Films from Books that should be made

One 48

One 48

One 48

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Often thought Rendezvous with Rama written by Arthur C Clarke would translate to a great film, but back in the day how to do that ... with CGI nowadays nearly anything can be done, just look at Avatar, love it or hate it looks stunning and is the highest grossing film of all time.

Rendezvous with Rama is a great exploratory yarn with tension going on as Rama gets closer to the planets in our solar system, it made it to 3 or 4 books but it was the first one I enjoyed the most, still give it the odd listen on Audio book format.

Fountains of Paradise by Clarke would make another good Movie too I think.

Any other suggestions?
 
The book I most wanted a film of for many years was Without Remorse by Tom Clancy, but sadly Amazon made a mediocre version a couple of years back that wasn't true to the story at all, so that ship has sailed I think. I'd still love a proper film of it, I find it bizarre that feature films were made of some of his other books with much more convoluted plots and high numbers of major characters, yet they left alone his one novel that is relatively focused on a small group of characters. In my mind Without Remorse is just way, way better suited to the big screen than something like The Sum of All Fears, which is a lumbering epic that takes about 800 pages to get going.

Invariably films adaptations are worse than the book largely because they have to cram everything in to a couple of hours allowing very limited scope for character development, scene setting etc. I think TV series are a much better vehicle for book adaptations as you can do it over say 8hrs instead of 2-3.
In my experience less than 10% of films are as good as the book, and this hold true even in cases where I see the film before the book (removing a common issue when you watch a film after reading a book and are constantly there saying "wtf that isn't supposed to happen / you cut a massive corner there").
 
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The Partner - John Grisham. Would make a much better film then, say, the Firm which I think most would say is the best Grisham book to film so far.

At least 3 or 4 more great legal/thrillers from him could also do with the big screen treatment, but I think the ship has sailed on this as it's been quite a while since the last Grisham film.


rp2000
 
Being a SciFi fan I would love a TV or film based on the culture series I believe it almost happened but Amazon backed out. I think player of games would be a great for a film adaptation

Also Gridlinked from Neal Asher or the Revelation Space series from Alistair Reynolds would also be adaptions I'd love to see
 
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rp2000 said:
The Partner - John Grisham. Would make a much better film then, say, the Firm which I think most would say is the best Grisham book to film so far.

At least 3 or 4 more great legal/thrillers from him could also do with the big screen treatment, but I think the ship has sailed on this as it's been quite a while since the last Grisham film.


rp2000
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I haven't watched the films in ages but I think The Rainmaker was arguably the best film in the sense it remained pretty close to the book.

Slight tangent but I got annoyed with him, I really felt like he started to get lazy and would write a great novel that feels like it is about 70% of the way through but he'd then rush it to a conclusion in 50 pages. King of Torts sort of era, I didn't notice this so much in his early works but it happened a few times. It feels almost fraudulent to get invested in a story and feel like it has a way to run only for it to abruptly aend.
 
Magician
Something in the Necroscope universe (although I read a few years back a TV company did pick up the rights)
Malazan Book of Fallen but I doubt it's able to be coherently adapted to movies/tv (thankfully)
 
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HangTime said:
I haven't watched the films in ages but I think The Rainmaker was arguably the best film in the sense it remained pretty close to the book.

Slight tangent but I got annoyed with him, I really felt like he started to get lazy and would write a great novel that feels like it is about 70% of the way through but he'd then rush it to a conclusion in 50 pages. King of Torts sort of era, I didn't notice this so much in his early works but it happened a few times. It feels almost fraudulent to get invested in a story and feel like it has a way to run only for it to abruptly aend.
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Well the rainmaker was a great movie but I felt they sold out by changing the tobacco to gun company protagonists to be honest.

The firm changed the ending as well, but I still preferred it overall. Maybe a time to kill is a close second for me.

I didn't like king of torts and a few others around then, and even skipped a few, where he went non legal thriller for a while as well.

Looking at the bibliography other good film candidates maybe The Last Juror or Sycamore Row (the not as good sequel to Time to Kill). Maybe the Racketeer.


rp2000
 
Does it matter about the age range of the book in question ?

I’ve always wanted to see a film about the very hungry caterpillar ( Eric castle 1969 )
 
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If there's one thing that we should all of been aware of by now - 95% of Book to Screen attempts are utterly garbage with very few wins for fans of the Books. The biggest wins I can think of off the top of my head would be LotR and the Gene Wilder version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (probably a few more TBH), but those seems to be an almost unique few cases and both had big changes to the original books too.

For books I'd like to see -

World War Z - HBO series shown over eight 1hr+ episodes.

Flight of the Old Dog or Day of the Cheetah by Dale Brown - Tom Clancy style 1980's books based on new planes from Area 51 and Russian spies etc.

Scarecrow series (or just Contest) by Matthew Reilly - This series is virtually already a screenplay as they are written as if they were already movies rather than novels.
 
Necroscope series by Brian Lumley. Truly monstrous vampires, not your teen girl friendly Twilight types.

The Elijah Bailey/R. Daneel Olivaw books by Asimov. They’d have to follow the laws of robotics more closely, my one issue with the Foudation series, and they can have Laura Birn as R. Daneel as she does a good job in Foundation.
 
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rp2000 said:
The Partner - John Grisham. Would make a much better film then, say, the Firm which I think most would say is the best Grisham book to film so far.

At least 3 or 4 more great legal/thrillers from him could also do with the big screen treatment, but I think the ship has sailed on this as it's been quite a while since the last Grisham film.


rp2000
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The Partner is a great read, one of my favourite John Grisham books along with A Painted House...would love to see them as films.
 
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