A fiction with bad source material(s), that could be improved by making it into a movie?

[the December King]

Well, I didn't hate the novels, but I would suspect that the Douglas Nicholas novel Something Red (2013) might be more enjoyable as a movie if we got to see how awesome the protagonist was, instead of listening to everybody's internal monologues of how awesome they thought she was.

But on the other hand, I'd love to see King Rat by China Mi?ville (1998) made into an awesome and musically charged series with Noel Fielding acting as the titular king (think the Hitcher, but a man rat). The book passed into relative obscurity (though at the time it won several awards), but was exciting and had characters that would really catch you visually if done right.

You know what? I reckon that the KingKiller Chronicle would also be better off as a visual. The writing is really good (and for those who like the series, I'd recommend Something Red), but the story can get a bit draggy dealing with the main character's financial woes, and said protagonist otherwise comes off as too perfect- perhaps a visual treatment would make it more, I dunno, engaging.

Aaaand this has just become a post about the movies I'd like to see made, based on books.

I'll see myself out.

 

[Zontar]

GATE definitely qualifies. The premise is a good one: modern world meets typical fantasy setting in the literal sense. Problem is the Light Novels are terribly executed, the manga is the same and the anime is worst because it deals with all the problems A1 has when making shows on top of the story itself being bad.

 

[BrawlMan]

I don't know what the manga of epic shows like Heroic Age or Gurren Lagann or Cowboy Bebop are like, but these are shows that deserve their visual and musical accompaniment. They're better for it by bringing it out onto the screen and letting it flow into our minds.

Cowboy Bebop and Gurren Lagann started off as TV shows first, and then got manga adaptions second.

Wait. That ever happens?

*Runs up a cartoonishly-pointy mountain and shouts*

You lied to me, anime industry! You lied!

As funny as that was, it's less the anime industry, and more that either a media website or a friend of yours were misinformed.

 

[FalloutJack]

I don't know what the manga of epic shows like Heroic Age or Gurren Lagann or Cowboy Bebop are like, but these are shows that deserve their visual and musical accompaniment. They're better for it by bringing it out onto the screen and letting it flow into our minds.

Cowboy Bebop and Gurren Lagann started off as TV shows first, and then got manga adaptions second.

Wait. That ever happens?

*Runs up a cartoonishly-pointy mountain and shouts*

You lied to me, anime industry! You lied!

As funny as that was, it's less the anime industry, and more that either a media website or a friend of yours were misinformed.

Panels at conventions, actually. They were trying to be informative, but I guess they generalized on a few points to save time.

 

[loa]

I think how to train your dragon did that?
Or at least I can't imagine the book being better than the movie.

 

[Fractral]

I think how to train your dragon did that?
Or at least I can't imagine the book being better than the movie.

The books are very, very different in plot and style. I wouldn't say strictly better, but they're very good children's books that get more mature as the series progresses. The first few are wacky comedies whose humor revolves around Hiccup being a loser, and he continues to be a loser well into the series.

OT: Eragon came to mind as a bad series, but to be honest I'm not sure there's any way the books could be improved to the point of being actually good without scrapping everything.
In a similar vein, a wheel of time tv series would be good if it (a) Cut out all the boring shit that happens (b) Skipped straight from book 7 to book 11 (c) Rewrote every female character to be... not how Jordan wrote them. Then it could be on Game of Thrones level. But then it wouldn't be the Wheel of Time we all love to hate to love. (I have never met someone who has read the entire series who doesn't hate it, yet they still read the whole thing)

 

[Vanilla ISIS]

Franchises that are based on toys, such as Transformers, G.I. Joe, He-Man, TMNT (yes, I know there was a comic book before but the version we all know is based on toys).
The "plots" that they came up with for the TV shows (a.k.a 30 minute ads) are really dumb and could easily be improved upon.
Unfortunately, a lot of these movies take the plots straight from those TV shows which is, in my opinion, the main reason why most of them (if not all of them) suck ass.

 

[Mister K]

I agree with the person that mentioned Shaman King. Not only the ending was kind of meh, but other things were kind of dumb too. Example: one guy made himself blind so he could hear and smell better. I guess nobody has heard of headbands or just closing your eyes.

Also, Stephen Kings Mist. It is so much better at least because of the ending. The book has a boring ending where main characters hear the name of a city on a radio and decide to try their luck with it. In a movie, however, the group rides through the mist and sees nothing except for mist and monsters. They stop. Everyone asleep, except for Main Character and a woman. He pulls out his gun. There are only 4 bullets. There are five of them in a car. He shoots the woman, 2 people in the back and his son. It was a mercy killing, so that they won't have to live in this hopeless world.

He gets out of the car. He screams and begs to be murdered. And what comes out of the mist? The US army, along with refugees. The kicker? One of the refugees is a woman that refused to hole down in the supermarket in the beginning and ran away. Main Character is obviously having a mental breakdown, with tears, screams and so on.

This ending is (for me at least) is a lot more King-ish. More so, it was King himself who wrote it.

 

[Zenja]

Transformers, I dont understand when people get mad at Michael Bay for it. He mostly improved the story from what I can tell. The source material has robots that live on a robot planet (real fast think about the concept of a mechanical planet.) that has an atmosphere of breathable air... yeah. Why they can transform is debatably worthless, and the whole source material has many problems. That isn't to say I think the movies are good, but rather that Transformer's source material is so bad that I don't think it is possible to make it worse.

I could at least watch Transformers 1 and 3 and find it mildly enjoyable. That is more than I can say for any other Transformers material.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

Lord of the Rings. A good story crushed under the weight of the author's fascination with the world inside his head.

Much in the same way, Harry Potter flows so much more nicely when you can see the locations than just read about them.

Edit: Silly typo fixed.

The Harry Potter movies started great, faltered a little, then descended into a total shit fest with Prisoner of Azkaban. Prisoner of Azkaban could have worked as a movie two parter, but a single movie version could have worked too. They just cut so much out and ended it abruptly and cheesy, which made it feel awful. Starting with Goblet of Fire there is no excusing having one movie for each book. They almost got it with The Deathly Hollows but that might have stood had it been a three parter.

Jo Rowling isn't up her own but with world descriptions like Tolkien was... Seriously Tolkien gave in depth descriptions of freaking tableware, which made his books a freaking slog to read.

I think how to train your dragon did that?
Or at least I can't imagine the book being better than the movie.

The first books is alright, but the books totally different from the movies. For example Toothless is a "common/garden Dragon", like the terrible terrors in the movie. The dragons also talk, speaking a language called dragonese, and they're all much smaller than their variants in the movies. Tootheless in particular is a smarmy little shit, with an extremely bad attitude and is ungrateful in the extreme, no matter how much Hiccup tries to do good things for him. They both basically have to almost die in the first book for Toothless to have any respect for Hiccup. The second book isn't terrible, but by the time of How to be a Pirate the entire concept is off the rails at that point. Still seeing as these are children's books, a lot can be forgiven about them.

Still Dreamworks' Dragons are far better than the source material the franchise originates from.

OT: David Weber's Honor Harrington universe, while the source material is really good, fantastic even, a TV series would do really good things for the series. Edit: Like an actual, canon, physical depiction of Treecats.

Also BattleTech the way the lore is presented kind of sucks, as do the stories, a series of Movies would be really nice.

 

[ThreeName]

Anime adaptation of novel by some japanese author - then later adjusted slightly by english version - Ghost stories. I recommend it.

To be fair, the novels were quite popular - it was the anime that bombed (hence why it was sold off to an American company with almost entirely free reign over what to do with it)