4 Reasons to Stop Adapting Books into Movies

*SPOILERS FOR STEPHEN KING'S "IT", FOR SOME REASON*

Divergent: Allegiant comes out this weekend, and is apparently based off of the first half of the third book in a very popular series of young adult novels. Having not seen the first two, or read the books, the trailer looks like it was written by a random word generator. Seriously, either this movie has way too much lore or I'm having a stroke every time I see the trailer. So sorry everyone, but I'm not seeing this movie. I've got Daredevil season 2 to binge watch and it's hard enough forcing myself to write this article before I watch it, let alone binge watching an entire YA franchise that's been pitched to me as "somewhere between Twilight and The Matrix, both in terms of story and quality". I'm also not reading the book because I'm not forced to read something for 10 minutes every day like I was in middle school.

Seriously though, can we all agree that it might be time to cool it on the whole YA trend? The last two Hunger Games, while successful, were still relative disappointments at the box office. Literally 100% of the people who have read a book the movie is based on say the book is better. This isn't just with YA movies either. Lord of the Rings fans say the book is better. Comic book fans will tell you "it was cooler in the comics because..." (the ellipses are you falling asleep). Even pregnancy training manuel fans would say that the film adaptation of What to Expect When You're Expecting failed to meet expectations. So maybe it's time to put a hiatus on the whole "book adaptation" thing, and I've got a few reasons why.

1. The Book is Longer

With the exception of The Cat in the Hat, almost every movie is over faster than someone could read a book. Naturally, this means that books have substantially more material than the movies, and naturally, this infuriates fans of the books every time a movie is made based off their religious text. Really, there's no limit to how long a book can be. There aren't editors for books that automatically cut them down to somewhere between 90 and 120 pages. In fact, some authors seem hell bent on rambling on and on about things relatively irrelevant to the "story". But that's sort of the point.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, and movies succeed by showing you 24 pictures per second, in a 90 minute movie is worth 129,600,000 words, give or take a few. Of course, idioms aren't science, and if an author used a thousand words to describe a setting, character, or historical detail they'd probably have to split one story into three individually cumbersome pieces. You know, like Lord of the Rings.

Now I'm not insulting J.R.R. Tolkien, as I'm sure his fans would rise up to kill me. Honestly, I'm more insulting his fans, who want to rise up to kill me. For everyone who was disappointed in the movie version of Lord of the Rings because it left out the detailing on Bilbo's sconces in his Hobbiton home, I have to break it to you that sconces aren't inherently cinematic. As fantastic as the books are, there's simply no room to fit every single detail into a movie. I mean, even if you were to take the shortest of Tolkien's books, then chop it up into three different movies, you'd be stretching a single narrative into three parts just to cram all the boring details in. You know, like The Hobbit.

But I've said enough about Lord of the Rings, so I'll actually go back to my first example: The Cat in the Hat. If you find yourself in the rare position of adapting something into a movie in which the source material is actually shorter than a feature length movie, it becomes your job to elaborate the story. 9 times out of 10 this goes poorly, as the writer for EuroTrip isn't exactly Dr. Suess. Seriously, the guy that wrote the screenplay for The Cat in the Hat wrote EuroTrip. I bet you didn't know that (Scotty certainly didn't).

2. You Made the Book Better

The traditional novel length comes from an era before movies. Way before movies. Narrative books actually predate religious text, with Homer writing the first draft of Troy some 800 years before the birth of Christ. Yet somehow, almost 3 millennia later, the story of Troy was perfected with Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom. Remember Orando Bloom? He used to be in movies.

But Homer, Bronte, and Stoker were all writing before the era of convenience, or the era of movies. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and White People Problems was struggling to get his novels about rich white people published during the great depression, and tried his hand at writing movies instead. He hated it. Fitzgerald thought that movies were a debasement of humanity. Still, the paychecks cleared.

