If you love both reading and watching films, 2026 offers rich rewards – this year will see everything from new Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility adaptations to yet another instalment in the Dune franchise.
Project Hail Mary, The Odyssey, H is For Hawk, and Wuthering Heights are already out, meanwhile.
Generally, hitting the big or small screen spells good news for book sales. People can’t stop buying copies of the Homeric text after Nolan’s blockbuster; Wuthering Heights sales skyrocketed after Emerald Fennell’s controversial interpretation.
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But that doesn’t mean every author is a fan of their works’ film or telly counterparts.
Here, we rounded up eight authors who criticised adaptations of their books:
1) E.B. White wasn’t delighted with 1973’s Charlotte’s Web
Paramount Pictures
E.B. White, who wrote the 1952 children’s book, had been in negotiations with the production team John and Faith Hubley.
Eventually, Hanna-Barbera got the rights instead. After their animated 1973 movie came out, White wrote: “The movie of Charlotte’s Web is about what I expected it to be. The story is interrupted every few minutes so that somebody can sing a jolly song. I don’t care much for jolly songs. The Blue Hill Fair, which I tried to report faithfully in the book, has become a Disney World, with 76 trombones.”
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His wife, meanwhile, told would-be director of the abandoned original adaptation, Gene Dietch, “We have never ceased to regret that your version of Charlotte’s Web never got made. The Hanna-Barbera version has never pleased either of us.”
2) Truman Capote didn’t love 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Author Truman Capote spent many years disparaging the movie based on his 1958 novel, calling it the “most miscast” movie (he’d wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part Audrey Hepburn got).
When asked what he didn’t like about the adaptation, he replied, “Oh god, just everything” – the book’s narrator role changes, as does the book’s ending.
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3) Stephen King had issues with 1980’s The Shining
Warner Bros Pictures
Speaking to The Paris Review about Kubrick’s version of his story, King said he thought the movie was “Too cold. No sense of emotional investment in the family whatsoever on his part”.
He added that Shelley Duvall as Wendy was “insulting to women. She’s basically a scream machine…
“And Kubrick didn’t seem to have any idea that Jack Nicholson was playing the same motorcycle psycho that he played in all those biker films he did… The guy is crazy. So where is the tragedy if the guy shows up for his job interview and he’s already bonkers? No, I hated what Kubrick did with that.”
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The writer had penned his own version of the script, which Kubrick didn’t use.
4) Rick Riordan disavowed the 2010 Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief flick
Author Rick Riordan let his feelings about the adaptation be known on X, where he likened the movie to “my life’s work going through a meat grinder when I pleaded with [the studio] not to do it.”
He also posted, “I still have not seen the movies, and don’t plan on ever doing so… I judge them from having read the scripts because I care most about the story. I certainly have nothing against the very talented actors. Not their fault. I’m just sorry they got dragged into that mess.”
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Still, the writer hinted he was “gonna fix” this with Disney+’s 2023 series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, for which he had more oversight.
5) Michael Ende called 1984’s The Neverending Story “revolting”
Going so far as to remove his name from the movie’s credits, Ende publicly described the movie as “revolting” and claimed, “the makers of the film simply did not understand the book at all”.
The author even reportedly tried (and failed) to sue in order to stop the movie from going out, saying his “moral and artistic existence is at stake in this film”.
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6) PL Travers had such a contentious relationship with Disney due to Mary Poppins, there’s a whole film about it
The film, which won a remarkable five Oscars, had a very different nanny to the one in PL Travers’ books (she “never wastes time being nice”) – Travers also disliked the fact that Disney made Mrs Banks a Suffragette.
So contentious was her relationship with Walt Disney that the movie Saving Mr Banks was made to chronicle the making of the film.
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7) Alan Moore, the mind behind V for Vendetta’s comics, called the 2005 movie’s writing “rubbish”
Warner Bros Pictures
When asked to weigh in on the adaptation, Moore said: “I’ve read the screenplay. It’s rubbish”.
He also told the New York Times that for a lot of the DC projects that had become movies, “I don’t want anything more to do with these works because they were stolen from me – knowingly stolen from me.”
8) Moore also slammed the Watchmen film
The writer, who claimed the studio was using his brother’s serious illness to pressure him, said of the movie: “curse this wretched film and everything connected with it”.
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Speaking to GQ, meanwhile, he said: “I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work.
“From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason… It seemed to me that what people were taking away from works like Watchmen or V For Vendetta wasn’t the storytelling techniques, which to me seemed to be the most important part of it. It was instead this greater leeway with violence and with sexual references. Tits and innards.”
