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Hard To Adapt Work / Literature

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Authors

  • Jane Austen:
    • Mansfield Park is one of the least adapted of her works. Although the other books with stoic heroines have received multiple acclaimed adaptations, the character of Fanny Price is a true Shrinking Violet whose monologue is extremely internal because she doesn't believe she has the right to express an opinion to her wealthier relatives even when she sees their behavior as truly wrong. It also lives up to Austen's promise that she would write something "less light, bright, and sparkling"; the themes of emotional abuse and the dire consequences of infidelity exposed are sometimes an Audience-Alienating Premise for viewers expecting the typical comedy-of-manners. And apart from all that, there is the Values Dissonance of the romance between Fanny and her first cousin plus the implication that the Bertram family trade involves slave labor. As a result, this one is adapted a lot less frequently during periods of Austenmania, and when it is, Fanny tends to get an Adaptation Personality Change.
    • Austen's works, in general, tend to be difficult to adapt, as many of the famous Audience Coloring Adaptations lack her trademark Lemony Narrator style and play them as straight romances rather than the World of Snark the books tend to be.
  • Most of Agatha Christie's detective stories are and have been adapted quite easily, barring some tweaks here and there to suit the format. There are, however, a couple of exceptions:
    • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which fundamentally relies on several quirks of the First-Person Perspective narration (specifically, the story is an account written in first person by the murderer himself). While it has been adapted as part of the Poirot television series starring David Suchet, unlike many of the others this one is often considered less satisfying, simply because the mystery is considerably weakened by having to show what was happening, rather than relying on the narrator's interpretation of events.
      • A Japanese TV adaptation, Kuroido Goroshi, managed this by making the first 3/5 of the movie a Whole Episode Flashback. At the start of the film, Shiba/Sheppard gives Suguro/Poirot the manuscript that Shiba has been writing. This is a scene taken straight from the novel, but in the book, it's not until near the end that Sheppard gives Poirot the manuscript and lets him read it. The simple device of starting the movie with this scene allows most of it to take place with Shiba's narration accompanying the action, which preserves the impact of the twist.
    • Endless Night is narrated by the murderer, and there aren't even that many suspects running around, making a faithful adaptation rather a difficult task. It has been adapted twice: the 1972 adaptation had a lukewarm reception (including from Agatha Christie herself), and the 2013 adaptation fared somewhat better (a 6.9 iMDb rating to the 1972 film's 6.0) by virtue of making considerable changes to the plot, most notably, including Miss Marple in it while there was no trace of her in the book.
    • Lord Edgware Dies, in which the solution to the mystery hinges on a device that is rather difficult to pull off on-screen without being obvious. The actresses playing Jane Wilkinson and Carlotta Adams have to look similar enough to each other that the audience won't guess that it was not Jane at the dinner party, but not similar enough for the resemblance to stand out and raise suspicions (the 1985 film, for instance, had Faye Dunaway play both parts). The director of the 2000 Poirot adaptation resorted to a cheat by showing the real Jane Wilkinson (Helen Grace) at the dinner party rather than Carlotta (albeit only for a few seconds and from an oblique angle), seriously undermining the Fair-Play Whodunnit - although to be fair, not showing her face at the dinner would have been too much of a giveaway.
  • Don DeLillo's works are rarely adapted into visual mediums since his works are meant to be read rather than experienced. David Cronenberg's film adaptation of Cosmopolis garnered some backlash when it was released due to its dry and didactic nature. The same goes for White Noise (2022).
  • William Faulkner: His novels, especially The Sound and the Fury, do not adapt well to the screen, because so many of the books consist of long, stream-of-consciousness internal monologues rather than external action or conversation.
  • Stephen King:
    • The Shining: The reason why Stanley Kubrick took so many liberties with his 1980 adaptation is that the original novel relies on a good amount of imagery and lore that would be difficult to effectively convey in a visual medium, as the later miniseries adaptation demonstrated. Kubrick stripped back so much of it that the final product only followed the most basic elements of the source material, with Kubrick adding in and rearranging content to fit his own vision. The end result is generally praised as a good movie in its own right and is widely considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made, but most agree that it's a poor adaptation of the book, leading to a longstanding bout of Creator Backlash and Disowned Adaptation sentiment on King's part (for the record, King himself did consider Kubrick's The Shining a good horror movie, but he prefers to see it as a movie inspired by his own work as opposed to a direct adaptation of such). This incidentally was what led to the miniseries' creation in 1997, and while the miniseries was highly praised upon its initial premiere, it's now criticized for trying to be too faithful to the book, generally being considered inferior to the much-beloved movie.
