We all know of movies that began as books. Books like The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Mortal Instruments, and many more have been subject to Hollywood’s interpretations in past years. These interpretations tend to sway from the original ideas created, and that in turn leads to angry readers. Readers go to see their favorite books brought to life, only to be disappointed by Hollywood leaving things out or completely butchering an already perfect novel.
One difference between written works and movies is that the author uses words while directors use pictures to describe a story. When a book, poem, play, or any other literary work is made into a movie, it is called an adaptation. This means that the script writers take a book and use their own interpretation of it to create their movie. With this, there could be parts left out, or altered depending on what they find important and the time allotted for the film; there could also be things added to make the movie visually appealing to certain audiences.
While some people do not care about the obvious differences in Hollywood making a book into a movie, avid readers tend to get passionate about their favorite novels being made into movies. If a person has not read the book or just does not care about little mistakes in the plot line, the movie will most likely be preferable to them. In this day and age, things that are visually appealing and not time consuming tend to be the way the public prefers to go, which means that books have been placed on the back burner for many while movies have become the easy and convenient way to know a story.
Adaptations of books can be very faithful to the book going by its exact plot line, or they can be loosely based on the book, only taking its main ideas and changing many of the supporting details. Some examples of faithful film adaptations include Divergent, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and The Fault in our Stars, which all stay close to the story line with slight faults. While on the flip side of that, movies like The Mortal Instruments and Stuart Little tend to be way off with the actual plot-line butchered.
In our day and age, Hollywood appears to have run out of original ideas, using books and remakes to roll in the dough. This means that audiences are getting bored and readers are getting angry. Hollywood producers truly are making use of the saying “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” by constantly taking tired, old concepts and reusing them in a little bit of a different way.
People tend to get sick of movies based on a book series because Hollywood takes them and stretches them out to try to make a little more money. For example, Twilight was a good book series, but because of how long it took for the movies to come out and how much money they tried to make, many people lost interest.
Books move us to tears and play with our heart strings, and there is no way a movie could ever replicate or replace those feelings. Just because something is easier to understand does not mean it’s better than the original. Visual effects and loud fight scenes do not make a work of art all that it is; it takes a true understanding of the work to even begin to try to make a movie of it, or you will only make it a mockery.