I've started reading Jumper by NameDoesNotMatter. I would like to formally apologise about all the harsh things I've ever spoken about that film.
Fine, the cast is unlikeable and the action scenes are just fisticuffs in the air, but my god, in comparison to the teenage dreck that is the book, it's a masterpiece. At least they tried to build a credible back story for the main character.
In the book, he literally thinks everyone is out to sexually assault him (and somehow they seem to), he solves his problems by throwing money at it, instead of any actual creativity, and the author desperately tries to portray him as a mature-for-his-age adult, despite the fact that his first reaction to anything is crying followed by petty revenge.
I'm just flicking through the pages, pausing at any plot bits, and then flicking on.
Ready Player One I guess. There's a big difference between seeing a fuckload of pop culture artifacts on screen and reading multiple pages of somebody rattling off their knowledge about them. The worst part is that RP1 doesn't even really engage with the culture it utilizes in any kind of interesting way, it's all just surface level references that you'd learn from reading Reddit comment sections where people quote memes at each other. The movie on the other hand kind of makes it work because the pop culture artifacts aren't dwelled on, they're used more like an aesthetic choice, while the main focus of the movie is on its paint-by-numbers plot.
I actually really liked the book over the movie. I felt like the book did a much better job of describing the dystopian world and how the MC (can't remember his name and too lazy to look it up) and the world at large more or less dealt with it.
Iirc the movie doesn't even go into the history of the digital world and why the MC was obsessed with it. I get that movies and books are different but it seemed like the movie was "inspired" by the book and not based on it.
When the iron giant shows up in your story as a reference and you have him
checks notes
Choose to be a gun
This is probably the best example of the OP's thread topic. Ready Player One book is really bad gaming nostalgia on the order of the Brick by Brick meme novel by Bob Chapman. Just absolute consumerist trash with nothing interesting to say. The movie is still bad, but better then then the book.
I can't think of a more perfect example.