    • It has had multiple adaptations such as the 1990 Miniseries and 2017-2019 duology (the 2017 film in particular being considered very good and was a hit at the box office). However, all three works are still heavy distillations of King's original Doorstopper whose content is an utter sensitivity minefield and Mind Screw for filmmakers to adapt. The first big problem is that it is a Nested Story with the narrative split between the Losers' Club childhood Coming of Age battle with Pennywise and them coming back to Derry Older and Wiser and more cynical to finish Pennywise off. Not to mention the various other side stories and accounts, such as the fire at the Black Spot and drowning at the Stan Pipe, which helped flesh out the world. The Miniseries attempted to do the switching back and forth between the Losers as adults and kids, on-screen however, it only makes the flow of the story cluttered and severely dampens the stakes of the childhood battle with Pennywise given the audience knows they are all going to survive to adulthood. There's also the hard task of making the adult versions of the Losers as likable and engaging as their kid selves, which the 1990 Miniseries struggled with. Unsurprisingly the 2017 film, which was solely the childhood portion got the most praise, even compared to its sequel, which featured the adult versions of the characters admirably doing their absolute best. Then there are the many content issues with the story since it involves kids being abused, killed, and most infamously having sex in a sewer, and extreme racism when it comes to Mike. The Miniseries had to cut down on the violence and darker content at the cost of lessening the threat and even the Darker and Edgier 2017-2019 films which are even more extreme than the book in some respects—such as Beverly's dad attempting to rape her whereas the book only implied incestuous feelings—still had to remove the aforementioned sewer scene and the extended racial abuse Mike goes through to make it suitable for the MPAA. Finally, the Cosmic Horror Story element of the story, with Bill in the book's climax having a Battle in the Center of the Mind with Pennywise in another dimension aided by Maturin the giant god turtle as It is strongly connected to The Dark Tower (see below) which is quite hard and confusing to translate on screen. This means the film adaptations are inclined to change it to just having the Losers physically kill Pennywise. Though granted the 2017 and 2019 films to their credit, touch upon Pennywise's cosmic origins and lean into the Clap Your Hands If You Believe elements of the book, but still nonetheless have the Losers physically kill Pennywise and downplay or omit the elements more explicitly connected to The Dark Tower.
    • The Stand has proven itself to be difficult to adapt to other media, due to its massive length and focus on well over a dozen main characters across several locations. As such, the book only received a 1994 miniseries (which still needed several cuts to fit the story into its runtime) and another miniseries released in 2020 for Paramount+.
    • Dolores Claiborne, which is a bit odd since he wrote it specifically to allow Kathy Bates to play the main character in an adaptation after being so impressed by her in Misery. The book is a long, rambling monologue by the title character as she gives a statement to the police after being suspected of murder for the second time in her life, ultimately giving the full story behind both deaths, but going down numerous tangents on the way there which all add something important but would be incredibly awkward to translate to a film structure. King's wish ended up coming true, with the film massively restructuring the story to focus on Dolores' relationship with her daughter in the present day, and adding a whole new major character in an Inspector Javert detective trying to get her convicted to tie things together.
    • Attempts to adapt The Dark Tower to the screen languished in development hell for a multitude of reasons. The Doorstopper length of the books, the dense lore behind the series, and Continuity Lockout stemming from the books' connections to the wider Stephen King Verse all make it difficult to adapt without either oversimplifying it or being confusing to general audiences. The lone film or TV adaptation of the series thus far took heavy liberties to be more palatable to general audiences, but failed critically and commercially, with fans being turned off by the changes to and simplification of the books and casual audiences finding it too complicated.
  • C. S. Lewis:
    • The Screwtape Letters has seen a few adaptations (a stage version by Max Mclean, a 1994 comic book, and a 2009 radio drama) but author C.S. Lewis considered the book inherently unsuited for stage or film. Presumably, this was because it's an Epistolary Novel where the plot is really just a framework from which to hang various mini-essays on religion, morality, and philosophy (delivered in a backhanded fashion by an Unreliable Narrator). Reportedly, a playwright approached Lewis with a script for a stage version with an original framing device for the letters—and Lewis encouraged him to cut out Screwtape entirely and turn the framing device into a standalone play.
    • Several of The Chronicles of Narnia have been successfully adapted to screen and stage, but a notable absence is the series' third book (in chronological order; in publishing order, it was the fifth) The Horse and His Boy. This is primarily believed to be due to how two of the main protagonists of this book are talking horses, which would be difficult to portray unironically due to how often stories featuring talking horses are usually played for comedy (such as in Mister Ed). And even without that stigma to worry about, faithfully portraying this aspect of the story is still difficult at best due to how difficult (if not dangerous) it would be to try to train real horses to portray the two talking horse characters and how getting around the issue of training live horses by animating them with CGI instead would be highly expensive to use for an entire feature-length film. Tellingly, the only successful adaptation of this book was an audio play, which completely eliminated the need for any visual effects and risk of Special Effect Failure by relying entirely on the voice acting being heard without anyone or anything being committed to visuals.
