Why People Prefer The Book To The Movie ?

Regardless of if people liked the movie or not, the first expression or comment from a reader will be " I liked the book better" or other statements similar of that expression. What are the reasons for making such a statement ?

1) Books are the "originals" by nature much better than the movie versions. The story are entirely original when compared to a movie versions where
characters and events in a book version are deleted or changed to dramatise the movie. By viewing the movie, you will miss the essence of the original thoughts or story intended by the author in the first place. If the movie's version is "good to see" must be credited to the director of the film standing on the merits of the director himself , and not the writer of the original story of the movie. The movie is being credited for the quality of the film director, and other areas taken in the process of making a movie.

2) Books are usually read first and thus measured
on its own merits when read.Movies on other hand have their own extra standards to be measured - cinematography,adapted screenplay, costume designs,music, special effects and etc.. against measured to the writing's style and quality of the original writer of the book version.

3) Let us compare a book of 500 pages against a screenplay of 200 pages adapting a story from a book.It is a big challenge to fill a screenplay with
actual narrative,dialog,monolog, action of a book.An average reader is engaged with that particular books for days by soaking in the atmosphere, creating set visuals or scences in their heads (by thinking visually), and imagined yourself "hearing" voices and "seeing" faces of the story's characters. Books have "pages" to describe
all these things to a reader, and time at his disposal when compared to a movie it has about 2 hours to tell a person a story in such a short time missing some things from the book unexplored or deleted, and the movies doesn't quite match up to your expectations of things you have read about in the book.

Read the book first, and then see the movie or video later. :-)

Do you have any comments ?

Every time this topic comes up my reply is the same: I prefer to see the film first.

Because of time and money constraints, the movie will always fall short in some way. Which is why I read the book afterward, to fill in the gaps. Reading the book first just leads to disappointment when the movie doesn't (and probably can't) deliver in the same way a book (an one's imagination) can.

For the most part, I treat books and movies as separate works and evaluate them on their own individual merits. Neil Gaiman's Stardust is a classic example for me - I love both the movie and book, but for different reasons and in different ways. I like the book for the ethereal, fairy tale nature of the prose, but the movie doesn't have this same spirit. Instead, I like the movie for the characters, the acting, and the light-hearted nature of the story. When I treat them this way, I get to enjoy both. Of course, this assumes the movie is well-made. It's certainly possible to make a mess out of a perfectly good book when developing a movie!

Another point is that many books are written from an omniscient point of view (or nearly so). We often know what the characters are thinking and feeling. In the movies, it is up to the skill of the actor to let us in on these factors, and facial expressions and body language are subject to individual interpretation. Someone unfamiliar with the book might not understand why the character acts the way he/she does if they miss the subtle clues.

The other major problem in reading the book before seeing the film is that the reader will have mentally described the characters and scenery. The film will of course differ from the visualised expectation, leading to disappointment.

If the book is read after seeing the film, the characters and scenery from the film will become the visualised landscape, so there will be no dichotomy of perception.

People don't always prefer the book to the movie. For example, I preferred the movie to Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. And while I liked both the movie and King's story, I think the movie of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was better.

I often prefer the movie, even when I love the book. One of my favorite movies is Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The book is at times propoganda for socialism, with supposedly uneducated homeless men complaining about the proletariat. I found the book hard to take. If I'd read it first, I'd have given up halfway through and refused to ever see the movie.
I Am Legend is a toss up. I like the book but didn't think much of the Will Smith version. I love Omega Man, probably because I saw it when I was little (and only read the book last year).
On the other hand, I've loved the book White Fang since I was a kid. None of the films have come close.
So for me, it's a crap shoot.

>7 dukeallen: So true about Treasure of the Sierra Madre--I forgot about that one.

>5 sarahemmm:
If the book is read after seeing the film, the characters and scenery from the film will become the visualised landscape

Not necessarily. While Vivien Leigh is most definitely the Scarlett I see while reading Gone With the Wind, my Ashley Wilkes is no Leslie Howard.

>#9: And Mary Astor is no Brigid O'Shaugnessy (from The Maltese Falcon).

>10 MrAndrew:

...and Angelina Jolie is no Mommy of Grendel, from Beowulf.

Well, it depends on the book, doesn't it? and what sort of entertainment you're looking for.

Two Harry Potter movies were enough to keep me from going anywhere near the books.

I enjoyed the movie Seven Years in Tibet, but the book was terrible. So in this case, a screenwriter, director, movie crew, etc. brought the story to life better than the author did.

I ran into an old high-school English teacher who chastised me for watching TV or movie versions without reading the book. The book is always better, she said.

Not true.

