10 Movie Adaptations That Clearly Hated The Source Material

1. The Shining

Stanley Kubrick, for as talented as he was, had one particular quality that no other director has come close to matching: that being the ability to p*ss off pretty much every single author of the books he adapted into movies.

That's because a good chunk of the filmmaker's works are based on pre-existing material, but he liked to interpret said material as he saw fit, only focusing on the elements that interested him and discarding or altering the rest.

It's an approach which saw a straight political thriller novel transformed into a biting nuclear satire, and him asking "why would I want to do that?" when Malcolm McDowell asked if he ever talked A Clockwork Orange over with the book's writer, Anthony Burgess.

Of course, the most infamous dispute was over The Shining. Kubrick changed pretty much everything, much to the chagrin of Stephen King, whose work was thrown out. Likewise, a lot of the most famous elements from the story, including the bloody elevator and creepy twins, weren't featured in the novel, which probably annoyed King even more.

The two are very different takes on the same core premise, to the point where choosing one over the other seems redundant because they're both so different.