By: Thomas Horvath

Any avid book fan will know the excitement and ensuing disappointment of their favorite book being adapted into a movie. It can be exciting at first to see the world and characters visible to the human eye, but movies based on books tend to get a bad rep from book fans. But why is that? This article will go into the main reasons why many movies don’t live up to the source material in fan’s eyes.

The biggest reason is likely because of our brain. When we read a book, we get an image, a voice, and a whole energy in our head. When we see things in the movie that go against our mental image, it takes away some of the enjoyment of seeing the book be adapted. Another reason is length. A book tends to either be too short or too long for a proper movie adaptation, so we are left with cut content or unnecessary padding. For instance, while the Harry Potter movies are beloved by audiences around the world, the books are incredibly long, leaving the movies to have no choice but to cut some scenes and sometimes even full plot lines. The third major reason \a book adaptation can be controversial is when the movie makes creative choices that are different from the movie. Harry Potter is another great example of this, as many of the book fans take issue with Hermione being given many of Ron Weasley’s lines in the book, contributing to his character being worse to make Hermione more likable.  Most of these reasons do not affect the average moviegoer, and we can see that with the success of movie series such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, and Lord of the Rings, to name a few.  Even characters like Spider-Man and Batman have seen success with movies that take a story out of their library and remix it for general audiences. This shows that general audiences would rather have a good movie than one that is completely faithful to the source material.