It doesn’t happen all the time, but now and then there are movies that actually do better than the books that they were taken from, either because enough is changed that makes the story a little more appealing to the audience, or because the director manages to flesh out certain points that people might not have fully understood. In any case, taking a book and turning it into a movie is something that can have the effect of mangling the overall story, but it’s not a guarantee that this will happen. Quite often it’s been seen that the movie will actually misrepresent what the book was all about, but even that can make the movie come off as a better tale than the original book ever did, simply because it shows the story in a glaring light that people can actually see and don’t have to argue over when it comes to how they depict each element. At the end of the day, some movies are better than the books they came from simply because they can show what words aren’t always capable of, but there are rare times when the two will sync up perfectly.
Here are a few movies that did better than the books they came from.
5. No Country for Old Men
Punctuation and grammar kind of plagued the original book, but thankfully that’s not really a big deal in the movie unless an actor wants to hem and haw over the script they’re reading and how it’s formatted. Of course, one might think that a person that’s managed to land a role in a movie as big as this one was should be able to take a simple script and divine what’s needed when it’s time to speak their lines. It’s fun to think that a lot of people don’t even remember that there was a book version of this story, to begin with, especially since this movie was something of a surprise to a lot of people.
4. The Hunger Games
There are plenty of people who would gladly debate this statement. Many folks that have read the book made it clear that the appearance of many characters wasn’t followed to the letter, but it’s probably for the best since in some cases the descriptions sound a little too over the top. But overall people have loved the movies and apart from a few mistakes here and there, it’s been seen that a lot of folks have really taken to them. Personally the interest kind of ended after the first one, especially with the wooden acting talents of Jennifer Lawrence. But hey, everyone has their own opinion when it comes to movies.
3. Jaws
The fact that the author actually regretted writing this book is kind of amusing since it means that he took a second look and didn’t like what he saw. But a lot of readers might have appreciated the omission of certain moments in the book when it came to watching the movie. Sometimes a book can really go off on a tangent and deviate from the main thrust of the story, which is a bit disorienting and even kind of annoying for the reader. But the fact that Peter Benchley took a look back and was sorry for vilifying sharks in such a way is hard to condemn since it’s likely that this wasn’t his intent.
2. American Psycho
Apparently this book upset people so much that it was taken off of shelves and eventually stopped selling. That’s kind of disturbing since no matter if a book is filled with negative and strange ideas, it’s still better to afford it a chance to be read and analyzed by others than to simply shrink wrap it and stop setting it out where people can see it. The movie was absolutely nuts since the main character couldn’t be trusted as the narrator simply because his mind was so fractured that trying to make heads or tails of what was real and what wasn’t at times was a little more confusing than it should have been. But madness is addictive, there’s no doubt of that.
1. The Godfather
There were certain aspects of the story that Mario Puzo went into that weren’t featured as prominently in the movie, such as the lady parts of the woman that Sonny was cheating on his wife with, Johnny Fontaine’s personal life, and even Michael Corleone’s need to have a handkerchief at hand after having his face busted up by the police chief. The movie did a much better job of finding a story and sticking with it, and also did a better job of keeping the side stories attached even if they weren’t focused on so often. Sometimes books can ramble, meaning that the author is off on one tangent or another.
It’s very easy to follow a side thought, unfortunately.
Follow Us
