantasy series “Artemis Fowl” is not your typical children’s book, as it centers around a tween boy with genius, criminal tendencies. As Fowl tries to replenish his family fortune by kidnapping a fairy police officer for ransom, he largely remains stoic and focused on his enterprises, while sometimes showing glimpses of his humanity. 

The film version of the book, released in 2020 by Disney, turned Fowl into a much more family-friendly character. “It was a decision based on a sort of inverse take on what I saw in the books, which was Eoin introducing Artemis gathering a sense of morality across the books. He said that he had him preformed as an 11-year-old Bond villain,” director Kenneth Branagh exclusively told Slash Film. “It seemed to me that for the audiences who were not familiar with the books, this would be a hard, a hard kind of thing to accept.”

Fans of the series did not like Disney’s take on the morally corrupt Fowl, with one X user ranting, “He’s not a hero. He’s a criminal mastermind, not a f***ing surfer. I guarantee you nobody at Disney has even read the series, let alone the first book. The author APPROVED this s***?” Another posted, “Um… so I see this movie is titled ‘Artemis Fowl’ but I don’t see an arrogant, genius thief who discovers the fairy world ON HIS OWN and then decides to rob them.”

Stephen King books have been remade into cinematic masterpieces for years, but the movie version of “The Dark Tower” series fell flat. What should have been a great film with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey as the leads failed to capture the depth of King’s series about a gunslinger on a quest to find The Man in Black and the Dark Tower. 

While Elba and McConaughey gave the movie star quality, the plot and dialogue were panned by critics. “‘The Dark Tower’ is hollow. It is soulless. It is a film that never quite figured out what it wanted to be, and so elected to be nothing much at all,” reviewer Brian Tallerico wrote on Roger Ebert’s website. “The Dark Tower’ plays it so safe and takes so few risks that its greatest sin is in being the one thing those formative books never were for so many people: forgettable.”

Viewers also slammed “The Dark Tower” for attempting to cram King’s series into one movie, and failing badly while doing so. “Imagine someone told all of ‘Game of Thrones’ in one movie that was just an hour and a half, then cut out 99% of the story,” one fan wrote on IMDb. An X user echoed the same sentiment, writing, “That ‘Dark Tower’ movie was like if they tried to do all the ‘Harry Potter’ books in a single short movie.”