I bought this book for my son about six months ago and the only similarity between it and this movie is food falling from the sky. The original story was a grandfather telling his grandkids a bedtime story of a town that had peculiar weather where food replaced rain, wind, snow etc. There was no scientist at the root of it and life was fine until the weather went haywire and the people had to flee town.

The film will probably be a bit more entertaining and stand on its own in that it's character driven. Kids who have read the book probably won't care about the change. My son liked the trailers and didn't even think about what had been altered. Was it worth making? I guess that all depends on how well the script was thought out and executed. If it was just based on the book alone I'd say no.