The Bourne Ultimatum

I was strolling by the bookstore and I saw the book: The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum. Now I’ll admit, I’ve never read the book (nor the novels that preceded it). And again, I’ve never watched the movie, not even The Bourne Identity, not even on pirated DVD. But I saw the trailer for the movie the other day and I was interested. So I looked up the series on Wikipedia.

According to the Wikipedia entry, the book is entirely different from the movie. In fact, the plot diverged ever since the prevoius movie, the Bourne Supremacy. I’m just wondering—will fans of the movie be shocked when the buy the book? Now this isn’t a post against movie adaptation of novels. History after all has produced various results: we’ve produced cool crap (i.e. Conan the Barbarian), crap that’s still crap (i.e. Kull the Conqueror), blockbuster successes (i.e. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe), and rarely movies that are as good as the book they’re based on, if not more superior (i.e. The Lord of the Rings trilogy). It’s just that what moviegoers are seeing and what they’ll read as readers are two entirely different animals. (Of course the reverse isn’t true—fans of the novels will know that the movie is different and in many ways, they brace themselves for it.) And unlike something like I, Robot, this isn’t the first in the series but rather the third in a trilogy (unless you count Eric Van Lustbader’s sequels). So it really has me wondering.