  • The works of H. P. Lovecraft have a reputation for being un-cinematic. This owes in part to their being heavy on exposition, and in part to their descriptions of Eldritch Abominations that can drive anyone who merely looks at them to insanity. The latter is difficult to put to film without being either Narm, Special Effect Failure, Nightmare Retardant, or some combination thereof. None of this has stopped filmmakers from trying. A particular challenge was Color Out Of Space, an adaptation of a story that would be unfilmable if it were true to the source, which chose to take advantage of the discovery of magenta technically being an inherently unnatural color.
  • Both of Vladimir Obruchev's most famous books, Sannikov Land and Plutonia, suffer from that. The reason is that their whole premise depends on the author's Shown Their Work musings on geology, geography, and biology, with barely any plot to go with it and few of the characters rising above Bit Character personality level, and on top of it all, both books (especially Sannikov Land) are wrapped up with a heavily bitter Bittersweet Ending. Technically, Sannikov Land does have a beloved film adaptation, but in fact, it is a very loose one, bordering on In Name Only.
  • As of 2021, Inherent Vice is the only film adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's work and the first one in more than fifty years of his literary career. That's because it is one of his few comprehensive works (comprehensible by his standard), and the rest are notoriously long and dense, and contained with a complex narrative and sentence structures with an excessive amount of puns and wordplays. Even with the movie's straightforward narrative, it received criticism from detractors that the story was too hard to follow. Films that homage Pynchon and follow the spirit of his works, such as Under the Silver Lake and Southland Tales, have faced this exact criticism, featuring confusing plots unsuited for narrative films.
  • Dr. Seuss's books don't tend to translate well to a feature-length film, and the film adaptations of his books tend to fail more than succeed. Many of his books tend to be incredibly short and simplistic at their core, making Adaptation Expansion necessary in order for them to fit within a typical kids' film structure. However, because of this, the films tend to be incredibly drawn out as a result, with the additions made to extend the story often detracting from and muddying what were meant to be simple short stories. The stage musical Seussical had to combine elements and plots from multiple different Seuss stories in order to have enough story to fill out the run-time, and it initially flopped on Broadway, only becoming popular through regional and school productions.
  • Tolkien's Legendarium:
    • For the longest time, The Lord of the Rings was considered too difficult to adapt to film — it was a Doorstopper, it had tons of characters who occasionally had different adventures, and there was so much exposition that the books needed several appendices to explain it all. Ralph Bakshi tried an animated adaptation, but he ran out of money halfway through and never finished it. Peter Jackson's film adaptation was considered remarkably ambitious, seeking to adapt all three parts as separate movies and film them at the same time — but he was able to convince the meddling executives to let him do three movies and give him the money to do so, and the rest is box office and Oscar-winning history. In fact, the Jackson trilogy is a strong candidate for the single greatest adaptation of a literary work of all time, and it was so groundbreaking in this respect that modern audiences occasionally don't understand how hard it was to make or even get the production started.
    • The Hobbit has had three attempts to adapt it to film, none of which were as successful as The Lord of the Rings. For Tolkien, it's got a lot of Early-Installment Weirdness, including talking animals, a talking bag, and the existence of giants. It's so episodic that there are multiple points that could be considered a climax. Its dwarf characters are comically underdeveloped, especially compared to LoTR's protagonists. And most problematically, despite happening before The Lord of the Rings and containing several characters who appear in the later work, it's not really a prequel to LoTR — the temptation to treat it as such is perhaps the biggest stumbling block. Peter Jackson, in adapting The Hobbit to film, essentially tried to clone The Lord of the Rings, making it a prequel trilogy as long as the original — in spite of the source material being much shorter than The Lord of the Rings, leading to a lot of Padding. Jackson's hand may have been forced by Executive Meddling, and the Hobbit trilogy was significantly less acclaimed than LoTR, but it was still a massive financial success (particularly the third film), and its extended editions were better received. Meanwhile, the 1977 Rankin-Bass animated TV movie has its fans, particularly of the voice-work, but it suffers the opposite problem from Jackson's movies, in that it had to cram the book's narrative into a short runtime, leading to a somewhat disjointed plot. (The absence of the character Beorn being the most notable issue.)
    • The Silmarillion is less a single narrative and more a collection of smaller tales that form a somewhat cohesive historical account. Essentially, it was pieced together posthumously from a body of material J. R. R. Tolkien had worked on for much of his life, ever since World War I, and the earlier-published but later-written books were practically just spin-offs of it. However, he had never managed to complete the work to his satisfaction due to his constant rewrites and additions. Most of it takes place during the First Age and the War of the Jewels and covers a period of about 600 years, switching the narrative between many different characters and dispensing lots of exposition. As such, an adaptation would be nearly incomprehensible, even to people who were familiar with The Lord of the Rings, unless you were a big nerd who already studied the background. Even then, it's difficult to link to The Lord of the Rings because of the insane time differences — to put it in perspective, the War of the Jewels was as distant from the events of the prologue of The Lord of the Rings films (where Isildur takes the One Ring from Sauron) as said prologue is to Frodo and his adventures (over 7000 years before Frodo, in fact).
    • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is based on the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and explores the events that lead to the creation of the One Ring and Sauron's defeat, which was lightly touched upon in the book and forms a five-minute prologue in the movie. The thing is, the appendices have a little bit of overlap with the Silmarillion and Legendarium as a whole, which is off-limits from the Tolkien Estate. This all makes it nearly impossible to adapt this story without an absurd amount of Adaptation Expansion that has to deviate from the actual canon not included in The Lord of The Rings.
    • In terms of video games, the world has also seen far more misses than hits. Adapting the events of the books presents issues; though things like length, spectacle, and large casts are less important than in a film, the books and films have long stretches of little to no action on the part of the main characters (Frodo in particular forsakes fighting altogether by the third book), forcing any traditional action game to heavily modify the plot. Consequently, most of the more successful games are based primarily on the films instead. Games serving as prequels run into the issue that, while several characters do have lengthy and mysterious backgrounds, they also have obvious endpoints as characters that any prequel is going to be unable to cover. This has resulted in several attempts at side-story projects that take place in Middle-earth but deal with their own events, which gives the creators a lot more freedom, but also risks the final product feeling very little like Tolkien. Rights issues are also a factor; the main events and world of the books, the iconic imagery of the films, and the various other stories that Tolkien's estate keeps a tight grip on are all separate, which has created issues for quite a few developers. For instance, Lord of the Rings: The Third Age only had the rights to the films and therefore had to tightly constrain its plot to ensure the protagonists exclusively visited film locations, and The Lord of the Rings Online only had the rights to the books, resulting in a noticeable off-brand look to its characters and setting.
  • P. G. Wodehouse: The plots of his light comedies wouldn't be impossible to adapt to film, but it's the author's scintillating and witty wordplay that really make them classics that they are, and capturing that on film, especially the dialogue, is a major challenge. Hugh Laurie, despite appearing in a well-regarded television adaptation of Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, has gone on record as saying that Wodehouse's work is essentially unfilmable.

Specific Works

  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is Adaptation Overdosed, but the original book is structured episodically, which means it's hard to translate to a movie with a beginning, middle, and end. Much of the humor is based on puns and math-related elements (the author's day job was a math professor at Oxford) that can't properly be conveyed in a spoken word medium. The book also spoofs the way kids in the mid-19th century were raised and the general stuffiness of Victorian upper-class British society which is lost on modern readers who aren't as familiar with the culture of that place or era.
  • American Psycho was deemed nigh unfilmable due to its graphic violence and sexual content. The film managed to maintain the spirit of the book while losing some of the more graphic scenes.
  • Animorphs has a very youthful cast (they're 13 at the start of the series and 16 by the end), who live double lives where they fight aliens by turning into animals. The concept makes it sound like it ought to be aimed at the same demographic as Power Rangers, but the series also contains incredibly violent fight scenes and ruminations on the cost of war that more or less reserves it to older audiences when portrayed in a visual medium. That's before mentioning how the concept requires you to depict animals and complex, ostentatious alien designs that puts an accurate adaptation well beyond a live-action TV budget*. Meanwhile, the episodic structure of the books means that they don't really work as films either. For most of these reasons, the TV series that ran at the same time as the books was mostly remembered as an embarrassment. A movie was greenlit in 2020, but the author and her husband ended up walking away from it feeling they weren’t being listened to.
  • Cormac McCarthy has seen many of his works put to film, but Blood Meridian is not one of them. Even more than McCarthy's other works, Blood Meridian is extremely violent, featuring countless acts of scalping, maiming, rape, and murder by its protagonists alone, presented with disturbingly gruesome banality as a scathing Genre Deconstruction of The Western. While there's actually very little in the way of technical challenges that could prevent a film from being shot and made (horrific violence and philosophical plot aside, nothing about the story is outwardly fanciful or inconceivable for a Western film), it's definitely "hard to adapt" by virtue of only attracting a very niche audience and inherently invoking the preemptive wrath of censors. For a character-specific example, Holden was written as a physical monstrosity that probably couldn't exist and therefore impossible to convincingly portray in live-action. In 2023, it was announced that McCarthy himself would take a crack at adapting the book into a screenplay and be an executive producer; unfortunately, he died soon afterwards, leaving the fate of the project uncertain.
  • Adapting The Blue Lagoon into various forms of media such as film or theater presents a lot of complex challenges. These difficulties arise from the need to delve deeply into themes related to the growth of characters, depicting their sincerity and innocence, and accurately portraying the isolated island setting. Additionally, it is crucial to manage the passage of time, address cultural shifts, and avoid excessive sensationalism. These multifaceted issues have significantly affected the reception of film adaptations, often resulting in mixed or negative reviews. Despite having top talent at his disposal, English filmmaker Herbert Wilcox failed to successfully adapt the novel to the screen in the 1930s. Frank Launder’s 1949 film underwent significant screenplay modifications to comply with The Hays Code. The 1980 film inevitably streamlined certain aspects of the story to make it more accessible to a wider audience, which may have left purists yearning for the intricacies and complexities found within the novel's pages.
  • Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is a Dickensian satire that criticizes the excesses and social dynamics of the 1980s in a precise and cynical manner, complete with a cast of jerkasses. Adapting the social commentary, sharp wit, and the exploration of themes such as race and class while navigating the cultural shifts since the novel's publication presents challenges for filmmakers. Brian De Palma's 1990 film adaptation had an All-Star Cast of likable actors such as Tom Hanks note  as protagonist Sherman McCoy and Bruce Willis as sleazy—and in the novel, British—journalist Peter Fallow, and bent over backward to soften the novel's racially-charged story. The end result was a legendary Box Office Bomb.
  • Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is built around the tension between what the narrator Severian has the means, vocabulary, and inclination to describe, and what the book's characters and surroundings must actually BE like. Any adaptation would have to be explicit about things whose very ambiguity is the engine that powers the story.
  • Brave New World has traditionally been regarded as a far less easy book to adapt than its counterpart, Nineteen Eighty-Four (or, to a lesser extent, Fahrenheit 451), due to its plot being much less straightforward than Orwell's novel and due to its heavy use of gratuitous sex as a part of the novel's setting. It'd be immensely difficult to accurately portray this without it getting branded as pornography— which would make it far more difficult to distribute— and the fact that children are depicted as freely engaging in sexual activity (and being tortured and abused into not liking flowers and books) and intercourse in the book only amplifies this. Even though the book depicts that last part as something for the reader to feel disgusted by, trying to actually depict it would be impossible at best and hideously illegal at worst. Despite this, Brave New World has had three adaptations: two TV movies (a 1980 version from the UK that was more-or-less in line with the book [though the problematic parts involving children were heavily implied in this version] and a 1998 American-made version that didn't include the problematic parts involving children) and a serialized streaming series that doesn't even include children in the futuristic hedonistic world.
  • Being very monologue-centric, along with the fact its author J. D. Salinger forbid it, is why there have been no screen adaptations of The Catcher in the Rye.
  • Chaos Walking has a central element, where every living being has their thoughts, fantasies, hopes, and dreams broadcast in a flood of information known as Noise, which is hard to convey visually. The book also tends to lean more towards the philosophical and focuses on character interactions, such as how society functions in a world where one-half struggle to turn off their thoughts. A film adaptation was unsuccessful, with a common complaint being that the interesting parts of the premise ended up underdeveloped in the translation.
  • A Confederacy of Dunces has had many hangups during attempts at being adapted into a feature film, usually in the form of the fat comedian being cast as Ignatius (John Belushi, John Candy, Divine, and Chris Farley) dying before production could begin. The latest effort attempted to get around this "curse" by casting Will Ferrell as Ignatius, and things seemed to be going well...until the head of Louisiana's State Film Commission was murdered and Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, shelving the project indefinitely.
  • The Decagon House Murders, the debut work of Another author Yukito Ayatsuji, is synonymous with this trope in Japan, for reasons that are spoiler-y to even mention: the culprit is someone who was seen on both the mainland and the island, and the fact that these two characters are the same person is meant to be a shock to the reader, but isn't to any of the characters. Naturally, letting the audience actually see the killer's face or hear a voice at any point would immediately give it away. The book went unadapted for 32 years before a manga adaptation was published where the culprit's resemblance would stand out far less.
  • Discworld is a series all about storytelling and the abstract nature of language and puns. Terry Pratchett's erratic writing style and wild imagination have made his work seemingly only fit for the medium of the printed word. Adapting the books takes key elements out—in particular, one of Terry Pratchett's signature writing motifs is his use of footnotes that add clever asides and jokes, something that struggles to work on a film (some stage plays have included the Footnote as a character, to work some of this stuff in). Though there have been quite a few good adaptations, none have quite been able to become as well received as the books.
  • While there are many adaptations of Dracula, and many of them are perfectly good works, the book doesn't have that many outright scares. Instead, it has a feeling of slow-building dread that the adaptations lack since the book is a Scrapbook Story made up of the letters, journals, and records of characters who, for the first half of the book, have no idea what's going on. Dracula is a complete Outside-Context Problem for them, and only Van Helsing has even the foggiest notion of what to do about vampires once he's aware one is in England. Even for a modern reader who knows exactly who Dracula is and what he's up to, it's still a very unsettling read because you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop and want to warn the characters somehow but can only read on as they slowly put the pieces together themselves. The format of the book allows Stoker to build a great deal of atmosphere and ambiance, and give the reader insights into almost all the major characters, and the plot is a spooky slow-burn as you watch all these characters gradually realize the true nature of what they're up against. It's one of the book's greatest strengths, and it, unfortunately, can't really be adapted to any other medium. The adaptations have to take a different tactic entirely, either reworking the plot or going at it from a different angle (e.g., playing the situation for Dramatic Irony, showing it from Dracula's point of view, etc.).
