BMC Opinion: Best & Worst Book-to-Film Adaptations

A Question of Opinion: The Best and Worst Book-to-Film Adaptations, according to the BMC Community

Numerous movies that we watch were books first. While book-to-film adaptations are notorious for not giving justice where it’s due, there are some pretty popular adaptations. Before the break, I was able to interview a few students and faculty about their favorite and least favorite book-to-film adaptations.

Unsurprisingly, Lord of the Rings was the most common answer for the best adaptation.

Dr. Tacoma thought that “the Lord of the Rings movies do a great job of capturing the spirit of the books. They’re still twelve hours long total, but they’re taking hundreds of pages of texts and turning that into a movie. I think they do a great job with the spirit and they get most of the characters right.”

Ironically, The Hobbit was a pretty common answer for the worst adaptation.

On that, Victoria Kinsey had this to say: “I refuse to watch it on the grounds that my heart cannot take seeing Tolkien’s work stretched out and torn to pieces. To take the smallest book and make three movies out of it – they had to ruin it, they just had to. And, I’ve heard rumors about some love triangle with Legolas, a dwarf, and an elf, and THAT NEVER HAPPENED. IT DIDN’T HAPPEN, people. Thank you.”

Others confirmed that she made the correct decision by refusing to watch it.

Another popular answer for the worst adaptation was Eragon.

This movie is one that was pretty painful for those who had read the book. When talking with Kirsten McAfee, she said that she “watched the movie when [she] was a little younger and hadn’t read the books yet. When [she] got the books for Christmas a few years later and read them, [she] refused to watch the movie after that. [She] still, to this day – seven years later – has not seen the movie.”

The Chronicles of Narnia was a favorite for Dr. Mims – and was echoed by a few Bible majors as well.

It isn’t surprising, considering what the school play for this semester was meant to be. However, it was a pretty cool coincidence that all of that group answered with The Chronicles of Narnia as their favorite and not least favorite.

And, there were plenty more.

The movies previously listed were the most common, but there were other students that listed Catching Fire from the Hunger Games Trilogy and To Kill a Mockingbird as their favorite adaptations.

And, there were some that listed the Divergent trilogy, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the last two movies of the Maze Runner series as their least favorite.

There are tons of other adaptations out there that weren’t mentioned – some of them are pretty great and some of them are pretty terrible, though it’s all a matter of opinion. While one person told me that they loved the Hunger Games trilogy, another one told me that it was their least favorite adaptation.

What are your favorite and least favorite book-to-film adaptations? You can contact us through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter by the username @bmcbeacon.