Yeah, I’d be interested to know how many Marvel movie adaptations were done without seeing the finished film. Did they all feature scenes that were ultimately cut? Jack Kirby’s version of 2001: A Space Odyssey being the exception as it was done around 1976.
An interesting one (for me at least) was the Conan '82 adaptation. It’s vastly different to the finished film, but over the years it has become increasingly evident that it was pretty accurate in terms of the original script. That’s what’s so fascinating to me - it’s almost as if two parallel versions of these movies were being created. A lot of the stuff that seemed so inaccurate in the TESB adaptation has shown up in deleted scenes and script drafts.
ROTJ was probably the most ‘film accurate’ adaptation I was aware of back in the day, but for me it arguably has better dialogue than the movie in a number of places. I see it as a kind of ‘what if ROTJ had been directed by someone else’.
This reminds me of the original Back to the Future novelization