People love books and people love movies. And people really, really love stories that are told both as novels and as films.
It should come as no surprise that many authors – perhaps even most authors – want to adapt their books into movies. It is one of the top requests that my team of screenplay writers for hire are asked to write.
Adapting a book into a screenplay is not a simple matter, often involving literary gymnastics and more than its fair share of controversy.
Let’s look at the top 10 movies of all time that have been adapted from novels. Compiling this list was not easy. Nobody can agree on how to rank movie viewing, so I am using a hybrid of dozens of lists on the Internet. From those lists, I have pulled out the top movies that were adapted from books.
I’ve left out those that were inspired by comic book series, rather than by a specific book, as so many of the top movies were based on Avengers, Spider Man, Demon Slayer and Batman. That’s another list for another day.
Jurassic Park
Not all the Jurassic Park movies were based on Michael Crichton novels, but the first one was. And like all movie adaptations from books, there were plenty of changes.
One of the more controversial ones was the decision to give the dinosaurs lizard-like, scaly skin, rather than the features they had in the original novel. Paleontologists accused the film makers of perpetuating an outdated view of dinosaurs.
David Vickery, who finally gave some of the dinosaurs feathers in 2022, argues that it would have been impossible to create the feathers when the first Jurassic Park movie was filmed in 1993: “You could barely do the dinosaurs. They achieved a fantastic thing in 1993 to create animated dinosaurs but feathers might have been a no-go.”
There may have been another reason. People fear lizards more than birds. And Hollywood makes more money by leveraging our preconceptions than trying to educate us away from them.
Harry Potter
The Harry Potter stories are perhaps the best-known book-to-film adaptation, and certainly the most frequently discussed. Even the extent to which the author, J.K. Rowling, was involved in adapting her books to film is debated. Many reports have her incredibly involved. Indeed the Brits-only rule that kept Robin Williams from playing in the movie has been well publicized.
But in 2022, Draco Malfoy’s actor Tom Felton, said that “as much as Jo is the founder of [these] stories, she wasn’t part of the filmmaking process as much as some people might think,” saying that he recalled seeing her “once or twice on set.”
The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz is one of the books most frequently adapted to film. The 1939 musical film by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the best known and also the one said to be most faithful to the original story by L. Frank Baum.
Despite being a children’s book, the novel is actually darker and more violent than the movie version. In the book, the Wicked Witch of the West sends wolves, crows and bees after Dorothy and her friends, but in the movie, she sends only flying monkeys.
In the novel, the Tin Woodman is quite the killing machine. He somehow avoids slaughtering creatures in the movie. The novel was, in general, sanitized for movie audiences.
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Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is another story that has been adapted from book to film many times. As is often the case, the Disney adaptation is the best known. But Disney stepped into controversy where the makers of Harry Potter didn’t. They were accused of Americanizing the story.
The main challenge with adapting Alice in Wonderland from book to movie were the illustrations, not the words. The original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel had reached iconic status, being as much part of Alice as the prose. However, those intricate images full of lines, lines and more lines don’t translate well for animation. In animation, each line has to be reproduced many, many times, each time slightly differently, to make the picture move smoothly across the screen. So, the visual aspect of Alice in Wonderland had to be completely “rewritten”.
Gone with the Wind
Is there a more iconic movie than Gone With the Wind?Margaret Mitchell’s novel was 1,037 pages long, facing even more of a downsizing challenge than most book-to-movie adaptations. The movie studio calculated that the book was the equivalent of a 168-hour movie.
The movie makers had to decide whether to cut scenes or to shorten scenes. Of course, all book-to-film adaptations do both.Producer David O. Selznick decided the public would be more forgiving of scenes being cut entirely than of scenes being distorted. So huge parts of the novel ended up on the chopping block before filming even began.
Frozen
Until it launched, there was no guarantee that Disney’s Frozen would be a success. Disney studios had been trying to adapt The Snow Queen for film since the 1930s. It just might hold the world record for longest book-to-screen adaptation from start to finish.
Of course, much changed in that time, including the added sister dynamic and the single villain in Hans. And of course, Elsa becomes a hero, rather than a villain. The struggle in Frozen is less between a hero and a villain, and more focused on Elsa’s inward struggles. Hos contemporary!
The Godfather
Mario Puzo gave more credit to the film adaptation than to The Godfather book he wrote. He said, “If you pick the 20 best movies of all time, you would have to include that movie. I don’t think you could say the same thing about [the book]. It’s a different thing, different evaluation.”
Of course, Puzo also co-wrote the script, something that is rare when books are adapted to film. The result is a film that is truer to the original story than many book-to-film adaptations. There are plenty of changes and omissions, as is always the case. But they are smaller and subtler than in most adaptations.
Jaws
Peter Benchley’s Jaws spent 44 weeks on the New York Timesbestseller list in 1974. A year later, the film made a splash in theatres. As with Jurassic Park, the movie Jaws relies of audiences feeling the terror the animals evoke.
The author expressed a fair amount of regret for having cast sharks as villains in such a terrifying manner. The novel and the movie both leveraged people’s pre-existing bias of fear to entertain. It could be argued that the book alone would not have made much of in impact on people’s attitudes towards sharks, but the movie surely amplified existing misperceptions quite vividly.
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago was controversial before it was adapted for the movie. The Soviet government had tried to suppress him and all his works. So, he smuggled the manuscript out of the Soviet Union to Italy.
When he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the CIA got involved. Due to the Cold War, the CIA pressed for this Russian writer who was perceived as anti-Soviet to win the prize. This would embarrass the Soviets. The CIA also had the novel translated and sneaked into Russia, where it became an underground sensation.
Pasternak died in 1960. But the Cold War lived on. And Doctor Zhivago lived on as an emblem of the Cold War. And in 1965 it became one of the top-viewed films of all time.
Beauty and the Beast
Wikipedia lists at least 13 adaptations of the classic fairytale. The two best-known are the animated version of 1991 and the more recent 2017 film, both by Disney. What the two share in common is that they are both musical adaptations, loved as much for their songs as for the animation or acting.
Given that this film is an adaptation of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot’s 1740 fairy tale, it ironic that the 2017 film was novelized.
Beauty and the Beast is at once among the most romantic and among the most sexist stories of all time. It reinforces the notion that a woman’s sole value is in her beauty, but that a man can be loved no matter how ugly he is. As such, it is anachronistic for our times. Could a gender-reversed adaptation be in the works soon?
Ghostbusters (honourable mention)
This is a top 10 list, and Ghostbusters is number 11. Why? Because the movie was huge and was based indirectly on a book. Dan Aykroyd believed in the paranormal and was fascinated by it. His mother claimed to have seen ghosts, his grandfather had experimented with radios to contact the dead and his great-grandfather was a renowned spiritualist.
More importantly, his father wrote the book A History of Ghosts. Ghostbusters is not based on that book. But its inspiration is felt in the movies, and we all love Dan Akroyd and Ghostbusters…so, honourable mention.
What’s next for book to movie adaptations?
More will come. Book-to-movie adaptations won’t stop as long as there are A) books, and B) movies. However, not all great books will get the adaptations they deserve, and not all great movies will become novels as we might wish.
It will (likely) forever frustrate me that The Matrix has not been novelized and that Incarceron has not been adapted to film (no news on that since 2010). But that still leaves hundreds, perhaps thousands, of great book-movie combinations to enjoy.
And if you happen to have written a novel of your own, you might also be thinking of how to adapt your book into a movie.
AUTHOR BIO: David Leonhardt runs a team of book and screenplay writers at THGM Writing Services.
