10 Movie Franchises That Lost Sight Of Their Source Material

Plenty of big movie franchises started out as book adaptations, but to sustain a long-running franchise, some creative decisions have to be made. There are only a few franchises which have the material to remain faithful adaptations right until the end, but for every Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, there are countless other franchises which exhaust their source material and have to come up with new plans.

Long-running franchises like James Bond and Jurassic Park may have started out as book adaptations, but the number of movies outstripped the number of novels long ago. From this point, franchises face a choice over whether to wrap things up or come up with new and original stories. This can be a success, as it has been with Shrek, or it can be the start of a rapid decline in quality like the Jaws franchise.

10

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park Has Long Since Forgotten Michael Crichton’s Ideas

The first Jurassic Park is based on the novel by Michael Crichton, but Steven Spielberg takes a few artistic liberties with his adaptation. Spielberg changes some of the characters to fit into his version of the story, particularly the park’s owner, John Hammond, who becomes a sympathetic character rather than the villain he is in the book. Despite these changes, the central idea of the story is very much intact in Spielberg’s blockbuster.

After Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing movie of all time, a sequel was always on the cards. Crichton wrote one more Jurassic Park book, The Lost World, but beyond that, the filmmakers had to concoct their own storylines. The Jurassic World era is completely removed from Crichton’s stories, as the dinosaurs leave the park and spread out all over the world. Jurassic World Rebirth looks as if it may take the franchise in another new direction that has nothing to do with Crichton’s work.

9

Blade Runner

Blade Runner Continues To Expand

Blade Runner is a loose adaptation at best, and the fact that it changes the name of Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? underlines how many original ideas are in the movie. Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk neo-noir thriller does at least stick to the basic plot beats of the novel, although the franchise’s recent rebirth has taken things in an entirely new and unexpected direction.

Starting with Blade Runner 2049, the franchise branched out into uncharted territory, as Denis Villeneuve’s legacy sequel is only concerned with the previous movie, not Dick’s novel. The critical success of the sequel means that Blade Runner appears to have a viable future, and the novel could become little more than a footnote in its history. The upcoming series Blade Runner 2099 is set to expand on the lore of the universe.

8

James Bond

The Spy Franchise Ran Out Of Books Years Ago

The James Bond franchise started out as a big-screen adaptation of Ian Fleming’s popular spy novels, but the recent movies have been completely original stories. In fact, there hasn’t been a James Bond movie directly based on one of Fleming’s books since Casino Royale, and even this was an outlier. It’s the only one of the last nine movies in the franchise based on one of Fleming’s books.

The James Bond movies make several changes to the books, so even when they are direct adaptations, they have their own flair. Fleming may have invented the character, but each actor brings their own particular style to the role. Whoever gets the role of 007 next won’t be compared to the character in the book. They will probably be compared to Daniel Craig and Sean Connery instead. There are no more Bond novels left to adapt, so the story of Bond 26 is also unknown.

7

Shrek

Some Fans Might Not Even Know About Shrek’s Literary Origins

Fans could be forgiven for thinking that Shrek was an original movie, since it’s far more popular than the children’s book it’s based on. William Steig’s book doesn’t share much in common with the movie to begin with. For example, it features Shrek’s parents, he has the ability to breathe fire, and he’s attracted to the princess because she’s so physically repulsive. However, it does broadly outline the story of the first movie, as Shrek sets off on a journey with a talking donkey to rescue a princess from a castle guarded by a dragon.

Shrek 2 takes the confident, original approach of the first movie and dials it up a notch, completely ignoring the precedent set out by the book. By introducing characters like Puss in Boots, the Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming, it underlines its identity as a franchise that mocks fairy tales, although this isn’t a particularly prominent element of the novel. After some Puss in Boots spinoffs, Shrek 5 has no game plan to follow, and there’s no telling how it could shape up.

6

Willy Wonka

Each Iteration Of Wonka Takes The Character Further From His Book Counterpart

Most Roald Dahl adaptations have been made after the author’s death, since his disappointment with 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory caused him to shut the door on most other offers. It would be interesting to see his thoughts on Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, since its more faithful in some ways, but distinctly colored with Burton’s idiosyncratic style in others.

