20 Movie Characters Completely Different From Their Source Material

It may be taken for granted sometimes, but it can be extremely difficult to pull off a good mystery, a big twist, and satisfying conclusion in a movie. Not everything can be a Knives Out or The Sixth Sense, and as such there are plenty of these stories that fall completely flat.

One such is Secret Window, in which Johnny Depp's Mort Rainey is plagued by a mysterious stalker who accuses the writer of plagiarising his work. The ultimate reveal that Mort's stalker, John Shooter (John Turturro), was a figment of his own imagination was unfortunately just too easy to telegraph throughout the whole thing.

In fairness to the filmmakers, there was at least an attempt of a curveball upon a curveball within the story, as Mort and Shooter were changed significantly from the source material, namely Stephen King's Secret Window, Secret Garden.

In the movie, as Shooter, Mort kills both his wife and her lover in a fit of rage that he seemingly never finds comeuppance for. In the novel however, Mort's created character actually separates from him to a whole new person, who instead kills Mort and heads into the wind. It's a huge departure from the book that changes everything, though it still wasn't able to encapsulate the audience on the whole.