The one example that keeps coming to me is 2010, where you had this incredibly bold and mesmerizing work of art that was Kubrick's film... followed by a pedestrian, plot-heavy scifi movie that was only concerned with "advancing the story" and lacked much of the spirit and creativity of the original.
I think you're forgetting that
2010 was a book first, and
2001 was a book and a film simultaneously. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick developed and made their versions of
2001 together in full collaboration, with both of them collaborating on the film script and Clarke then expanding it into the novel; but Kubrick took his version in a very stylized and surreal direction while Clarke wrote his version in his usual, much more expository and straightforward style. In 1982, Clarke wrote the book
2010: Odyssey Two, which was actually more a sequel to the movie version than the original book (in that it put the Monolith at Jupiter rather than Saturn, along with other differences), but which still carried forward the storytelling style and a lot of the ideas of the original book, including the explanation of HAL's breakdown. Two years later, Peter Hyams adapted Clarke's novel into a film, in close e-mail collaboration with Clarke (at a time when e-mail was still new and rare).
So the creativity underlying both stories is Clarke's, and if you read the books, you'll see a lot more continuity of concept and style. The difference is that Kubrick's film was a joint creation with Clarke than nonetheless went off in its own stylistic direction, while Hyams's was more of a standard, trimmed-down adaptation of a pre-existing novel. I think there's a lot to like about the movie, but as with most such adaptations, the book is better, the fuller and truer version of the story being told.
Speaking as a Clarke fan, I think Hyams did a better job adapting Clarke's style than Kubrick did. I liked it that
2010 told a more straightforward story -- and frankly,
2001 bores the hell out of me.
2010's plot is less minimalist, the characters are more human, and it actually has an original score (complete with Blaster Beam!) instead of just a bunch of stock music. (I've never liked Kubrick's approach to music.) Its main drawback is that Hyams tried to make the film more "topical" by throwing in a lot of Cold War tension that wasn't in the book -- which made the film quite dated when the USSR fell just five years later. Also having gravity in the Pod Bay and casting a white actor as Dr. Chandra.