Movies have much bigger "audience" to the story of best-selling or popular novels. Besides " time and money constraints", a reader can borrow a book from the local library, and maybe trying to complete reading a novel after making a book renewal. Yes, a cinema ticket is much cheaper than a brand-new copy of a novel a person purchased, but the price of a used copy is slightly cost more than a cinema admission ticket. Movies making is a big and lucrative business but a big budget is needed to produce a movie.
Yes, a movie lacked the ingredients of an actual "hard-copy" novel but when there is a world premiere , many languages being dubbed , and many different foreign languages subtitles. After the screening of a first-run movies, more money made in the form of DVD,VCD and Blu-ray videos. I think a movie industry command higher profits than a book industry (publishing).There is bound to be differences in the story's content because dramatisation is needed to bring out the action and dramatic effects.Badly written novels will never reached to a cinema screen.
Sometimes, cinema moguls made wrong decisions to produce a film because of the story's content and lacking the action and drama elements. Taking an example, the recent Oscar-winning film , "Slumdog Millionaire" . It is a simple "fairy tale" made into a real-life situation's story. It was a low-budget film, (US$5 million,( I think, maybe I am wrong) but the film was
a success because it has right "ingredients" of movie making (won 9 Oscars including Best Picure,Best Director). If the title of this film remained as " Q and A"
it will not attract much bigger audience.
Lastly, I will stick to the book version for the authencity of the story.

And sometimes the movie will change the entire focus of the book - or even the plot. This is my biggest peeve. Two examples (one sublime, one ridiculous perhaps):

Shane is a little gem of a western narrated by a young man on the cusp of manhood. He sees (and dimly understands) the attraction between Shane and his mother; he also sees that Shane does what he must, despite his own wants and desires. You might say he puts the good of all above the good of the one. When Shane leaves, the boy wants him to come back, but understands why he cannot. In the movie, in order to use a young actor they had under contract (Brandon DeWilde), the plot was reworked to contain a whiny (imo) little boy who understands nothing.

Semi-Tough is a profane, politically incorrect, hilarious book about an NFL team and their journey to the Super Bowl. Billy Clyde Puckett is keeping an audiotape diary of his activities as the Big Game draws closer - with flashbacks and back stories concerning his friends and teammates. The movie threw the entire Super Bowl plot line out (probably because Jenkins makes fun of it all) and substituted a mishmash of football cliches.

And don't even get me started with Cheaper By the Dozen!!

14:
Shane is a favorite of mine too, and you nailed exactly the difference between a good book and a movie that was fair at best.

I've seen some pretty decent attempts lately to make good movies from books that also recognize movies are a different medium from books and thus can't be exactly the same. For example, Prisoner of Azkaban departed significantly from the book, but the ways in which it did made sense and made the movie better. I felt like the first two Harry Potter movies tried too hard to be like the books, which made them somewhat clunky movies.

There's only one movie I've seen that I would say is better than its book -- "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." And Prince Caspian comes close, because I liked the ways it elaborated on parts of the story the book didn't, again, in ways that made sense.

How about the reverse, when a book is an adaptation of a movie? Turning blockbuster movies into books just seems wrong to me. For example all of the Star Wars movies were turned into novels.

5: If the book is read after seeing the film, you are deprived of possibilities to use your own imagination, since you've already been given someone else's visualization of people and places. For me that is just unbearable.

I normally read the book before I see a movie. If I haven't read a book yet, I wait to watch the movie until I've finished the book. The first exception to this was Lord of the Rings (I still prefer the movies over the books) and the second was The Prestige.

I saw The Prestige and decided I HAD to read the book. I loved the movie, and the book is always better, right? In this case, I feel I was wrong. I liked some of the book, but overall I preferred the movie. The action was better, the plot twists were more realistic, it was just better.

With LOTR, I read the Hobbit and loved it, then started on the series. I read half of The Fellowship before I started listening to it on audio book. I started listening to The Two Towers, and got so bored. I couldn't finish. I still haven't finished the series, and I really wish I could. I just preferred the movies.

>18 defaults:
Wrong. That may be the case for you, but certainly not everyone has that problem.

>18 defaults:
I agree with Darsu. I don't like having someone else's images and interpretation forced on me. In fact I rarely watch movies or fictional TV shows at all, because I would rather read and create my own images in my mind.

How about Alex Garland's The Beach? I read the book first and then watched the movie. While I thoroughly enjoyed the book, the movie was a major let-down. It changed the plotline altogether, and made it difficult to connect with the characters.

