Book to Movie Adaptations

“The book was better.” 

Every reader has said that line at least once. I blasted it through my whole house when my family watched The Hunger Games and the Harry Potter movies.

Books and movies are at the same time very similar and very different. Thanks to book-to-movie adaptations, we can see how the same story morphs between these two mediums. This week, I’m going to dive into the world of book to movie adaptations.

Books Vs. Movies 

Books and movies are two very different ways of telling a story. Books aren’t meant to be read in an hour or even a day (although binge reading adventures would say otherwise) Movies are usually no longer than 2 or 3 hours, and are meant to be enjoyed in one sitting. Books play with words and rely on the reader’s imagination to interpret the story. Movies show an exact image of a story, and can use sets, costumes, and soundtracks to help tell the story more.

Even though books and movies can tell the same story, they are very different mediums of storytelling. 

So then what makes a good book to movie adaptation? 

Adapting The Story 

This school year, I’m taking a Spanish class. One of the first things I learned was that when translating between Spanish and English, you can’t translate what the words directly say. Instead, you have to translate the idea. 

It’s the same with books and movies. They can’t directly copy a story from one medium and paste it into the other and hope it works. A good movie adaptation will take the ideas of a book and turn it into movie form, tweaking things here and there to make it a movie. Not a book. 

When I was younger, I was majorly obsessed with movies having accuracy to the book. It ruined my day when I watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and I saw all of the scenes that had been cut out. 

I don’t think we can judge whether a movie is a good adaptation using accuracy. If accuracy was all an adaptation had to worry about, then we would have 15 hour long movies with every little conversation and event, no matter how big or small. That doesn’t make a good movie. Again, book to movie adaptations need to translate the ideas, not just copy and paste the book into a movie. 

How to Train Your Dragon 

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about one of my favorite movies, How to Train Your Dragon. Did you know that this movie is actually based on a book? Yes, that’s right. How to Train Your Dragon is A BOOK SERIES. 

I read the HTTYD book a few years ago. Honestly, I can’t remember much from it, except the major difference between the book and the movie. They both had the characters of Hiccup and Toothless, vikings, and dragons. That’s about it. 

Again, I don’t remember very much from the book, so I’d love to hear what anyone who has read it recently thinks. But I remember the book being really silly and not as emotional as the movie. I’m all for fun and jokes, but when comedy is paired with an emotional story, it works so much better. 

The How to Train Your Dragon movie takes the general idea of an outsider viking who has to train his dragon, and adds in a story about a teenager learning who he is. In this situation, the book acted as a basic concept for the movie, but the movie expanded it into something very different. Still a great story, but different from it’s book. In this book-to-movie adaptation, the screenwriters took a very basic idea presented in the book and added a more emotional story to it. 

Shadow and Bone 

Now let’s change gears to the Netflix adaptation of Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows. This TV show is any book lover’s dream about having an accurate and faithful adaptation of a book. 

I haven’t read Shadow and Bone, so I don’t know a lot about how accurate the show is to the books. (if you’ve read the books and watched the show, I’d love to hear what you think!) But on the Six of Crows side of things, we got to see scenes that were almost word-for-word accurate to the books. Other parts of the story were completely new. (The show technically takes place a few years before the events of Six of Crows)

The Shadow and Bone adaptation took parts of two different books and threaded their stories together. Along the way, many things were kept the same, but other aspects of the story were changed and tweaked. 

The Hunger Games 

The Hunger Games is a book that seems like it would be very hard to adapt into a movie. When reading the book, we are told exactly what Katniss’s strategy and motivations are. She fakes falling in love with Peeta to survive. In the movies, it’s harder to pick this out, mainly because there just isn’t any way for it to be clearly stated. 

So much of The Hunger Games relies on context, too. Throughout the book, Katniss tells us about how the games work. Information pops up organically, as Katniss experiences it. I can’t remember for sure, but the movies have a little prologue-thingy majigg at the beginning and…that’s about all we learn about the world and games? I would love to be able to re-experience watching the movies without any context from the books to see what it’s like. 

All in all, I don’t think we can judge whether a book to movie adaptation based on its accuracy. Movies and books are very similar ways of telling a story, but at the same time so different. 

Tell me, what are some of your favorite book-to movie adaptations? What makes you enjoy an adaptation? Thanks for reading, I hope you have a great rest of your day! 

-Hannah