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In reply to #9: I agree with you. I haven't read the book, but I was very disappointed with the movie. I watched the first half, waiting for the creature to be revealed as some ugly, disgusting brain eater. What did it turn out to be? A giant spider! Oh, please!

Both versions of Salem's Lot were pretty bad, too, don't you think?

No doubt that "It" was a joke compared to the depth of the book. The theater of the mind trumps all. I was rooting for Pennywise in the movie. 

'Troy' ...the movie was an appalling, rubbish hatchet job of the Greek Myth (is that a book?)

'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' ... from fabulous, heart-breaking book to overdone turkey.

Catch 22 ... It was never going to work as a movie. 

The Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy ... what a waste of a brilliant comedy.

But the worst... The Golden Compass. Hollywood ripped it's religious guts out so the right-wing loons wouldn't whip up 'moral outrage' and force its withdrawl (ie religious self-censorship). And it was rubbish anyway.

I'll jump on the IT movie-version-bashing bandwagon too. Horrible...even for a Stephen King adaptation.

In reply to #5:

Oh, I agree, ghastly.  I think Meyers is a very so-so writer.  Good ideas but her plodding got very much on my nerves.  The director seems to have chosen *that* aspect to focus on.

"The Da Vinci Code" annoyed me beyond all belief. How on earth did Tom Hanks manage to be so annoying?? It could just be me. However the suspence that was built up in the novel just did not come across in the film.

I thought the film did not compare to the book.  I am probably bias because I think many books are so much better then the films.  I did not care for "Eragon" film, "Twilight" film, or "The City of Ember" film.  If you take the films separate from the book I guess the are well done but I enjoy the details of books.  I enjoy creating my own image with well written books.  Technology is always rapidly expanding but so much is often lost in translation when a book is adapted to a movie.  In fact there have been studies that show the language is simplified. 

I didn't see the Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter, but I recall that they even included the caveat "Loosely adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne" or something like that.

My nomination for worst book-to-film, though, is Native Son.  It was not only a poor adaptation of the story, the film was badly produced--grainy and unfocused.  The acting was over the top and stilted.  I showed it once (and we may not have even finished it) and never again.  Instead, after trying that bad version of Native Son, I paired Native Son with the fine film A Place in the Sun (based on Dreiser's An American Tragedy--both book and film can be effectively compared to the Richard Wright novel).

This is a fun topic!

The most disappointing I have seen is Ask the Dust. It's a remarkable book by John Fante, and the movie was just horrendous. 

The World According to Garp....really, any Irving novel that has become a movie....there is so much complexity to all of his novels that a movie can't do them justice.