  • The Dune universe has proven difficult to successfully adapt to the big screen due to its length, complexity, and significant amounts of spice-induced psychedelia. Alejandro Jodorowsky unsuccessfully attempted an adaptation of the first book in the 1970s, despite first-rate talent at his disposal (documented in Jodorowsky's Dune). The director's cut of David Lynch's film is over three hours long and still has to cover large portions of the book in narrated Time Skips. The Sci-Fi Channel had a little more success by adapting the first three books of the series as two separate TV miniseries, with the extra run time of a mini-series format going a long way to making the material more accessible. The 2021 and 2024 film duology split the book in half to have room to breathe, and has been very well received but is considered a bit too slavishly loyal to the book and accordingly a bit slow in some places.
  • Earth's Children: The series is tricky to adapt to other mediums as the critical and financial failure of the 1986 film adaptation and the passed-over TV series pilot attest. The books are all doorstoppers with huge casts and they're rather exposition-heavy, going into intricate detail about prehistoric life, geography, and wilderness survival amongst other things, and the plots themselves tend to be slow-paced and introspective (including heavy use of the Inner Monologue at times), which can be difficult to translate to a purely visual medium without coming off as dull or confusing (especially as you'd have to cut out a lot of details for a more reasonable run-time). Then there's the fact it's set in the Ice Age and so you'd have to factor in a decent special effects budget to create extinct creatures like cave lions, mammoths, woolly rhinos, etc. (and most of them are covered in fur which is more difficult and costly to animate).
  • Ender's Game:
    • The founding work of the franchise chronicles Ender from ages 6 to 12 (plus an epilogue of quite a lot longer), an age when it is hard to find actors who are capable of, well, acting, much less portraying a character of any complexity. Orson Scott Card, who has a lot of experience in theatre, was adamant that the film not be made unless an actor could be found who could carry the role. Then-15-year-old Asa Butterfield rose to the challenge, aided by a Compressed Adaptation that squeezes the whole story into less than a year and the casting of Harrison Ford as Col. Graff, and the resulting film was released in 2013. It didn't turn a profit, but no one complained about the acting.
    • Marvel’s adaptation Speaker for the Dead was the only book they adapted that had nothing to do with the Bug War. And it remains the only time that book got a derived work, as author Orson Scott Card deems it unfilmable, given "It consists of talking heads, interrupted by moments of excruciating and unwatchable violence." The follow-ups Xenocide and Children of the Mind can also be considered hard to adapt, being bloated philosophical works.
  • Isaac Asimov's short story "Gold" is an In-Universe case. A writer requests a movie producer to adapt his seminal book, which is recognisable as the second part of Asimov's own The Gods Themselves. Since it features Starfish Aliens everybody thinks it can only come out as cartoonish, but the author wants a serious feature.
  • House of Leaves has been declared No Adaptations Allowed because the footnotes and appendices, multi-tiered Nested Story, and symbolic use of formatting clues such as the different font colors create an experience that simply can't be translated to any other medium without sacrificing its bite.note 
  • I Know What You Did Last Summer's big twist would be extremely difficult to adapt, which is likely why the better-known film adaptation (which was already very loose) scrapped it entirely. One character that features in a seemingly supporting role as a Romantic False Lead to Ray is Julie's new boyfriend Bud, who represents her desire to move past the accident that got a little boy killed. There's also a subplot involving Helen's budding friendship with a new man who moved to her building called Collie. Not only does he turn out to be a brother of the boy they killed, but Collie and Bud are actually the same person, which is cleverly hidden by simply never having Julie or Helen meet the respective boys. Said twist would be quite hard to pull off in a visual medium without making it easier to telegraph.
  • Mordecai Richler's The Incomparable Atuk. It's not that it's a difficult book to rewrite into a movie; it's a fairly straightforward comedy about an Inuit man who moves to Toronto. Rather, the issue is that everybody who tries to adapt it seems to either fail miserably or die, causing many to declare it cursed. Throughout the 80s and 90s, numerous different filmmakers, studios, and actors would try to make the movie, only for it to fall back into Development Hell yet again for some reason or another. Eventually, everybody just gave up and declared it unadaptable.
  • The Land of Oz series is a children's classic, but few adaptations adapt more than the first book for three reasons:
  • Life of Pi: The book was considered "unadaptable" because of the strange narrative and heavy involvement of various dangerous and difficult to train animals, but the film pulled it off to rave reviews, albeit by using enough high-quality CGI to bankrupt the animation company.
