9. I Am Legend (2007) Loses Most Important Aspect; Title No Longer Even Makes Sense
Forget that they changed the year and the setting to present day New York - that was the kind of switch-around that fans of Richard Matheson's seminal vampire novel I Am Legend expected, because Hollywood. It's not like they were going to make a movie set in the '50s anyway, right? But the ultimate slap in the face regarding this point-missing adaptation presented itself i n another form - in the filmmakers' blatant disregard not for time or place or even the protagonist, Robert Neville, but in its butchering of the entire reason the book exists in the first place. That's to say, Matheson's original novel set out to make a scientific argument for the existence of vampires, which - for some reason - are changed to mindless zombie-like things in the adaptation. This makes no sense at all, given that the story in the book is entirely poised around the idea that the vamps are intelligent beings. Which gives rise, ultimately, to the fact that vampire hunter Robert Neville - who spends his days killing the vamps in their sleep - has become their legend, hence the title. The movie skims so far away from all this it's genuinely unbelievable, to point where Matheson even wondered out loud why Hollywood had even bothered.