37 Famous Movies Up Against Their Original Source Material

The 1990s movie Adaptation pretty much nails it: adapting a story into a film can gut you as a person, figuratively and kinda literally. Nothing about it is particularly easy. You’re taking someone else’s precious work and making a new work from it, usually without input from the person that made it their labor of love in the first place. So no matter how much the person adapting the work says they’re forging their own path, in the back of their minds you know they have to be thinking something along the lines of, “I cannot screw up this person’s baby.” 

It’s a tall order, and there are realities that cannot be skirted — so yeah, adaptation is frequently like taking a rectangle and forcing it into a circle-shaped hole. Things have to change in order to make it work. Here are some interesting ways things have changed in an adaptation — or surprisingly stayed the same…