It makes no difference whether you read the book first and then watch the movie or the other way around. One of them is bound to be disappointing, because if you read the book first, you'll be disappointed by the modifications in the movie storyline. And if you watch the movie first, as people have said earlier, your visualisations of the characters and the places will be based on the movie, and therefore not be a pleasurable experience.

22>

Vinayg's post reminds me of The Orchid Thief. The book was an excellent nonficiton account of the history orchid collecting, including an interesting story of a Florida poacher.

The movie was a piece of tripe where the author falls in love(?!) with an/the orchid poacher.

The only similarity between the two was the title...

I am not a big movie watcher but I tend to shy away from movies if I already read the book. When I read I have a movie playing in my head. I know what the characters look like. If the movie's characters are different than what I visualized, I am disappointed. The prime example is the mother in King's Pet Sematary. She just wasn't what I had in mind.

If I see the movie first I tend to see those characters instead of what my mind imagines. Two good examples of that are Denzel Washington's character in The Bone Collector and Morgan Freeman's Alex Cross.

I can't read Lord of the Rings now without mentally picturing Aragorn as Viggo. However, that doesn't really trouble me - he made such a good Aragorn.

For me it is all about character development. In most cases, I find the characters in books to be deeper and more intimate. I really enjoy getting to know the person and care about what happens to them. I find characters in movies are much flatter and usually more predictable. You miss all their inner thoughts. All you see, is what is presented to you on screen. Having said that...I still think Hollywood has done a great job with alot of different books.

Usually if the movie is good I read the book. The book will usually give me a deeper insight about what I saw. Though sometimes the movie has nothing to do with the book. I found a copy of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming at a used book store and bought it for my sons. The movie had nothing to do with the book at all. Oh there was a father (and in the book a mother), two kids and a car but that is all they took from the book.
If I've read the book I don't bother with the movie, even though it is said many books are written with the hopes of becoming movies and therefore move gracefully to the big screen.

>12 barney67: Seven Years in Tibet

I forgot about that - its one of the few films I have seen and liked, having read the book more than 30 years ago. I don't recall the film as being that much like the book, though my recollection may be hazy. I know I did like the book (I was a teenager and found it amazingly exciting and exotic).

When I was about 7 I saw the movie Toby Tyler. Loved it. Then we got the book from the library. I didn't like it because it wasn't the same story as the movie. My dad hit the ceiling and said that from then on if we wanted to see a movie, we had to read the book first.

That was 48 years ago. I still follow that rule 99.9% of the time.

The only exception I can think of offhand is Bridget Jones Diary - I didn't know the movie was based on a book. And in that particular case, I liked the movie better. But not much, and possibly Colin Firth has something to do with it. (smile)

But I make my daughter follow the rule. She's 15.

For me, personally, seeing the movie first stifles my imagination and creativity. Also, reading the book first fills in gaps that the moviemakers leave - by their nature movies cannot show every scene, every nuance of a book. And if you don't read the book first you may not know there are gaps, but I can think of a quite a few movies that seem disjointed and jumpy because there's not enough time to develop some of the peripheral scenes that lead the book forward.

It's one of those things where it's fun to make sweeping generalisations, but if you think about it for a bit, saying "the book is always better than the film" is about as sensible as saying "men can't cook", or "women are bad drivers". I suppose the reason that we like to say it is the feeling of disappointment you get when you have looked forward to seeing a film based on a book you love, only to discover that it misses precisely the thing you thought was so special about the book.

As people have said above, there are plenty of examples of mediocre books made into great films, and vice-versa. And there are a few cases of good books turned into good films without much resemblance between the two - a couple that spring to mind are Gentlemen prefer blondes and Cabaret/The Berlin Stories - neither film has very much to do with the original book apart from characters and setting, but in both cases I'm very fond of both the book and the film.

Obviously, a film isn't a book: it's an interpretation in which all sorts of other people intervene between the author and the viewer (scriptwriter, director, designer, actor,...). All of these people are taking creative decisions without consulting you, and there are obviously some you won't agree with ("Elizabeth Bennet should not be played by a stick insect"). On the other hand, there might be some aspects of the interpretation that give us a new insight into the book ("I never thought of the Bennets keeping pigs"). That's the same process that goes on when you go to the theatre or to a concert: Shakespeare in modern dress or Mozart on original instruments might give you a whole new view of the original work. Or not - that's the chance you take.

#50 (thorold),
I agree. I think one can enjoy both book & film if you approach each as separate art-forms.
A film might use only the general idea of the book,
or it may single out one or two characters/events from the book. That doesn't make one better or worse than the other, just different.
Sometimes the book and the film complement each other. I read "The Kite Runner" at about the same time as I saw the movie and found that the movie enhanced the setting while the book allowed additional insight into the characters.