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Books are generally better
(piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone)
People who like both
I hate this stupid take. Books and movies are very different mediums, with very different rules for storytelling. The chance that a director captures what you see in your head is so abysmally small, that you will always be disappointed. Just see the stories as abstract things, with books and movies being different interpretations of it. There are cases where I prefer the book over the movie, and cases where it's the other way around. It's all fine.
Yeah moviemakers are artists aswell. It’s impossible for an artist like a director and screenwriter to not leave their own artistic fingerprint on the work.
I see it like this. Books are the work of a single individual. That one person will have broad authority to write their story however they please. So range of book quality is very large. There are great books and there are truly awful books. And in fact, the vast majority of books are total rubbish. But the dregs get forgotten and the good stuff rises to the top.
Movies are made by committee. This reduces the spread of quality. Many hands tends to move things towards the average. So you have a much lower portion of total crap, but you also don't have as many true masterpieces. The quality of most movies tends to be pretty mid.
But because books don't go through as much of an averaging out of quality through being created by many hands, when they go well. They go WELL. Sometimes a master author will sit down, truly be in their element, and create their greatest work. And their vision will carry through and arrive to the reader undiluted. But movies? You can be the greatest director or screen writer on the planet; you're still not going to be able to make a movie without the help of hundreds of other people. You could write the world's greatest movie, but your vision will inevitably be worn down quite a bit before it reaches the audiences in theaters.
Or, expressed graphically:
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Film made from books tend to not even tell exactly the same story and that's my main issue with why movies are commonly not as good as the book. The movie tells a different god damn story than the one it was based on. Or at least significantly change things that didn't need to be changed just because of the medium.
Ready Player One, for example. The movie is absolutely terrible compared to the book and one of the things that really sucked about the movie was the lackluster way it did every single visual reference made in the book. The protagonist's avatar in the game of the book was basically an amalgamation of like 10 different popular fictional characters. They had a fucking additional race scene in the movie but didn't even use the car he was described to have had in the book (a mix of the ecto1 and back to the future delorian).
It should be pretty easy to match what people imagine reading the book here, since everything was just a clearly described video game or movie reference. Hollywood still managed to fuck up the visuals in their visual medium version of the story, while also changing the story in a lot of places in ways that didn't need to be changed.
See, that's the great thing about art. Different people like different things. I found the book for RPO terrible, really awful. The movie however was quite entertaining. Spielberg knows his stuff and can polish a turd. For The Martian, I really enjoyed both the book and the movie.
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I watched and loved the movies before reading the books so my opinion may be biased, but I think Lord of the Rings movies were more enjoyable than books.
I see how the books were great in their time and the worldbuilding of the books is amazing - but the movies do great job at streamlining the story and making it fun.
The battle of helm's deep is way better in the movies at least. Battle of gondor.. some parts are better in the books, the whole "ghosts killing everyone" in the movies was a bit cheap. But either way both are great.
Oh and frodo in book > frodo in movie
Hot take, the battles in the book aren't great because Tolkien doesn't want to glorify violence. Half of the fights are like two pages in the books before the point of view character passes out. After realizing that I was kind of disappointed in how "campy early 2000s action movie" the battles in the films are.
There certainly are things I liked better in the books, I remember that much. But when judging entirety of books vs entirety of movies movies were better in my opinion.
(I'm only talking LotR itself ofc)
Yeah the movies have 1 extra thing that puts it way above the books: music
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The LOTR movies need a lots of hand waving to work. Which is why you get questions like "why didn't they take the eagles to mordor?".
Eh. It is a popular meme but I think even with the info the movie gives it is pretty clear why. They need to go in secret and Sauron and Saruman have spies/scouts about (like the Sarumans birds).
And even if they flew to near Mordor undetected, the giant freaking Eye would spot them - if the patroling Nazgul wouldn't spot them first.
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The film is helped with amazing casting and a lot of care over the script. However there are things that were changed that do not matter and done for the right reason, such as Arwen being given more screen time (not quite a sausage fest as it was before), Glorfindels role in the Black Rides bit, but also bits that I really didn't like, such as messing with the power levels of Gandalf and Witch-king during their confrontation.
