I love The Princess Bride movie. The book just pretty much sucks. It goes to great lengths to suck the fun out of the Dread Pirates Roberts parts of the book. Where the frame story in the movie is about a sick kid and his grandpa reading to him, the frame in the book starts out mentioning that scenario, but then goes off into this cynical, whining spiel about how miserable the author is with his life, how his wife hates him, how his kid is fat and how that is horrible, and on and on and on.

I really liked the movie Going Postal. I saw it before I read the book. After I read the book, I did like the book in a lot of ways. The plot is better and makes more sense in the book, but the descriptions are pretty spare. I couldn't picture the golems at all from the descriptions in the book, and a few other characters were a lot easier to visualize as their movie versions.

Visualizing things is the main advantage of movies over books, and always will be, I think. No amount of illustrations will give you what 30 seconds of a movie can.

It has been a long while since reading this one, but I remember being really disappointed with the Ella Enchanted book. I had, of course, seen the movie first. The plots are very different if I remember rightly. The book was a lot more serious. I really like the kind of fairy tale punk that the movie Ella Enchanted represented. Maybe if I had read the book first and gotten attached to it, it would have been different.

I would have to say that I vastly prefer the book, even if I did end up reading it after watching the movie version.

There are other sorts of adaptation. One of the more ridiculous chains of adaptation decay is the one followed by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which goes:

-The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, book, by L.F.B
--The Wizard of Oz, film, starring Judy Garland
---Wicked, book, by Gregory Maguide
----Wicked, musical, starring Idina Menzel

Each is based on the preceeding, and to some extent on everything before it, but it's mostly a straight chain. And which is better?

Well, frankly, it depends on what I'm looking for. Wicked-the-Musical is great fun, but Wicked-the-novel has a deep political element that didn't make it into the musical, and is explored further in the sequels. Oz-the-movie is a classic, of course, and far nicer than either version of Wicked - in the sense that you come out of Wicked depressed, not cheered, particularly in the case of the book. And Oz-the-novel? Well, it is the start of a massive series, which will take far longer to read than even the four Wicked books - and I like to read.

So it's a case of swings and roundabouts. Same with Jurassic Park, previously mentioned - I love both the film and the book, the film because, y'know, dinosaurs, and the book because it delves far more into the science of those dinosaurs. The book's also a thriller, with the element that the characters - and the reader - don't know what's happening most of the time. The film is far more of an action film, even though the dinosaurs are hardly ever in it. So what mood am I in? That's going to influence your answer.

hS

I think a lot of the time, for me, it depends on which I experienced first. For instance, I saw the Princess Bride years before I read the book. Of course, they were both written by the same man, so they're pretty close, and both are very good, but I preferred the film's version of Buttercup, and the ending.

On that note, what about movies that are really different from the book, but both are still enjoyable as long as you treat them like separate pieces of work?

And there are others where the book and movie have different good points for different reasons. For example, though I am not an avid Hunger Games fan, there were points where the message was communicated more strongly by the movie (because you finally get to see glimpses of other perspectives besides Katniss', and because a lot of the description in the book of, say, district 12, was rather vague.) But the movie also tends to gloss over a few points that had more ideological impact than action.


I can't think of any examples of movie's I've seen that were good movies from a mediocre book, but I know I've seen a few.

I would make the argument that the film adaptations of both Jaws and the original Jurassic Park are stronger than their original literary sources. It's admittedly been a while since I've read either of the books, but I remember them as being rather lackluster in comparison. Both films tweaked characters, settings, and plot points enough to create a better experience.

I've heard similar things about the film versions of The Godfather and Goldfinger, but as I haven't read those books I can't speak to that with any degree of certainty.

I now I'm biased, but I rarely like any adaptation of a book. No Hollywood budget can ever stand up to my imagination. Things might be different if I watched the movie first and hen read the book, but I try to avoid that whenever possible, so it rarely occurs.

The early Harry Potter movies were faithful enough that I liked them a lot, but the later ones cut out too many little details that made the books so fun.

The Harry Potter movies are very close to the books, and are a decent translation from books to movies. As such, they're fun to watch.

On the other hand, there are movies that claim to be like the book, but cut out too much, or change the source material too much. While they might be fine movies on their own, they weren't what we expected, so we start off with a predisposition to dislike them.

Then there are movies like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where they pretty much tell you right off the bat that it isn't going to be exactly like the comics, so we don't go in expecting them to adhere as strongly to the source material.

In short, it depends on how much leeway we're willing to give a movie in relation to how close it is to the source.

For some movies they end up releasing basically a novelization as a tie-in book. Those usually aren't very good even when the movie is.

The general trend seems to be cross-medium diminishing- have you ever even tried to watch a movie based on a video game?


A somewhat less obvious answer is the James Bond books. They didn't really age well, even though most of the movies did.

In Harry Potter (like you mentioned) I saw the movies before reading the books - and even then, I preferred movie (with some exceptions), since I could see what was going on better.