Not Every Great Novel Makes a Great Movie: On Film Adaptation

Christopher Nolan's blockbuster The Odyssey drew mass audiences to cinemas this summer, becoming this year's most talked-about film adaptation. Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights ran it close, provoking argument among people who had not yet watched a frame of it.

That pair of films frames a perennial question in cinema: why do some adaptations satisfy while others enrage? A new analysis published in The Guardian on 16 October takes up the problem, tracing a line from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting.

What does a 'good' adaptation actually mean?

The piece opens with a blunt premise. Not every great novel makes a great movie, and sometimes the opposite is true. The measure of success, the author argues, sits elsewhere than in loyalty to the source text or gentle handling of beloved characters. Regardless of the book, there is more than one way to write a successful adaptation.

The writer confesses to joining the craze for Nolan's film against their better judgment, comparing the impulse to a Victorian going mad for penny farthings — buying a ticket into the popular conversation along with everyone else.

The new Sense and Sensibility movie, released this September and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones in a romcom take on Jane Austen, presumably hoped for the same effect: audiences turning up precisely to discover whether they hated it.

Why do audiences so rarely leave satisfied?

The Guardian piece is clear-eyed about the typical verdict. Very few cinemagoers leave saying: "That's exactly how I pictured it in my head." Fewer still say: "That was better than the book."

The likelier responses are less generous, and the author lists them with relish:

• shaking fists at how they ruined the ending
• complaints that the film dumbed it down
• unforgivable casting of somebody with the wrong hair
• the betrayal of a beloved character

The last charge carries a recent, named example. The author cites last year's Thursday Murder Club debacle, an adaptation that, in their view, betrayed its source.

What changes for studios and audiences?

The practical answer the piece suggests is that controversy itself sells. Wuthering Heights had the world and his wife arguing before anyone had watched it, and the studios behind this autumn's literary releases understood that argument drives ticket sales as reliably as acclaim.

For audiences, the implication cuts the other way. If there is more than one way to write a successful adaptation, then demanding a film match the picture in your head is a losing game. Kubrick's The Shining, after all, sits among the case studies — a film Stephen King famously disliked and audiences canonized.

The full analysis, which also examines Bridget Jones, The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange and The Silence of the Lambs, makes the case that adaptation is a craft with many valid routes rather than a fidelity test with one right answer. Expect the argument to resume with every book-to-screen release on the coming slate.