Books To Movies; Hits and Misses

From books to movies, it's sometimes a little frustrating when a movie isn't able to accurately portray what was written in the original book. We'll be looking back over some of the bigger books-turned-movie franchises from the past ten years.

Harry Potter

Let's start with the biggest movie franchise over the past decade or so. Both the books and movies were great, but in translation you lose a lot of things. Some of these things are as small as Peeves the Poltergeist to things as big as the battle with the Death Eaters in Half-Blood Prince. Now, we can't have everything, and it would be hard to bring everything from the book into the movie without it being 17 hours long.

There were some big issues though with certain things they left out, and could have spent an extra few minutes explaining other.

The first big issue we come across, of course, is that huge battle after Dumbledore is killed between The Order, Dumbledore's Army, and the Death Eaters that was filled with tension and emotion. I'm sure it would have been hard to do the visual effects for how much damage was done to the castle...

But to leave out the battle entirely when it was a very important chapter and ignore that it happened, seems more like a lack of effort.

Sometimes it's understandable for them to drop a scene that would take a lot of visual effects, too much time to film, or doesn't translate well to film (see honourable mention), but there was a lot of necessary information that was cut out of the film adaptations of Harry Potter, the biggest and most important being the lack of information about the prophecy that explains why everything that happened in the series actually happened. In the books, we get a full explanation of this prophecy, how Voldemort marks Harry and how Harry has the same, but greater powers. In the movies, they just briefly mention it and kind of leave you feeling a little confused about the whole thing.

There's a lot more little details they leave out. However, they stayed as true as you can get to the books for a good majority of the movies. Even though important details were glossed over and scenes were completely dropped, it's still one of the better books-turned-movies.

The Twilight Saga

As much as everyone loves to hate Twilight, it's surprisingly the movie series that most accurately portrays what's in its books. It adds in some unnecessary details and scenes. And yes, it does change some minor details like where certain events took place, and it kinda leaves out a lot of really good character background stories, but as far as story goes, these movies are right on point with their books.

The Hunger Games

Ah, my personal favorite. It's easy for me to see and pick out these differences. There's the small details like not getting the mutts right, to bigger ones like how head over heels Katniss for Gale. Oh, and let's not forget the fact that in the first film, they didn't say Effie Trinkets name AT ALL. It's also upsetting that we didn't get characters like Madge and the Mayor, and we didn't get too much detail about Haymitch's games.

I'd also have to say Katniss ended up a lot happier in the books than they showed her at the end of the series in the film. They focused too much on it being a love-triangle when in the books there was no triangle, only her need for survival and the lengths she'd go to for it. There's a lot of differences in the books and the movies. While both were great, they were great separately. I'd have to say this one was a miss with the inaccuracies.

The Mortal Instruments

The Mortal Instruments, a movie so apparently bad and straying away from the books that they scratched the whole thing and made it into a TV show.... but was it really that bad?

I'm going to have to say, no. Other than the characters being a little older than they are in the book, and Simon not turning into a rat, and a few other differences, this one stayed pretty true to the story of the first book. I'm really sad they didn't carry this one through.

Divergent

Honestly there was so much wrong with these movies that they should have scrapped this one instead of TMI. Whoever made these movies read the book, decided they couldn't be bothered to show the full immensity of what was going on in the books, and sized it all down to be a lot less interesting. Honestly, I can't even get that much into it because I gave up on watching the series. This was a huge miss.

HONORABLE MENTION - The Maze Runner

The. Maze. Runner.

Where do I even begin. This movie is so far off from the books from Thomas' character being a huge crybaby, to his telepathy with Theresa, to the maze itself. The second book was barely even an inspiration for the second movie. BUT - huge but right there - it is definitely for the better. I forced myself to read the first two books simply because I wanted to see the new Dylan O'Brien movie, and I have to read the books first. IT WAS HORRIBLE.

The movies, on the other hand, are absolutely stunning, and so well put together. And they actually make sense. You'd have to read the books yourself to understand just how little sense these books made.

So while this was a miss in accuracy, I would definitely just watch the movies.