13 Adaptations That Were More Controversial Than We Realized

In 1975, Stephen King published a 10-page short story titled “The Lawnmower Man." In the story, a man hires a company to cut his grass, and it turns out the groundskeeper answers to the ancient god, Pan. The lawn mower then chases after the customer and kills him. 

When the 1992 film The Lawnmower Man starring Pierce Brosnan was released, it deviated heavily from this original plot, bringing in a scientist who experiments on the gardener. It takes much more of a sci-fi bent, with the gardener becoming hyper-intelligent and transforming himself into a digital being of “pure energy” who exists only inside a computer mainframe. The movie was so different from the story that King sued the filmmakers for advertising the film as Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man.

A judge agreed with King, and the movie makers were ordered to remove King's name from advertising in a rare legal victory for a dissatisfied author.

The Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series by Rick Riordan is one of the most popular series of the 21st century, selling over 180 million copies worldwide. So when a film adaptation was announced to be released in 2010, avid readers were ecstatic to see Percy on the big screen. 

Though the series seemed a perfect fit for a cinematic reimagining, the film took a few too many liberties and massively disappointed fans. And it seems that Riordan tried to warn the filmmakers about this backlash - to no avail. 

In 2018, nearly 10 years after the first film was released, Riordan published emails that he had sent to the producers on his personal website. In the excerpts, Riordan outlines several of his concerns about the direction of the film, which also turned out to be issues viewers had when it was released. He pointed out what a mistake it would be to change Percy's age from 12 for several reasons - the plot, potential sequels, and for appealing to the main demographic of the book (readers aged 9 to 12). In the finished film, Percy is 16, and portrayed by Logan Lerman.

After reading a draft of the script, Riordan really let loose, writing:

The script as a whole is terrible. I don't simply mean that it deviates from the book, though certainly it does that to point of being almost unrecognizable as the same story. Fans of the books will be angry and disappointed. They will leave the theater in droves and generate horrible word of mouth. That is an absolute given if the script goes forward as it stands now. But the bigger problem is that even if you pretend the book doesn't exist, this script doesn't work as a story in its own right.

It seems Riordan got the last laugh, as not only was he correct about the film's reception, he later helped create the Disney+ show, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, released in December 2023. To the delight of fans, the show stays much closer to the spirit of the books and has received positive reviews across the board. 

While there are some aspects of violence in the 1973 novel I Know What You Did Last Summer (like a hit-and-run, someone getting shot, and someone getting strangled), the book is more of an emotional suspense tale than anything else. When the 1997 film of the same name was released, it clearly marketed itself as a slasher film - full of gore. 

The author of the book, Lois Duncan, didn't appreciate this, since excessive violence - especially involving teens - struck a very personal nerve for her. She said:

What I, personally, have a problem with are the stories (usually on television where action takes the place of introspection) where violence is sensationalized and made to seem thrilling rather than terrible. I was appalled when my book, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was made into a slasher film. As the mother of a murdered child, I don't find violent death something to squeal and giggle about.     

Duncan's 18-year-old daughter, Kait, was shot to death in her car in 1989. The perpetrator was not indicted until 2022, after Duncan had passed away in 2016.

When The Blind Side was released in 2009, it quickly became a box office success. The film detailing how a white, affluent family takes in an African American teen and helps him make the most of his football talents was also critically acclaimed, with Sandra Bullock winning the Academy Award for Best Actress. 

Unfortunately, according to the subject of the film, Michael Oher, the hit movie didn't accurately portray his life. Specifically, he was frustrated at how the film made it appear that he didn't know how to play football. 

In Oher's 2011 book, I Beat the Odds, he addressed this:

I felt like [the film] portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who had never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving once he got it. Quinton Aaron did a great job acting the part, but I could not figure out why the director chose to show me as someone who had to be taught the game of football. Whether it was S.J. moving around ketchup bottles or Leigh Anne explaining to me what blocking is about, I watched those scenes thinking, 'No, that's not me at all! I've been studying - really studying - the game since I was a kid!' That was my main hang-up with the film.

The Blind Side was launched back into the spotlight with another controversy in 2023 when Oher alleged that the Tuohys actually locked him into a conservatorship, rather than adopting him as they said they would. Oher claims the Tuohys then profited off his story while he received no share of the money from the film.

The novel The Neverending Story was first released in Germany, where it rose to the top of children's book charts. After it was translated into English and other languages, filmmakers became interested in releasing two versions of a live action film: one in English, and one in German. 

At first, author Michael Ende was excited, collaborating on the script with director Wolfgang Petersen. The work turned sour when Ende claimed that the director rewrote the script without telling him:

I saw the final script five days before the premiere and only as a result of a judicial verdict in Munich. I was horrified. They had changed the whole sense of the story. Fantastica reappears with no creative force from Bastian. For me this was the essence of the book.

Ende later demanded his name be removed from the film, and he sued the German production company for breach of contract when work on a sequel began.

Today, the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is considered a children's classic. Back when it came out, it turned only a modest profit at the box office. It wasn't until the film became part of the regular family-friendly film rotation at Christmastime in the '80s that it really developed a following. 

Success or no success, one person despised the film from the get-go: Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What irked Dahl the most was the film's shift away from Charlie in order to put Gene Wilder's Wonka in the spotlight, along with other changes like making Slugworth a Wonka spy. 

Dahl was so unhappy with the film that he refused to have another Chocolate Factory film made, dashing any hopes of an adaptation of the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It wasn't until six years after his death that his wife, Felicity Dahl, began talks about a remake film directed by Tim Burton. Though the 2005 remake is in many ways closer to Dahl's novel and had a generally positive reception, it has failed to displace 1971 version in the hearts of many, a fact that would likely irritate the author even more.