What book do you feel deserved a much better media adaptation than what it got?

It wasn't necessarily 'bad', but I think they could have done better with Ender's Game.

As soon as I heard about the movie I knew they were gonna milk the laser fight scenes for far more than they were worth.

I know this is a total pipe dream that never would've happened, but I wish they either just focused on Bean or just made a philosophical epic out of Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide instead.
- Ender's Shadow would actually be an excellent way for them to soft reboot the series.
I think it would have been better as a TV series. They glossed over the battle school battles too quickly. And in making it a series, they could have done Ender's Shadow at the same time.

Eragon never got a movie.

Atla never got a movie

These things are true.

Eragon was not a great book. It was a decent premise, the characters and story had potential. Given it was written by a teenager, it's very impressive.

But Mr Paolini must look back on it and cringe so bad. I'd actually like him to go back and reboot it now as a mature author.
- I mean are you judging it as the target market?
  
  It was a young adult book. I refer to it as baby's first high fantasy.
  
  Do 8-12 year old boys that will love super long high fantasy later in life probably still love it? I would bet money.
  
  But of course as adults we look down on the young adult book. Basically all young adult books seem not well made as adults.
  
  I know a handful of exceptions, but they stand out in my head as remarkable because they were exceptions.

World War Z The movie only shares a name with the book. Everything else is bullshit.

The audiobook is really excellent and I sometimes get frustrated that they didn't just add a camera and call it a TV show.
- I should give that a try!

Wheel of Time is currently getting fanfic-ed into oblivion by the showrunners. I'm watching it anyway to see the characters come alive but some of it hurts.

I'm only on book 3 of WoT but decided to check out the first few episodes of the show anyways -- I think some of the changes were wild and out of left field and some were very reasonable. Like skipping the first few towns of the journey makes sense, and introducing Tom at a slightly later point cause he's kinda useless before that.

I did stop watching and had an existential crisis when they showed Waygates just being basically Minecraft Nether Portals haha Oh and channeling looks SO GOOFY in the show!
It's tragic really, I actually quite like everything apart from the script. I knew from the get that they would have to cut a lot of stuff and merge some books - which to be honest is fine, plenty of stuff that doesn't need to go in - but I don't understand their need to manufacture melodrama. It feels like every episode nothing happens but we're still flying through the plot.

Just a complete failure to match the tone/cadence of the books. So much time should be spent traveling and exploring the world, but the show chooses to sit around and have overdramatic unexplained scenes that won't make any sense to someone who hasn't read the books. I'm still not sure who the target audience is.
I gave up halfway through the Shadar Logoth episode (near the beginning of season 1).

I could overlook the individual annoying little details, such as Lan complaining that his bath's not hot enough, but the big issue I have is the tone. The books have an air of romantic optimism which, on the screen, ought to play out much more like Lord of the Rings than Game of Thrones. The series just discards that, going modern grimdark grittiness, and as a consequence something essential seems to be lost.

Most of them? Lord of the Rings is the exception not the rule

Plus Princess Bride. I actually prefer the film.
- The book Jurassic Park is great, I’ll take the movie every time given the choice
  
  But these are all still exceptions, adaptations are usually best when they are either extremely book accurate or handled by a competent artist and not a studio or group of producers

World War Z.

Book: Absolutely brilliant "documentary" from the survivors of a fictional zombie outbreak. Goes deep in to the details of high command and front line soldiers about how their initial assumptions were flawed and the ethical nightmare they were faced on a day to day basis. From wondering if they are killing infected people that could eventually be cured to strategically letting uninfected cities be used as zombie bait giving them time to prepare defenses elsewhere. All told way after the fact when the charcters have benefit of hindsight giving them lots of room to be reminest, express regret and throw shade at each other on why someone ELSES arrogance got people killed. Super funny writing and a nice tide clever book overall.

Movie: Brad Pitt, playing a non-scientist, runs around and finds the cure for the zombie virus in like two days. Forgettable action movie that does nothing unique or interesting.

Audiobook: Full voice casted by A list names who absolutely nail it. Faithful to the original text and lightyears ahead of. the movie. IMHO, it's the best audiobook experince around.

