Adaptations are always prominent in the movie world. Often, there’s already a fanbase to draw in, meaning there’s a high chance that filmmakers will be able to make back the money they spent adapting it, and if it’s a franchise, they might make even more money from subsequent films. One of the dangers, however, is failing to live up to the preexisting fanbase’s love of the book.
Trying to rework the story to better fit a film is a thin line that has to be walked in order to appease the majority of the audience. There will always be some people not happy with something — maybe the characters aren’t the way they envisioned them, and they don’t like this change. The Good Omens TV adaptation experienced this with their design for Crowley, even though they simply gave him red hair instead of ‘dark’ like the book mentioned. There are always changes that are necessary for film, however, and it’s not always a bad thing.
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An Exact Adaptation Would Never Survive
20th Century Fox
Too much faithfulness to the source material is definitely a thing. There are several different reasons, but perhaps one of the biggest — if the book and the movie are the exact same, why choose both? What’s the point of translating something to a different medium if it remains exactly the same.
The book might not make any more sales if everyone would rather sit and watch a movie, and vice versa. Adaptation is all about changing something to better suit its environment, and a book truly can’t be recreated on the screen word for word. That doesn’t mean adaptations are bad. It’s great to see the story come to life in a new way and watch the characters go through these hardships, even if they’re not all exactly the same.
Chances are, directors and producers would also be less inclined to make an adaptation if they weren’t given any creative freedom. All they’d be doing is taking everything the book says and translating it onto the screen, putting more focus on how the book portrays something than how something might look better in the medium of film, or even just better in their eyes. Because of this, it would almost just make more sense for a book writer to turn to writing screenplays instead of books so that they can be in charge of their own movies, instead of removing creative freedom from whoever else would be in charge. Not every book is meant to be a movie, and the film industry would suffer for this.
Different Mediums Work in Different Ways
New Line Cinema
Have you ever read Lord of the Rings? Depending on what edition you buy, and what scale it was printed at, it’s around 1,200 pages long. If you’ve ever watched the movies, you’ve experienced a lot of dangerous adventure as the journey continues on through different perilous scenarios. What’s in the LotR books that can’t be conveyed to mainstream film is just how long this traveling really is — it’s the journey at the center of the whole plot, so of course there’s going to be a lot of traveling, but the book makes sure to detail it all as it builds up the world around it.
This slow pace would be terrible for most movies, and even condensing it down to keep the action going still took three movies to tell the story. Ultimately, there is no way to keep an adaptation completely faithful, as film is an entirely different medium and has different requirements to meet, while books are allowed to be as long or as short as they need to be, and can be as internal and expositional as the author wants.
Miramax Books
A typical movie tends to be an hour and a half to two hours, which is nowhere near enough time to read through a typical novel. This means the book gets to mention some details that might have to be cut in film for the sake of irrelevance to the story, or even full minor characters whose stories can be repurposed into other character arcs that fit the time better, or be taken out of the story entirely.
Look at the upcoming Percy Jackson TV series: after the failure of the movies and the audience largely reacting negatively so that the rest were canceled, they revived it as a TV series to have more time to get into the little details the movie had to cut. It just means these books exist better as books, or potentially as a TV series that gives more time for the details. Every adaptation has the potential for failure, so it’s really a matter of deciding what medium is best, including if the book would be better off staying as a book.
Books Are Never Meant to be Films
Warner Bros.
Ultimately, it comes down to the idea that no author writes their book with an adaptation in mind; otherwise they’d just write a screenplay. That’s why it’s always important to keep in mind the fact that not everything will translate perfectly. An author can have long-winded dialogue that helps set the scene, or tells the important pieces of plot.
Movies don’t often have the luxury for long conversations, not without something else happening to keep the audience entertained and the dialogue from dragging on. There are a ton of literary elements that would never translate over to film or TV properly, which means there will never be a ‘perfect’ adaptation to a book. There’s no doubt it can get close, but it will never be exact. Ironically, some of the best literary adaptations (Naked Lunch, Adaptation) intentionally alter the structure of the book to fit the nature of film.
The Medium Is the Message
Sony Pictures
It works the other way around too: some things are better off as movies rather than books. Intense action scenes are one of the hardest things to get across well in writing, but are very easy to bring to life on the big screen. It can also get very repetitive in books if action sequence dominate exposition, character, and dialogue.
You don’t have to explain how a character is feeling or what they’re thinking in a movie, as the actors can show it with their expressions and their reactions, and maybe even voiceover narration for their thoughts, like some movies do. In fact, the old adage for film is “show, don’t tell,” which is the opposite of the advice given to novelists.
Sometimes comedies include gags that rely entirely on visuals, sometimes the plot is too short to make a full book; sometimes some scripts are written with specific actors in mind to play the role, which definitely wouldn’t translate well to a book. Filmmakers have to pick and choose their battles, and they understand that in order to make a good movie, they can’t perfectly replicate a book. Fans of these books would be much happier if they respect that.
