It seems like nowadays, no movies are made from an original script or screenplay. All movies are either book adaptations based on novels or remakes of older movies that were book adaptations. Sometimes these reincarnations are magical and bring stories that existed on pages to life. Other times, you wish the two-hour atrocity could be removed from your memory because some authors' words are untouchable. So let’s examine which is truly better: books or movies?
One of the biggest hits of the summer was The Fault in Our Stars. The book and movie were substantial hits that have lead to more of author John Green’s books to be made into movies. But what may have contributed to the movie’s success was that it was a basic blueprint of the book with much of the author’s words left unchanged.
Sticking directly to the source material isn’t going to guarantee a good movie. Even though the Twilight franchise was very financially successful and stayed close to Stephenie Meyer’s books, the movies are now a punch line for bad acting and bad vampires.
And you can’t mention successful novel series and movie franchises without talking about the legendary Harry Potter. It was impossible to include all the details of the seven colossal novels into the eight-movie saga. However, after so many novels have turned into television adaptations, maybe television could be a different medium to help book series that are too large for the big screen.
This may be happening with Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices series. Another one of Clare’s series was adapted into a movie but with little financial or critical success; still, the author has a huge fandom and her team is trying to capitalize on that by adapting The Infernal Devices into a television series instead of a movie. This was a trending topic on Twitter before production on the series began, so they might be on to a successful series.
Still, when these shows are adapted onto the silver screen, are viewers getting the full experience that comes with reading the book? This leads to people spoiling endings for their friends or not thoroughly understanding the plot points or character development. This has been such a big issue that Gillian Flynn, who wrote Gone Girl, decided to change a twist in the end of her novel so people who read the book or looked up the spoilers online would still be surprised by the ending.
There have been good book-to-movie adaptations such as Catching Fire from the The Hunger Games series, but there have also been some like Jim Carrey’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Hopefully, with the insane cash incentives, movie studios can keep making movie adaptations that are accurate and faithful to the books.
