10 Movie Adaptations That Clearly Hated The Source Material

8. Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis has always courted controversy with his button-pushing novels, most famously with American Psycho, and his first book, Less Than Zero, was no different.

A relatively short story about Clay, a wealthy have-it-all back from college for the winter, it doesn't take long before the tale descends into his friends' flirtations with drugs, pornography, snuff films and a whole load of nasty things that you can imagine grabbing headlines back in the 1980s.

20th Century Fox snapped up the rights and released a film version two years later, which bared little resemblance to the source material.

That perhaps should have been expected; any studio worth their salt would have wanted to ride the wave of popularity and infamy the book courted, but at the same time no studio would be willing to film something so abrasive and purposefully ugly and risk attracting similar ire towards what ultimately needs to be a commercial product.

All the rough edges were sanitised to not p*ss off a mass audience, but that left an unmemorable (if well acted) drama that lacked substance.