The Worst:
Eragon was the worst book to film adaption I’ve ever seen. Imagine Star Wars was a 500 page book being made into a movie. Now, imagine it with a director who thinks it doesn’t detract from the story at all to remove Jedi, Sith, the Force, aliens, and 75% of all events, characters, and information about the world they live in (even when time constraints have nothing to do with what’s removed, since the movie turns out to be just over 90 minutes and so could easily have gone longer) and you can imagine what I mean: You’d think if all those changes were made that it’d be clear there was nothing left to make a movie about, and so there’d be no one inspired to make the movie that way, but boy would you be wrong.
The Best:
Most of the good movies (well, good is subjective, but adaptions that can stand on their own without the help of their books) that used to be books that I’ve seen I haven’t read the books of, and the film counterparts of books I’ve read that I’ve seen I mostly didn’t care for, but I did read Holes and then watch the movie, and my low expectations were shattered: it was a movie that did many things differently than the book, but was good in its own separate way for it. The only real exceptions were a few explanations they left out, but it was harder to get too bent out of shape about them when the rest of the movie was so good.