You come across an interesting book at the bookstore. You pick it up. You read the summary. You think to yourself, “This looks good,” so you take it straight to the counter. You come home and you read the first few pages. The next thing you know, you’ve finished the whole thing in two days and you just can’t bear to bid farewell to the characters that you’ve fallen so deeply in love with.
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So you start suffering through a ‘book withdrawal’ and you need your fix, fast. Suddenly you hear whispers about the book being adapted onto the big screen!
You just cannot wait for the film to be released. So you re-read the book, again and again, to keep the storyline fresh in your memory. And you realise you’re not alone! There is a whole fandom now full of other fans just like you, eagerly waiting to see their favourite book come to life. And when the moment finally arrives…you leave the theatre feeling disappointed.
So what went wrong?
Sometimes when we read a book, we cultivate this perfect image of what the entire story looks like in our heads. We can already picture exactly what the characters look like, how the scenes should go, and even hear in our minds how they say their dialogues. So when none of this matches up with what we see, we feel majorly cheated. We build up so much of the story in our imaginations that the movie almost always falls short in comparison.
While some movies adapted from books are simply… not up to par… most of the time it’s a combination of many different things that lead to it varying so greatly from the source material.
When books are written, ideas are usually fleshed out and worked on by one person — the writer. But when it gets spun into a whole production, so many other parties get involved and this causes interference – a simple case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. At the end of the day, most of the artistry gets stripped away to appeal to the masses, such as scenes that fall into the categories of ‘disturbing content’, ‘gore’, or ‘nudity’.
Not to mention scenes that were probably already filmed, but were left on the cutting room floor due to restricted runtimes. And then there’s budgeting! The grand explosion scenes or that beautiful, mysterious castle you read in books might just be too expensive to pull up. Dealing with the emptiness and sunken feeling of reality vs. expectation will always be painful, but everyone has a different creative and artistic vision, and sometimes, it’s just not meant to be.
*Cover image via Amazon.com
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