12 Book-to-Movie Adaptations So Bad, the Authors Deserve Letters of Apology

This adaptation of Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning YA novel about a dystopian society where no one experiences pain or suffering boasts an all-star cast that includes Katie Holmes, Alexander Skarsgard, Jeff Bridges, and Meryl Streep, but even that couldn't save it from being "safe, sorry and a crashing bore," according to Rolling Stone's Peter Travers. Also, Taylor Swift is in it? So there's that. It sits at 35 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Jules Verne's 1873 novel is a heart-pounding adventure of Phileas Fogg's attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a bet. The 1956 version starring David Niven and Shirley MacLaine earned high marks from critics, but the 2004 remark starring Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan did not. The Toronto Star's Malene Arpe had this to say: "Jules Verne is rotating in his grave worrying about his other works ripe for plucking from the public domain." Final score? 32 percent.

H.G. Wells's 1895 novel about an inventory jumping around in time is credited with coining the term "time machine," which is almost universally employed in media when talking about a device used to travel through time. The movie, which earned a paltry 29 percent, can be credited as managing to be described as "joylessly extravagant," "amazingly stilted" and "weirdly disjointed" by three major critics.

To be fair to the Twilight Saga movies, the first, third, and fifth installments are all hovering right around 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — not great, but not terrible either.

However, the second and fourth films based on Stephenie Meyer's YA vampire series, New Moon (28 percent) and Breaking Dawn – Part I (25 percent), were panned by critics. Tom Long of The Detroit News wrote, "A big bowl of adolescent romantic mush garnished with horror-lite action scenes and a rushed road trip, The Twilight Saga: New Moon is a mess," while Slate's Dana Stevens said of Breaking Dawn, "By any normal standard, this is a terrible movie, with stilted dialogue and leaden pacing . . . but the Twilight saga stopped being normal a long time ago."

Fans disagreed: both films have around 60 percent on Rotten Tomatoes' audience score. However, that is markedly lower than the audience rated the first and fifth films in the franchise.

Romance fans generally liked this adaptation of Nicholas Sparks's 1999 tearjerker starring Mandy Moore and Shane West, giving it a 78 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the highest audience score of any movie on this list. But critics were . . . less than kind. They called it "overwrought," "melodramatic" and "a tooth-rottingly sentimental weepie." The reviews resulted in a 27 percent. Oof.

The second H.G. Wells novel on the list, this one is about a shipwrecked man who winds up on an island ruled by a mad scientist and populated by the scientist's animal-human hybrid monsters. Marlon Brando played the title character in what is a bit of a stain on his otherwise-stellar acting career — he won a Razzie for it.

Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film "a maddening mess of empty gestures," and it actually has a lower audience score (20 percent) than the critic score (24 percent) on Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie adaptation of E.L. James's titillating trilogy was highly anticipated by her legion of fans. Unfortunately, it failed to deliver on pretty much every level. The Toronto Sun's Bruce Kirkland summed it up nicely: "Fifty Shades of Grey only has one shade: tedious self-pity," and audiences agreed. The movies' scores are 24 percent, 11 percent, and 12 percent.

Jack Black can be a lot of fun at times, but this 2010 stinker (20 percent) is not his best work. Film.com's Eric Snider said it exhibited "laziness at every turn" and urged moviegoers not to "reward these yahoos."

If you want to watch an adaptation of Jonathan Swift's satirical novel, try the 1996 version starring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. It's a lot more fun and faithful to the book.

This 1990 film (16 percent) had all the hallmarks of a hit. Based on a wildly popular satire of 1980s culture by Tom Wolfe, it stars Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis, and Kim Cattrall, and it was directed by Brian De Palma, the Oscar-winning director behind Carrie, Scarface, and The Untouchables.

Unfortunately, it severely missed the mark. Critics' main complaint was how terrible it was at bringing Wolfe's novel to life. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "Those who have read the book will be constantly distracted because they know so much more than the movie tells them about the characters" while Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman called it "indecently bad."

The fact that the novel upon which this film (16 percent) is based was written by a teenager is not an excuse. The Christopher Paolini YA fantasy novel was a New York Times bestseller for 121 weeks. But the film failed to capture any of the book's magic. Critics praised the visual effects . . . and not much else, describing it as "lifeless," an "embarrassment," and an "overblown bore."

If you go looking for an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel about puritanical hypocrisy and repression . . . look elsewhere. This Demi Moore-Gary Oldman stinker (13 percent) "takes more liberties with the text than Elizabeth Berkley did with that pole in Showgirls," according to USA Today's Susan Wloszczyna.

A live-action adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book is always going to be tricky, but at least How the Grinch Stole Christmas had a very good Jim Carrey performance at its center. Star Mike Myers tries very hard in The Cat in the Hat (9 percent), but ultimately mostly it's very difficult to adapt a 1,600-word book into a 90-minute movie.

"The movie is so disappointing, in fact, that it makes Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas look like a masterpiece," wrote the Orlando Sentinel's Jay Boyar, and the New York Times' A.O. Scott said, "A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy that Universal has the temerity to call Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat." Whoa.

Hilariously, this has one of the highest audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes of any movie on this list with a 49 percent. You just never know.