  • Advertisements for Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film of Lolita asked "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" It wasn't merely a catchy tagline. Not only does the novel center on a truly loathsome Villain Protagonist who lusts for his own underage stepdaughter, but it's narrated from his erudite point-of-view, where he tries to paint himself as a romantic, but subtextually betrays himself as a sexual predator. Kubrick made his film by, among other things, slightly aging up Lolita from 12 to 14, demoting the story's most provocative content to innuendo, and softening protagonist Humbert Humbert's most heinous actions. Adrian Lyne's 1997 adaptation is Truer to the Text, but misses much of the dramatic subtext.
  • Walter Tevis' The Man Who Fell to Earth is told almost entirely through characters' inner monologues, which is where the meat of Newton's inner struggle and characterization comes from as well as large sections of important plot development. This is likely why Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of the book is almost entirely incoherent if you haven't already read the book and understand the plot and the motivations of the characters (and even then a lot of stuff is changed pretty drastically), since having the characters constantly talking about what they're thinking would sound incredibly clunky and forced and as such a lot of extremely important context from the book is absent from the film.
  • Moby-Dick is one-fourth the story that everybody knows (a mad whaling ship captain chasing a white whale in revenge for his leg) and three-fourths an encyclopedia on whales, whaling, cetology, and mythological allusions to whales. As such, almost every adaptation winds up paring down most of the Doorstopper's content to the point where it can't really be considered the same story anymore because of how ironically crucial all the background information is to the experience of reading the book. As Andrew Rakich put it in his Letterboxd review of the 1998 film version, the ideal adaptation of the book would be some kind of seven-hour pseudo-documentary miniseries about whaling in the nineteenth century with the overarching plot taking a back seat.
  • William S. Burroughs considered Naked Lunch impossible to adapt, being deliberately incomprehensible, disturbing, and having nothing in the way of an overarching plot. As such, when he allowed David Cronenberg to adapt it into Naked Lunch, the latter compromised by crafting a new story that incorporates many themes from Burroughs' overall work and events from his biography. While still pretty Mind Screw-y, it's much less so than the book.
  • Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, was made into the movie Adaptation. which explores the general concept of a work that cannot exist in another medium. The actual book is non-fiction describing some colorful characters managing some exotic orchids and knowing how to dance around local laws. It was a well-received, fascinating book but has no actual plot or anything resembling a story structure. Charlie Kaufman's Creator Breakdown trying to make a screenplay out of the book led to the movie, with the movie focusing on his own desperate struggles to write an adaptation it manages to hit many of the major bullet points of the book.
  • John Milton's Paradise Lost due in part the surrealistic premise (The War on Heaven, Satan’s strange travels between dimensions), but mostly because of the difficulty that would go into adapting its complex Fallen Hero depiction of Satan. An adaptation would have to portray Satan as a Tragic Villain whom the audience sympathizes with, whilst simultaneously portraying him as a monster whom the audience roots against. The Devil being a main character in a story is also just itself a hard sell.
  • The Phantom of the Opera is an unfortunate example of being Adaptation Overdosed (complete with three separate high-profile adaptations in the form of an early 20th-century film, a mid-80s Broadway musical adaptation, and an early 2000s film adaptation of said musical), but yet scant few adaptations actually follow the narrative of Gaston Leroux's original book and the majority of them instead go for a distillation of the plot or just borrow similar set pieces and themes. One of the main issues of trying to get a faithful adaptation is that the novel is a horror romance thriller with a historical basis regarding the Palais Garnier opera house and trying to balance that in a different medium outside literature is difficult. This is understandably why most adaptations simply focus in on the Phantom and Christine, though this cuts into the worldbuilding of the book and does away with a sizable portion of the supporting cast, including ones who make the main characters feel more fleshed out (such as Christine's adoptive mother, Raoul's older brother, and the Persian for the Phantom). Another issue in adapting the book is the division among creators between whether it should be a chilling horror or bohemian romance. Earlier film adaptations (particularly the Lon Chaney film) focus mainly on horror, which takes away from the sentimentality of the novel. Later adaptations like the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, on the other hand, go the opposite direction by downplaying the horror and upping the sensuality, which diminishes the threat and monstrosity the titular antagonist is supposed to embody. Additionally, much like Dracula, the reader is kept in the dark for most of the book and mainly follows the bewildered Raoul’s POV until towards the end; an approach which, while good for slow burn mystery’s purposes, is ill-suited for non-episodic adaptations. Not helping matters is that Raoul is a bratty and immature POV protagonist in the book which is why most adaptations tend to make him more traditionally competent and noble to make him more likable, though at the expense of undercutting the agency and other strong qualities of Christine (the actual main character to whom Raoul serves as a Supporting Protagonist), resulting in her becoming solely a Damsel in Distress rather than a protective heroine like she is in the novel.