The North Korea section of the book was so creepy, I still think about that from time to time.
Fantastic book. Ok movie that seemed like it wasn’t related to the book at all. The scariest part is that the book accurately predicted how humans would react to an outbreak like Covid. Spoiler alert: not well.

Not the best Crichton novel, but Sphere. The book was a fun read but not even the combined powers of Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson could make the movie adaptation palatable.

I liked the book.

Before reading your last sentence, I was thinking Eragon.

We can hope for redemption. https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/eragon-tv-series-disney-plus-1235325019/

For kids books, I thought The Spiderwick Chronicles movie was unnecessarily shitty.

Animorphs. The show was atrocious, which is a crime because the books were amazing.

Di Vinci Code was butchered, and I’m sorry to say it but Hanks was the wrong choice for Robert Langdon.

I mostly enjoyed the book until the antagonist made such a huge error by revealing himself way too early that it ruined the whole thing for me. The other books in the series also had major issues that just ruined them as well.

Catch 22

I thought the 2019 mini-series was pretty decent.
- Trailer sure as hell looked better than the original which butchered that amazing book.

All Terry Pratchett adaptations. I think Hogfather is my favourite but still feels awkward. None have matched the tone, wit, and character depth in the books quite right and just feels wrong. To me, it seems like the perfect book series for a faithful multi-season adaptation, but has so far eluded those who have tried.

I loved the Timeline book from Crichton, but one look at the trailer for the movie, I decided to not watch it. It looked really bad. 5.6 on imdb sort of backs that up I guess.

Indeed. I saw that movie and it was pretty bad. The book, like most of his novels, was a good read though.
- I loved the book. The movie trailer made me ashamed of liking the book.

Artemis Fowl, Ella Enchanted, Inkheart. I loved these books as a kid, but none of the movies were good adaptations.

The giver

Gawwwd. The trailer sunk my stomach, and the worst part was not being able to explain the OBVIOUS problems with the concept without spoiling what made the book great.

I don't think we've had a single good adaption of an Isaac Asimov story - Foundation the show is very clearly not Foundation the series and I Robot is...not even worth acknowledging and infuriates me because like, if they wanted to do a murder mystery about Asimov's robots and call into question his "laws", Caves of Steel is right there and it's great. I'd love a good adaption of Caves of Steel but nooo lets all adapt the nigh impossible to adapt because it's dense as all fuck Foundation instead because that's the story everyone knows.

Also because you've mentioned kids media - How to Train your Dragon. The original series was this fun and interesting world where dragons have existed along humanity since the beginning and were our friends and work animals and the main character was a legitimately weak kid who was more interested in being a biologist and was legitimately pretty good at it, being able to actually talk to them and he had friends and Toothless was this highly entertaining small sassy green thing who was like, the world's equivalent of a house sparrow. And then DreamWorks took the title and base concept of "dragons and vikings" and threw everything else out for a generic movie with a generic protangonist in a generic fantasy setting. The dragons are now big and scary but the main character goes out to prove that they're not big and scary and Toothless is now just a giant dumb cat who's the world's equivalent of an invisible fire breathing polar bear but it's ok because Hiccup is special and they replaced the fun gremlin Kamikazi with the generic female love interest character who's trait is being better than the boys. But because everyone adores it we're never going to get an actual adaption that actually follows the books are we?

Also Solaris deserves a good adaption that isn't actively hostile to anyone who isn't interested in avant garde Soviet cinema. Stanislav Lem's one of my favourite authors and because of that fucking film it's legitimately hard to recomend Solaris the book to people because they're like "oh I tried watching it and it was really boring and confusing and overly arthouse?"

Also also I haven't actually seen them but like, is there any adaption of Wuthering Heights that's actually like, accurate? Because I've read the book and every time I talk to someone who's only seen the movie or TV adaptions it feels like they're talking about a completely different story that's just like, "Austen but kinda deranged" and not the batshit anti-Austen sturm und drang trainwreck that is the actual story (and also they apparently kinda ignore the last third of the book with Cathy 2 and Linton and Hareton?)

I want to say Percy Jackson, but the series seem on the right track to fixing this.

The series looks excellent so far! I am so freaking excited!

Annihilation. The book had such incredible imagery that was left completely out of the movie. The entire tone was different.

Maze Runner series. The first movie was fairly loyal but they split entirely from the books from the 2nd film onward.