10 Movies That Abandoned The Source Material (For The Better)
4. Jurassic Park
Unlike films like Jaws and Die Hard, the source material for this movie is still pretty widely known, due in large part to its author, Michael Crichton, still being a household name among book lovers.
The adaptation into Jurassic Park is odd, mostly in how it handled the characters. Not just little things like the main character actually LOVING children in the original novel, and leaping at the chance to mentor the kids he would end up trapped with. Most everyone who dies in the novel lived in the movie, and vice versa.
Hammond is played like a well meaning man in the movie, but the book quickly exposed him for the moron he was, and ultimately sentenced him to die. The lawyer, meanwhile, was actually a way nicer guy in the book, and even lived at the end.
How nice was he? In the book, it wasn't Dr. Malcolm who led away the T-Rex from the kids, it was him. Malcolm was a pretentious coward who got what was coming to him.
The book and the film are generally agreed upon to be just as good as each other, but the film does benefit from the changes it makes. For one, if you found Ian Malcolm to be a bit unbearable with his speeches in the movie, for every one they kept, the book had five.