But this speaks to a larger issue, what exactly makes books better than movies? You do. Reading a book is a much more collaborative experience between author and reader. A movie shows you Gatsby drinking while being sad, but a book makes the reader think of Gatsby drinking and being sad. In essence, you make Gatsby a sad drunk by reading about him.

The slow burn of storytelling that comes from a book forces you to attach yourself to the characters, to imbed your own personality and voice within them. I mean, I loved the movie version of Gatsby, because I can relate to being as handsome and charming as Leonardo DiCaprio, but for the rest of you plebeians, I'm sure it was a struggle.

There's also an unspoken sense of accomplishment that avid readers love to speak about. After slogging through some hundred if not thousands of pages only to find out It was just a space-spider, you feel like you really worked at something. That's something you don't get from sitting in a comfortable theater seat, eating four days worth of food in the course of two hours. So much of what makes books inherently good is just lost on screen. However, some of the bad stuff gets lost as well.

3. Books can be bad

Everyone treats books like they're some perfect thing, when in reality there's a lot of crap between those pages. In the last section I briefly mentioned Stephen King's It, which ends by turning Pennywise the Dancing Clown (AKA the master of my nightmares) into an ethereal space-spider. It's really dumb, and totally ruins the rest of the book. But some of the rest of the book was already ruined.

There's a section of the book roughly two pages long where a bunch of children have group sex in the sewer. It comes out of nowhere and doesn't affect the story in any way. In a novel that's over a thousand pages long, they could probably stand to cut out just a little bit, and that scene is definitely the one that needs to go. That being said, the rest of the book is still amazingly scary, and is universally considered to be one of Stephen King's greatest works.

But almost every book has a "sewer scene". I don't mean that specific thing that happens in "It", but rather an unnecessary scene that kind of ruins the rest of the story. Like how the eagles in Lord of the Rings are Gandalf's own personal get-out-of-jail-free card. Or when Ron ends up with Hermione instead of Harry, like he's supposed to (that article is coming, by the way). No author is perfect, and when you're pressured to write something biblical in length, there's bound to be some sections that miss the mark at some point.

4. You Run Out of Source Material

Considering the rest of this article has been saying that books provide too much material for a movie, this last point may seem counter intuitive. Let me explain. Remember how they split The Deathly Hallows into two movies? Or how they split Breaking Dawn into two movies? Or how they split The Hobbit into three movies? Or how I used three examples when one would have been fine? That's because I'm running out of steam writing this article, and just want to watch Daredevil. Hollywood is kind of doing the same thing.

A successful franchise is a beautiful thing to a Hollywood producer. It's like a money train that always runs on time. Books can make for some very successful franchises, with the Harry Potter franchise being the safest bet since Bond (James Bond if I'm being specific). Except... oh no! There are only seven books! Must all good things end? Are we all suffering through life only to die? Could we not hold on just a little longer? They could. And they did. Which is why we got Deathly Hallows one and two.

Splitting a finale is a great way to make sure you end on a high note, but it's a terrible way to make people excited for it. Separating one story into two parts inherently means the first half will be all exposition and rising action, and part two will be nothing but climax. But you've heard all of this before, so I won't bore you with it. Instead, I'm going to watch Daredevil.

Except I have one final, Daredevil-related point. If we truly end up retiring book-movie adaptations (which we won't), I think the solution is television, though I'm not sure that's the right word. Since the dawn of motion picture, people have complained that it will mean the collapse of the written word. Yet here we are some hundred years later and books still exist. However, with the advent of binge watching, I think we may have stumbled onto the monster we've feared for so long.

In many ways, television is much like a book. With 10 hour seasons, a show can pack as much detail into a story as a novel can. People can attach themselves to the characters, and everything can play out much more slowly, building that much more effectively. We've seen it with Game of Thrones, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and of course, my favorite Pretty Little Liars. But there's still the issue of finite source material, which sadly means, we're going to need more books. Yes, unfortunately binge-watching is not the death of the novel. The old king is alive, long live the new king.