A 2-hour movie would be about 120 pages; the general rule of thumb is one page per minute of screen time.
But a script is not a novel; it’s much less dense. A 120-page script couldn’t contain all the detail in a 120-page novel.
An interesting example of this phenomenon is “Full Metal Jacket,” which was based on the novel “The Short Timers.” IIRC, The Short Timers couldn’t possibly have been 200 pages long - maybe 180. The movie was two hours long, and is as faithful an adaptation as you’ll ever see, but they still took a LOT out of the last half of the book. You just could not fit it all in.
In making page comparisons, i was talking about equivalent amounts of text. I was assuming that the script had been converted from the large-spaced format that characterizes most scripts to the more compact formatting of a regular book. The script also contains a lot of information besides dialog.
Maybe word count would be a better way to do the comparison. Anyway, as you’ve noted, it’s virtually impossible, even with a short novel, not to leave out a bunch of stuff.
In fact, the movie of Battlefield Earth only covered about the first 300 pages of a 1,050 novel. The poor box offices receipts spared us an adaptation of the part where the Galactic bankers show up to foreclose on Earth because the Psychlos missed their last payment.
One thing I’d note here is that you can’t really compare apples to apples with films on a few hundred screens and films on a few thousand. For your typical wide release blockbuster, they’ll play in nearly all of a city’s multiplexes, but for a release like this, they’ll play one, maybe two theatres in a town, compressing all those options for screenings into one. They might also play in larger theatres in this case, something that’s unsustainable if there’s an attempt to expand to more centres. There’s zero chance that it could make these per screen averages on a typical 2-3000 theatre release.
You can’t really compare a movie to a novel. More to a short story. Remember the high-school definition of a short story? “You can read it at one sitting.” Sounds like a movie to me. Why movie makers think novels are better fodder for movies than short stories has always been a mystery to me.
That’s not the definition I remember my AP English teacher giving. There is always the exception for movie makers, see: The Lottery. Don’t get me started on comparing a movie to a novel.
I remember the definitions I got in high school involving word count. Something about the delineation between a short story, novella, and novel being a specific arbitrary word count.
I thought it was on the below average side of so-so. For a low-budget movie, the acting was alright (and I thought the characters were mostly well-cast), but the plot was pretty weak. It plays like a Time-Life “Atlas Shrugged’s Greatest Hits”; if you’re a fan of the book, you’ll recognise scenes, but they don’t really have any weight in the movie because they’re not given the context they had in the book. Conceptually, I think Johansson also completely missed what I always saw as the point of Atlas Shrugged, but that’s neither here nor there in treating the movie as a separate story.
I do suspect that the gap between the reviewer scores and the public’s scores is not just die-hard fans of the novel upvoting without seeing the movie. I suspect that the contrary effect is also true, reviewers who dislike the message, or what they perceive the message to be, and assigning a lower score than is really warranted. For me it’s maybe a 3 to 4/10 movie. 8/10 is ridiculous, but it’s no Battlefield Earth. It’s just mediocre.
That being said I do agree with Dio in that I think the book’s fans are likely to be less harsh than were fans of Watchmen or LOTR over the adaptation, and probably not, to coin a phrase, terribly objective about its foibles.
Whether it makes money or not is going to be determined by DVD and Blu-Ray sales. For a ‘cult’ film like this, DVD sales could be extremely good. It’s going to depend not on the reviewers, but on word of mouth and people who buy it just for the politics or simply because it’s Ayn Rand.
It will be interesting to see these numbers, as it would seem to be the case that absolutely every Rand fan would purchase at least one copy, and probably multiples to give out. I suspect there will also be the “bulk” purchase phenomenon - a technique that is frequently cited with conservative books in order to pump up the numbers.
Exactly (though it did skip and add events from the end of the book). It’s clear from the ending of the movie that there was a sequel being set up: Terl is alive and presumably can wreck havoc in the sequel by his relentless overacting.