10 Movie Adaptations That Clearly Hated The Source Material

9. The Omega Man

While this entry is going to focus primarily on The Omega Man, you might as well lump in I Am Legend and The Last Man on Earth as well, as all three movies disregard Richard Matheson's original work. Hell, at one point the author even questioned why Hollywood kept adapting his book, considering it always seemed to think it could do a better job at telling the story.

It's the 70s Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man that's the biggest offender though. So much of the source material is changed, from the nature of the apocalypse to the monsters themselves, and the premise is essentially used to support a bland action movie.

The main character of Neville is perhaps the biggest alteration though, with Heston's version being a wise-cracking banter merchant, oozing machismo and solving every problem with his fists. Vincent Price, he is not.

The major differences were both a blessing and curse in the end however, as Matheson commented: "It was so far removed from my novel that it didn’t even bother me."