  • The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel was up for adaptation in the 2000s, following the trend of young adult fantasy is in. It would be extremely hard to adapt for live-action films or even television because the six books take place over an Extremely Short Timespan, covering about a week at most. The two protagonists are also teenagers who would need to feasibly not age out of the roles or change their appearances drastically. The fantasy elements are also extremely high scale - involving trips to different Shadowrealms and all sorts of Humanoid Abominations in addition to standard monsters (Perenelle is trapped on Alcatraz with a whole army of every monster imaginable) - meaning they would be very effects heavy and thus require more time to perfect. Animation would likely be the best medium to adapt, but even that would require a big enough budget and studios being convinced that audiences would turn up to see six animated feature films (and the series itself did not have the explosive popularity of say Harry Potter).
  • In-Universe in Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock often reproaches Watson for using cheap tricks like environmental descriptions verging on Scenery Porn or deliberately retaining information from the reader to make for a more interesting story, which he feels makes the actual scientific part of the case (i.e., his deductions) less important. In the two cases narrated by Holmes, he finally admits that Watson had a point and that compellingly presenting the story is harder than he thought.
  • George R. R. Martin reportedly made A Song of Ice and Fire under the premise that he was creating a story that had no chance to be adapted into a movie or series. And to his credit, the incredibly complex and detailed world and lore he crafted for the series and the sizable number of characters did allow the idea of adapting the books into a visual medium to seem like a pretty tall order. Game of Thrones seemed to take that as a challenge, and being an HBO series was able to throw a lot of money to create an acclaimed show. It still required extensive changes to the original story, as well as surpassing the story of the books due to Martin's Schedule Slip. Martin then got more involvement in House of the Dragon to avoid the problems later Game of Thrones season ran into.
  • Story Thieves would be incredibly difficult to adapt to film, due to the series' large amounts of Breaking the Fourth Wall, to the extent that book four was a choose-your-own-adventure where the character knew they were in one, having been placed there by the villain of the series in the previous book.
  • Wilbur Smith claimed to have deliberately set out to write The Sunbird (1972) in such a way as to make it unfilmable (there are two intertwined stories - one set in the then-present, the other in ancient times - with characters from one appearing as different people in the other). Several of his earlier novels had been filmed and this was his way of breaking free from a situation in which he felt that he was losing control over his stories.
  • The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde relies heavily on gags that only work in a novel which is probably why no adaptation has been attempted.
  • Tristram Shandy is an incredibly metafictional novel about a man trying (and failing) to write his own autobiography, now regarded as a precursor to Postmodernism. It's widely considered to be unable to work as a film adaptation. A 2006 adaptation, A Cock and Bull Story, was favorably received—but rather than a straight adaptation, it added another layer of metafiction, thus becoming a film about two actors trying (and failing) to adapt Tristram Shandy.
  • James Joyce's landmark novel Ulysses makes heavy use of lengthy internal monologues, incredibly surreal and postmodern-before-postmodernism imagery, highly experimental chapter structures built strictly around breaking literary conventions, and a plot that attempts to follow multiple different characters over the same series of events. As a result, the book is typically considered impossible to effectively adapt to any medium other than the one in which it was originally published. That said, adaptations of the book have been attempted to varying degrees of success, including a 1967 film that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
  • Despite the countless adaptations of Jane Eyre, to the point of Adaptation Overdosed, Charlotte Brontë's later novel Villette has only had a few radio adaptations. This is most likely because of the novel's Unreliable Narrator, who deliberately hides things from the audience, including never revealing her Dark and Troubled Past.
  • A Warriors film has been greenlit, however, a film adaptation has previously been in Development Hell for this reason. The series has dozens of books and over a thousand named characters. This alone makes it difficult to produce a self-contained film based on even the first arc due to its length and the number of characters. However, the major issue is that the series is about feral cat colonies. With its crap ton of Family-Unfriendly Violence and Family Unfriendly Deaths (with the first book more-or-less beginning with a cat being murdered), it's impossible to get a kid's film out of the series but it's unlikely the film would appeal to the mainstream teenage demographic. Warriors already had adaptations in the case of Comic Book Adaptations, but they are heavily toned down compared to the books and go for the Bloodless Carnage route.
  • The uncentered, interview-based structure of Max Brooks' World War Z caused it to be difficult to adapt. Rather than a single narrative, the book is about an undefined interviewer interviewing people about their experiences and thoughts about various stages of the Zombie Apocalypse, with the closest narrative being recurring speakers. The movie version of World War Z instead takes a more traditional narrative approach, focusing on a few central characters before and during the Zombie Apocalypse, but this ended up not being well received, leading to the planned sequels to cease production.
  • Despite being a popular children's book, for the longest time A Wrinkle in Time was considered "unfilmable" because of the fantastic elements and philosophy in what is ostensibly a children's story. Two attempts to adapt the work to live-action have been made, one a TV movie in 2003 and the other a theatrical release in 2018, but neither was successful with either the book's fanbase or general audiences.

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