The widest disagreement in this year’s book-to-screen list is Practical Magic 2. Critics gave it 36% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it 90%. Book Riot published its round-up of the year’s worst adaptations on 23 October 2026. The nine entries split into two kinds of failure that reporters usually lump together.
One kind is a film that critics disliked and the book’s readers defended. The other is a film that everyone gave up on. The first kind still has an audience and a future. The second does not.
The gap runs from 1 point to 54
Five of the nine titles carry both scores and the other four carry a critic score only. The gap runs 54 points towards the audience at one end and 37 points towards the critics at the other.
| Title | Critics | Audience | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Practical Magic 2 | 36% | 90% | 54 points to the audience |
| Reminders of Him | 56% | 87% | 31 points to the audience |
| Finding Her Edge | 87% | 50% | 37 points to the critics |
| Wuthering Heights | 57% | 74% | 17 points to the audience |
| The Last Thing He Told Me season 2 | 47% | 48% | 1 point, both sides unimpressed |
| Klara and the Sun | 30% | Not given | Critics only |
| Verity | 31% | Not given | Critics only |
| Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials | 52% | Not given | Critics only |
| Cape Fear | 52% | Not given | Critics only |
Scores as reported by Book Riot on 23 October 2026. Where no audience score is listed, the round-up did not give one.
A 54-point gap measures loyalty, not quality
The audience score on an adaptation is partly a vote on the book. A film can pull an old title back up the chart by itself, and the Goodreads most-read list shows that happening inside a single week. Readers who loved Alice Hoffman’s novel arrive wanting the film to work, and Practical Magic 2 had a 1998 film behind it as well, which is two sets of expectations pointing the same way. The audience that gave it 90% arrived to check that the thing it remembered had been respected, not to compare it with a strong year of cinema.
Critics were reviewing a film with no such debt. Book Riot quoted the complaint that it was “overlong, muddled” and that it “strips the franchise of its gothic charms”, which is an argument about craft rather than about fidelity. Both scores can be accurate at the same time, because they answer different questions.
The reverse case is more interesting. Finding Her Edge got 87% from critics and 50% from audiences, with complaints about an uneven plot, predictable arcs and a forced love triangle. A Netflix adaptation that critics enjoy and readers reject usually means the film was built well and built for somebody else. The Harry Potter series had a memory to beat before it had a film to beat, and so does every title on this list.
The one that lost both sides
The Last Thing He Told Me returned for a second season and landed on 47% from critics and 48% from audiences. A one-point gap means both sides agree the thing stopped working. That is the most expensive outcome on the list, because there is no group left to market to.
Second seasons are where adaptations usually break. The first season has a novel to draw on and a mystery to close. The comparison being tested by any adaptation is the source, not a rival franchise, and once the source runs out the show is competing against its own first season. A season built on a story the author did not write has to invent the reason to keep watching.
Every quote here names the story, not the cast
Book Riot attached a quote to 7 of the 9 entries, and not one of them is about casting, acting or production:
- Practical Magic 2: an “overlong, muddled” story that “strips the franchise of its gothic charms”.
- Finding Her Edge: an “uneven plot, some predictable story arcs, and a forced love triangle”.
- The Last Thing He Told Me: a “thrill-light nothingburger of a story”.
- Klara and the Sun: “noxious sentimentality” that “strips away everything insightful and affecting from Ishiguro’s novel”.
- Verity: an “intensely stupid twist” that makes the ending “inconceivably lazy”.
- Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials: “no rope has ever been made that’s strong enough to support the amount of disbelief we needed to suspend”.
- Cape Fear: the showrunner “threw in the kitchen sink, then the tumble dryer and the aircon unit”.
Every complaint is about a plot decision or the telling of it. A bad adaptation is usually a well-made film with a story that was re-plotted by people who had to compress a novel into two hours, and who picked the wrong things to keep.
A 30% score on an Ishiguro novel points at the writing
I have not read Klara and the Sun, and I have not read the Colleen Hoover titles on this list. So this is a reading of scores, quotes and patterns, and the one thing I can say plainly is that a 30% critic score on an Ishiguro adaptation is a writing failure and not an acting one. The novel is quiet, and quiet is the first thing a screen adaptation sands off.
More book arguments sit in Book Notes.
Audience scores are self-selected and easy to game
Someone could point out that audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are self-selected, easy to game, and skewed by people who have not watched the film. That is true, and it is why I would not use a 90% audience score as a quality measure. It is still the best available measure of whether the people who were going to show up showed up satisfied, and for an adaptation that is the number that decides whether a second one gets made.
Source: Book Riot’s round-up of 23 October 2026, compiled from Rotten Tomatoes scores and quoted reviews.
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