When Hollywood isn’t milking the superhero franchises or making The Hangover Part 67, it occasionally dips its feet into the literary world and picks out a story to adapt from there. Sure, many writers will tell you how their books have been optioned for movies for decades (without any progress being made), but sometimes the studios do get it right and select an outstanding project to bring to life.
The reason not many books get adapted, though, is because it’s difficult to capture a novel’s multiple layers and very essence. Over 300 pages, for example, an adept novelist will be able to convey the past, present, and future of multiple characters, while serving up an engaging plot as well. In a film, however, many elements will have to be removed to ensure the running time doesn’t venture off into the unwatchable territory. Hence book-to-TV series adaptations being more favored for studios in recent years.
In the past decade or so though, we’ve seen a host of book-to-film adaptations that deserve massive praise for how the mediums beautifully complemented each other. However, let’s just establish something first: this isn’t about how high the films scored on Rotten Tomatoes, but more about how faithful they were to adapting (or updating) the source material.
Of course, this is all a matter of opinion, too, so we do welcome your thoughts and comments on any of the movies listed here. If you have something you’d like to add to the conversation, please sound off in the comments section below.
With that out of the way, let’s begin.