In some cases, where the original was a short story, the movie fleshed it out and is better:
The Day the Earth Stood Still is, I think a lot better than Harry Bates’ Farewell to the Master
The movie They Live was more impressive than Ray Nelson’s short story Eight o’clock in the Morning
On the other had, even with Guillermo del Toro writing and directing, Mimic feels like it’s just a huge amount of unnecessary padding wrapped around Donald A. Wollheim’s short story of the same name.
If we expand a little to stage productions, the musical Phantom of the Opera is much better than the book. The book is actually hilariously bad, as it was basically a dimestore novel and never intended to be great literature. Of couse, the musical changed almost everything in the book except the setting in the Paris Opera House, so it couldn’t help being an improvement.
The biggest improvement the movie made was switching up the kid characters. In the book, the girl is the younger kid, and is not just entirely useless, she actively makes things worse for everybody. Making both kids a bit older, and essentially splitting the brother from the books into both kids gave each of them something useful to bring to the story, rather than just being there to end up in peril because they did something stupid.
And some would say the musical Phantom of the Opera by Maury Yeston is even better than the one by that other guy.
I think movies and books are fundamentally different to experience. Often, when converting one type to the other (and usually the book is first, but not always) something gets lost.
I happen to vastly prefer the book version of the Lord of the rings. I reread it recently, any unlike most of the books i read as a child, i still loved it But i love the long introspective parts, and the richness of the world. And I’m not a huge fan of action movies in general. So while replacing a lot of introspection with battle scenes was an objectively good choice in converting the medium, it makes it a lesser work for my tastes.
As I’ve often said, IANA sophisticated consumer of entertainment. More of books than other formats though.
My general policy is whether I first see the production or first read the book, I don’t do the other one. Whichever one I experience first, I’m sure to be disappointed in the second. I learned that lesson mostly from bad experiences in the book → movie direction back in the 1970s.
IMO each medium is best at very different aspects of storytelling. What works well here does badly there. And vice versa. I’ll miss whatever’s missing from the second one I experience far more than I’ll enjoy whatever’s added.
After seeing Master and Commander I was excited to read the original books and unfortunately found them boring.
The book “Last of the Mohicans” I found completely unreadable, while the film with Daniel Day-Lewis I thought was great.
You’re kind of ignoring all the movie versions of the story, which is omitting a lot.
I don’t think we’d even be remembering the Phantom had it not been for the 1925 silent version starring Lon Chaney, Sr. His makeup skill was legendary, and he managed to make you care about an insane composer and twisted romantic. The movie frequently veers from common sense, but in that it follows the novel, which I agree is abysmal. The heroine and the hero both get taken in by ruses that wouldn’t fool a five year old today, and they often do profoundly stupid things. Terry Pratchett had their number when he wrote the Discworld novel Maskerade, which is sorta based on TPotO and makes fun of it. Especially Christine’s bubble-headedness
Any way, they couldn’t find a good ending for the film, and they kept on re-shooting it. The existing ending isn’t the same as the book’s.
When next Universal filmed the Phantom they significantly changed the story – now the Phantom was a musician and composer whose work is stolen, and who gets disfigured with acid. I think they wanted make him more sympathetic, and figured a half-mad composer who was wronged would be a better match than a psychopathic killer. I don’t think the movie did very well despite some ambitious opera staging, and a technicolor production – the only Universal horror film to be made in color). But it influenced the next version. Hammer films had been working through the Universal horror list. Having given us Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy, they decided to do the Phantom. They changed a lot (even giving him an evil hunchbacked assistant, who was actually responsible for a lot of the crimes), but they kept that mawkish sentimental story about the Phantom being a disfigured composer who was wronged (and pretty severely wronged in this version). Wen the chandelier fell in this version, the only one hurt was the Phantom. They kpt the idea of the disfigured, wronged composer when Brian de Palma 9and Paul Williams) made The Phantom of the Paradise.
If anything, Andrew lloyd Webber deserved credit for extracting the Phantom from that acid-disfigured composer and returning him to his roots as a psychopath. His ending is even closer to that of the book than any other version. So I disagree that the stage show changed “almost everything in the book excep the setting”. Christine Daeae, her grieving for her father, the “Angel of Musi” is all there from the book.
A.E.W. Mason’s novel “The Four Feathers” has been filmed half a dozen times. They usually take significant liberties with the plot. I still loved the 1939 version, starring John Clements, and I didn’t hate the 2002 version, starring Heath Ledger. Oddly enough, the most faithful version is a low-budget 1978 TV movie starring Beau Bridges. Despite the cheap costumes and sets, I enjoyed it.
Logan’s Run is an interesting pair. There are three scenes where the movie copies action and dialog from the book, near-verbatim, but for about three quarters of the story, the book and film are drastically different. Neither book nor film is an Immortal Classic, but both are entertaining yarns.
In the book, the actual hero is a detective from the Middle East pursuing the Phantom for crimes committed there. The detective is resourceful and cunning; Raoul is a complete airhead and pretty much useless, as is Christine. The musical completely omits the detective character and makes Raoul the hero. Don’t know if any of the movies kept him or not, but that’s a huge change from the novel.
If any of you are inclined to read the novel for giggles, btw, it explains how the Phantom was the architecht of the Opera house who put all those secret passages and trapdoors in there while building it, and none of the other workers knew about them because they were on strike that day. Also he has a secret torture chamber consisting of - wait for it - a hall of mirrors. And if you ever wondered what his name was, it’s Eric.