Burton’s adaptation treats the book like a rough outline, but he adds plenty of his own ideas, and the dark, quirky atmosphere is all his own work. Whether Dahl would have admired this or not is up for debate, but he almost certainly would have looked down on Wonka, the prequel starring Timothée Chalamet. It’s worth remembering that Wonka isn’t even the protagonist in Dahl’s book. If Warner Bros. wanted to stick to Dahl’s vision, they would have made Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator instead, the underrepresented sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

5

Jumanji

The Board Game Movie Has Become A Video Game Movie Franchise

The original Jumanji is a fairly faithful adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s children’s book. Van Allsburg later wrote a sequel, Zathura, which was adapted into a much less successful movie in 2005. The franchise could easily have stopped there, but it pressed ahead by ignoring Zathura and returning to the more popular world of Jumanji. However, it had to make plenty of changes to create a new story in the same world.

Related

10 Movie Adaptations Where You Don’t Need To Read The Book First

Reading the book before watching a movie adaptation can often provide added context, but sometimes it’s best not to bother with the book.

One noticeable difference between the first Jumanji movie and its sequels is that the board game becomes a video game in the more recent movies. This is merely a superficial difference to update the premise for a young audience, and it doesn’t affect the plot as much as the decision to have the players traveling into the game, rather than having elements from the game causing chaos in the real world. All the characters and the plot of the two Jumanji sequels are completely original, and with another sequel on the way, the book is a distant memory.

4

Die Hard

Die Hard Spins One Book Into Five Movies

Die Hard‘s literary origins aren’t talked about often, since so much of the movie’s appeal comes from Bruce Willis’ performance and John McTiernan’s flair for explosive action set pieces. Because Die Hard downplays its status as an adaptation, it was free to develop sequels without thinking about the original book, so John McClane’s adventures could get bigger and wilder with each movie.

Die Hard is based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, and it largely sticks to the same blueprint, although John’s wife isn’t in the novel and the terrorists have slightly different goals. Nothing Lasts Forever is actually a sequel itself, following the 1966 novel The Detective. Frank Sinatra plays the hero in the adaptation of The Detective, meaning that he and Bruce Willis played the same character over 20 years apart.

3

Planet Of The Apes

The Prequels Are The Latest Deviation From The Novel

The original Planet of the Apes movie is based on Pierre Boulle’s French-language novel. The movie was such a success that it spawned four sequels that came out in back-to-back years, none of which were firmly rooted in Boulle’s novel. The franchise had to expand on the author’s work, since he never produced a sequel, and it fleshed out the world from the first novel with some unpredictable twists and turns.

Although the franchise lay dormant for decades, it has come roaring back in the 21st century with the prequel series. Starting with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the prequels have imagined a world long before Boulle’s story takes place, charting the downfall of human society as apes gain sentience and begin to develop their own structures as the planet’s dominant species. The prequels have been critically and commercially successful, but they have little in common with the books.

2

Jaws

The Jaws Sequels Never Recaptured The Magic Of The Original

Jaws is a great example of a bad adaptation that turns out to be a great movie. Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster hit chops and changes Peter Benchley’s novel to his liking, removing the unnecessary subplots about the mayor’s links to organized crime and Hooper’s affair with Brody’s wife. This gives the story a more streamlined feel, and it focuses more on the terror of the shark attacks and the compelling dynamic between the three men tasked with hunting it down on the open waters.

Related

10 Great Book Characters Failed By Movie Adaptations

Even in some of the best movies adapted from books, the greatest and most beloved literary characters can devolve into shadows of their former selves.

Peter Benchley co-wrote the script for the first movie, so he clearly sanctioned every change to his work. However, neither he nor Spielberg returned for any of the sequels, and the quality of the franchise quickly plummeted. The sequels create some contrived reasons to stage more gruesome shark attacks, but the novelty wears off quickly, and it starts to get silly before too long. Had Benchley stayed on, the movies could have acted as the sequels that he never wrote.

1

101 Dalmatians

Disney Never Got Round To The Strange Sequel

One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a gorgeously animated movie that represents Disney’s style during the 1960s. It also created one of Disney’s best villains, and Cruella de Vil has since taken center stage. The live-action remake starring Glenn Close heaps more attention onto the dognapping fashionista, and she later got her own origin story starring Emma Stone. Cruella plays a much bigger role in the franchise than she does in the book.

The animated and live-action adaptations of Dodie Smith’s book both received sequels, and both focused on Cruella once again. If Disney wanted to remain more faithful to Smith’s ideas, they could have adapted the sequel she wrote in 1967, The Starlight Barking, a strange sci-fi tale in which a dog descends from outer space and speaks to dogs all over the world about abandoning Earth and joining him in canine paradise.