BrainPick Film / TV adaptation better than the book?

[Jonny]

Have you ever seen a film or TV adaptation of a book you've read and thought the film /TV outing was better?

Personally I have never found this to be the case. I think it's because the book feeds our imagination. In our mind's eye we already know what Mr Darcy looks like, we can envisage Bertie Wooster's world and so on and so on.

But in the film /TV we are presented with these things as hard facts and there's often quite a disconnect for us. They can jar with our own already formed imagery. And that's before we start to look at screenplay writers taking liberties with or making glaring cuts from the original story.

That's not to say the dramatised versions aren't good. Many are excellent - a few of my own notable favourites being Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Potter franchise in general, and in particular Netflix's, Anne With an 'E' - the brilliant reimagining of Anne of Green Gables.

But have you any where the drama beats the book?

 

[Catherine Le Bars]

I've always thought the early James Bond films outshone Ian Fleming's novels, and the reverse with Alistair Maclean (perhaps with the exception of Ice Station Zebra, The Guns of Navarone, and Where Eagles Dare).

 

[Rich.]

That classic Christmas movie, Die Hard, much better than Roderick Thorp's Nothing Lasts Forever, I reckon.

 

[Robert M Derry]

A good film/TV adaptation is one that understands that film/TV is a different medium to a book and that the concept must be executed differently. The Shining is my go to example of this. Both are brilliant, but neither surpasses the other in my view. They are just different interpretations of the same idea and each work to the strengths of the medium to entertain.

A good adaptation should not try to out do the original, but rather complement the original as an alternative take.