This lead to the abomination that is the Hobbit adaptation, partly because the film studio wanted to add an Aragorn to it, despite Thorin being nothing like Aragorn, and adding the three way love triangle because people liked the expanded Arwen story from LotR.
Yes, I very distinctly talk LotR only.
As for Hobbit, the Maple films edit made it quite ok and cuts most of the questionable stuff. Still too much Alfrid though. I hated Alfrid more than the love triangle if you'd believe it.
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The Martian is one example where they're about equal.
It helps that it was a short book, so very little had to be left out.
It also helps that Andy Weir is not good at writing prose, so his books work better as screenplays.
Reading it made me feel he wrote it specifically to be made into a movie.
I'm super stoked for the Project Hail Mary movie. But I was super disappointed in the trailer, because it shows the WHOLE freaking movie. If you haven't read the book, you're far better off skipping the trailer and going in blind.
Yup, that's my go to as well for "did right by the book".
In the case of The Boys, the show is objectively better than the comic book.
I love the The Expanse books to death, but holy shit, the series was so incredibly good. I love love love the TV Camina Drummer oh my god, she and Ashford defined the Belt for me.
I'm sore that the show was canceled, but I thoroughly enjoyed what we got from it.
The Expanse is one of the very few series that did justice to the source material.
I don't know that the show was cancelled. It ended at a natural point in the books, the subsequent books had a major time skip, and would have required an entirely new cast and practically no continuation of the old plotline. It would have been effectively a new series in every way that mattered.
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Ready Player One being the exception for this rule
I really liked the book! I really like the film too though
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Yeah, but it had its own awfulness, like the Iron Giant used completely inappropriately.
The book told a better story
It just wouldn't have made for a very compelling movie, as a lot of it is in Wade's head
So they ended up changing it drastically
So, which one you like better will depend a lot on whether that ^ bothers you
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Blade Runner, Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me?
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The Mist
Yep film is way better
Even King says so. They fixed the ending in the film.
Can we just appreciate art regardless of the medium?
No, books generally give more information, but that doesn't make them better.
They are different media with completely different aspects that shouldn't be looked at in the same way. The only similarity is that they both tell a story.
I'm always in favour of watching the movie. Since you get the story in 1.5 hours instead of spending multiple evenings to essentially get the same information. And I like visual media in general.
Of course, if no movie exists then reading the book is also a good option. Looking at you Terry Pratchett.
Oh, your hard drive has the whole movie series on it? Well I got the whole series right here!
Wow that's a really cool installation. Is it supposed to be a display of some sort or does it have something to do with the word press in the background?
The only movie I can think of that is as good as the book because it is, like, 99% identical to the book is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I was shocked when I found and read the book and felt like I already knew every line because the dialogue is word for word exactly the same, and the movie even includes a lot of narration ripped directly from the book.
Was it a movie first then the book adapted from the screenplay? I read one like that before, it was just the movie written down
No it was a book first. The book came out in 1971, the film in 1998.
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In the words of Jim Gaffigan: You know what I liked about the movie? It took me two hours, then I took a nap.
In all seriousness, I really enjoy watching the show/movie first, and then reading the book. I'm not disappointed about the things the show left out, which are often necessary exclusions for pacing or limitations in visual storytelling vs internal narration. And then, when I read the books, it's like I'm getting the director's cut with commentary. It adds depth to characters and sometimes has deleted scenes.
Of course this isn't universally true. I will say it worked spectacularly for The Expanse
There are a few exceptions where the movie was far better (Jaws comes to mind). And a few instances where both, while different, stand on their own quite well (How To Train Your Dragon).
But mostly, yes.
Arguably it's not a movie but a show, but for WOT the show was much more enjoyable
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I feel like the movie Fight Club is at least more fleshed out than the book was.
This is why I try to watch the movie first, so I can enjoy both of them.
A movie made by someone else will never compete with the tailor made vision you created in your own tastes. That’s why people tend to dislike adaptations compared to the source.
Agreed wholeheartedly
"Where the Wild Things Are" is a cute little children book about being wild sounds good at first but gets boring over time and it's fine but the 2009 movie was so much more depth, go watch it!
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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