Hello everyone and welcome to my article for Written Media Month!

I decided to focus on book to screen adaptions.

While it seems like written media to screen adaptions have declined over the past years, there was one point in time where it seemed we got these adaptions every few months. I remember the years where The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Fault in Our Stars were the biggest movies because of the books.

Although we are still seeing these adaptations as movies, we are now seeing these adaptions coming in the form of TV shows. Especially with The Queen’s Gambit, Invincible, and the upcoming Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

But what makes some of these movies and series so successful compared to others?

Well, I think that everyone can agree that the collaboration between the author, the screen writers, and director all contribute to making a faithful adaptation of the book.

Personally, what I think makes a successful book to screen adaption is the actor’s portrayal, the script and how involved the author is.

Sometimes, there would be something that might be hard to translate from book to screen and it makes me feel more comfortable knowing that the creator made whatever decision needed to be made for the better of the adaption.

But I wanted to know what other people thought makes a successful adaptation. Here’s some of their answers:

1. ” Keeping the adaption faithful to the book is what makes a good adaption, but I don’t mind when they include diversity that wasn’t canon. At the same time, I don’t like when they tokenize the diversity.”
2. “I like when adaptions are the exact same as the book. If there are certain events or phrases that important to the book, and they don’t include them in the adaption, then I can’t watch it.”
3. “I like when an on screen adaptation effectively captures the magic, world, and characters in an immersive and believable way. Not to say that the film adaptation has to be an exact reflection of what I imagined in my mind, but I want to be able to see that their was an immense amount of consideration into creating a physical representation of the story on screen. I want to look at the screen and believe that I am experiencing the book’s story in new way that ultimately still has it’s overall essence.”

As you can see, they all have very similar answers. I think this might be because we have all experienced the feeling of loving a book only to receive an adaptation that was absolute garbage. (Cough Cough the Percy Jackson movies and the Divergent movies Cough Cough).

So I think that also impacts the way we view adaptations and what we want out of them.

Now I want to give you a list of a few of the best written media to screen adaptations:

1. The Hunger Games
2. The Harry Potter Series
3. The Boys (which some would argue that the show is better than the comics)
4. Game of Thrones
5. Invincible
6. To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before
7. Daisy Jones And The Six
8. The Queen’s Gambit
9. Sharp Objects
10. The Handmaid’s Tale

While most of these books were able to a good job of sticking pretty close to the original source material, there were a few missed scenes/details that I feel would have elevated the final product and would have had lasting emotional impact. Some series adaptations were even finished before the final books were even released.

Leave a comment on our socials and let us know what some of your favorite book to screen adaptations are!

Thank you for reading my articles this year! I hope you found some great movies/TV Shows through my recommendations! Good luck with finals and have a great rest of the semester!