Obviously, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Mainly movies for me because I haven't read them. Extended editions, obviously.
But also, I adore the mass effect trilogy. Yeah, the rpg elements get gradually watered down, and the third ones ending isn't the best, but it's still an absolutely amazing Trilogy that I replay yearly. And it all came out in 5 years! Nowadays, single games have 5 years of dev time, at least. In my eyes, it's as perfect as it can be....Once it's been modded a bit.
So, I read the books. And they are very good. There is a reason that the series is so influential.
And there are definitely some things that I do not like about the movies. The shield-surfing, for example.
But as movie adaptations go, it is pretty darn faithful to the original. Like, I've seen a lot of movie adaptations where you're going to miss a lot of material if you don't do the books, but they kept all the significant stuff in. They streamlined it a little, and no Tom Bombadill, but I seriously think that it does a solid job of capturing the original.
Like, if there's any book or series where I think that watching the movie would get you a pretty good approximation of the material and still be a really good movie, Lord of the Rings has to be near the top.
I almost brought up the shield surfing 🙂. I decided not to. There were some little warts like that, and “I am no man” and etc, but overall the movies are awesome + about as faithful as you can get without making it into a miniseries that spans decades of production or something.
After watching the movies, I can't read the books any more. Tolkien was many things, he's great at world building and mythology, but storytelling is not among his greatest qualities.