What Makes a Successful Film Adaptation

Two Mediums One Story… Lots of Feelings

Since film has popped up and become a medium there have been movies based on books. The first film made in Hollywood was The Count of Monte Cristo. Disney made their first animated based on Snow White from the fairy tales. Some of the best movies of all time Jaws, Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey and so many more are all based on books.

As a reader I tend to want to read the book before I see the movie. Reading a book is a personal experience. When reading a book you have your own experience. Your imagination creates a unique reenactment as it takes the words and changes them into the story in your head. A movie, while you can still have a unique experience, shows the same face of the character to the whole audience. You can’t accidentally picture the wrong hair color or see their nose differently from the person sitting next to you. Jennifer Lawrence is Katniss, Elijah Wood is Frodo and it’s a hard visual not just a figment in your head. After you’ve seen the movie it can be hard to separate the visuals from the story on the page.

Movies are multi-sensory. It’s a visual medium but it also has a soundtrack, lines spoken instead of read, and they can interplay on a different level from reading. 4D theaters go even further adding motion to the seats, smells, and environmental details like water and fog to enhance the viewing experience. Streaming culture has brought on an onslaught of longer series that allow for more details and worldbuilding. There is no denying it most audiences do prefer movies or shows when it comes to their storytelling and many don’t feel the need to read the book after since they have already watched essentially the same thing.

Some things can change drastically depending on how it is delivered on screen. Dumbledore’s famous “Did you put your name in the Goblet of Fire?” line is only pointed out because, in the book, he was meant to say it calmly in the face of the other judges freaking out. In the movie, he’s yelling and threatening, even grabbing Harry as he demands answers. The whole scene changes with that reading and so can Dumbledore’s character itself. He is the man with the plan always calm and in control. The movie shows him to have a temper, to not know what’s going on, to be the first to blame the kid rather than looking to solve how it happened.

It makes his character inconsistent with what he is meant to be bigger picture.

To me, that is what makes a good screen adaptation, keeping to the spirit of the story. You can make whatever changes you need to for time or design but if you lose the essence of the story than your adaptation isn’t going to be as warmly received. Movies like Eragon where they change the whole world, races and all, as well as adjusting characters to suit an audience rather than make them accurate to the book.

Accuracy does not necessarily mean success either. You can have all the ingredients for a cake but if you don’t use them like you’re baking one it won’t come out quite right. Film isn’t the same as literature. You can’t be in the character’s head the same way. You can’t have metaphors and similes translate quite the same poetic way. Instead you have a visual to work with. Showing instead of telling becomes wildly more important. Audience engagement changes and since watching is more of a passive way to consume media the story has to have the audience work to stay invested.

The Harry Potter films showed how things could change and become their own entity. The fanbase that never picked up the books proved that. Film has advantages that literature will always struggle to compete with. The ability to build atmosphere with several different senses draws in the audience that descriptions of the same thing would struggle with. A soundtrack can add a ton of feeling to a scene without having to use a single word. Visuals make the action flow in a way that words can cause to drag. It makes sense why it is so popular a medium.

That being said there are so many movies and shows based on books. Even ones that people don’t often think of, like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Nowadays there are so many books that get translated directly into some kind of screenplay that you can hardly read it before the books all have the live action covers everywhere. Shows in particular are really taking off after the success of A Game of Thrones. Audiences have made it clear that they want to see their favorite stories done justice.

Now we are hitting the streaming era and we are already seeing remakes for Harry Potter, Twilight, Eragon, and Percy Jackson. It is a strange time to be a book fan. On the one hand it is awesome getting so much content. It is less awesome if the content doesn’t do the thing I love justice. Again.

Anyway.

A good film adaptation doesn’t have a set in stone definition, I have really come to appreciate that as I have gotten older and as the film industry has grown. Lord of the Rings isn’t a perfect translation of the books but it conveys the spirit of what the books can make a reader feel. They made adjustments but the story still feels whole. The Game of Thrones show worked because it stuck to the characters and the story. It tripped up the ending because the elements they decided to cut ended up growing in importance past what they could parallel.

It’s become a bit of a mental exercise, reading the book and then assessing the film. What’s really awesome is that the assessments can change with each watch. The film industry is slowing being pushed to perform on these book based movies and it is fun to see how they have evolved over the decades.

Streaming has had a very interesting impact on the whole practice. They can adapt books for their miniseries or a movie and it happens fast. Now books are being written to feel like those shows and cycle feeds itself. It’s strange to watch as a reader but it’s like watching a whole branching of a new genre. Romantasy is a thing and this new visual personal style of writing is really becoming popular. Books like A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, and Red Queen have given way to a new tributary of the genre where girls who have grown up loving books can be adults too.

Some are good some are bad that’s not really my point. Mostly that the medias can influence each other in ways people don’t always anticipate.

I suppose that wasn’t my whole point. I have been let down by adaptations before. Often. Even some that the audiences love I struggle with because it misses something that I loved, that meant something to me. The hardest part is everyone has a personal experience when they read. We relate on a personal level, we conjure images in our heads, and we have our own responses to what we went through. Nobody can put that exact experience on the screen. Sometimes it just has to become a project for the people making the film. I think that is how you end up with the Ghibli version of Howl’s Moving Castle or The Shawshank Redemption. Both are fantastic films and great books even with all their differences.

Inspiration can hit in crazy ways. You never know who is going to be inspired by what and it is hard, with that in mind, to be against the explosion of media happening now. Things are changing more with direct contact to the audience and I’m kind of excited to see how things change in the future.