[dwig]

I checked "never", but as the years have gone by I have learned that my expectations should be lowered so, really, I should have check "Always" as I always expect the movie to be a poor rendition of a novel.

It is quite impossible to make a marketable movie of a true novel length book. The book will contain way way way too much story to every fit in a single movie, given the ~2hr upper limit for a marketable movie.

Star Wars accomplished something similar by creating 3 movies to tell one novel's worth of storyline.

That said, I have occasionally seen short stories successfully translated into movies. There, the storyline can fit into the limited length of a movie. I've also seen some good movies that were derived from longer works, but were in no way faithful and/or complete replications of the books narrative.