Novels have been, for a very long time, a great place for film studios to find original stories to adapt and produce into major motion pictures. According to “Impact of Book Publishing on Film Industry” an article by WordsRated.com, about 28% of all English language films made have been based on a novel of some sort. This inspiration has led to some of the most celebrated films of all time, such as, “The Godfather”, “The Shawshank Redemption”, and “Gone With the Wind”. These, along with many other novel sources, usually have a wealth of detail that can be depicted in a fresh style on the screen and may also have a strong enough following in the literary world to drum up interest if an adaptation is announced. It’s a wonder then, why not every book that hits bestseller, or is seen as a literary classic, isn’t instantly scooped up by a studio for a new feature length film? The truth of the matter is, many novels have certain characteristics that pose varying degrees of challenge with translating into visual production. 

The most apparent difference between the two forms of page and screen is the story being shown through literary digestion versus dramatic expression. While a novel entertains with meticulous detail, where every word can produce a specific image which may vary in the minds of the thousands of readers, a movie can never directly translate this. They have to make distinct visual choices when interpreting the work. Someone that loved a book for many years may feel disappointment over a minute detail that the movie failed to give its supposed adequate screen time. B-plots and a web of character relationships that a book may take with its average reading time of 5 to 10 hours (200-400 pages at 40 pages per hour) to lay out simply isn’t practical for a film to capture. This makes it so that reformatting a book for a film is typically a challenging process. Even the authors themselves aren’t always the best judge of knowing what to include or take out for a movie. Peter Benchly, the original author of the “Jaws” book wrote three separate drafts of the film’s screenplay until Carl Gottlieb was brought on to heavily rewrite it and remove many of the original subplots the director Steven Spielberg thought wouldn’t work in the film, such as an affair and an organized crime subplot. In general, the book will always have the one up on the film in including detail, it’s simply a given for the art form. Just as the film will always have the appeal through visual action of its characters that an audience can interpret wordlessly rather than reading directly what it might represent. 

Some books are also designed in a way so tailored to their literary format that a film really couldn’t faithfully depict it on screen, such as the constant stream of consciousness of an unreliable narrator (J.D Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”) or the extreme length an author built the book with, only digestible in paper format (Leo Tolstoy “War and Peace”). Adapting a classic book isn’t a guarantee of a great movie by any means. Recently, the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë “Wuthering Heights” was adapted again in 2026 film by director Emerald Fennell, where a strong amount of artistic liberty was taken in the film as fans of book noticed that the movie ends about halfway through the actual story, themes of generational abuse are omitted, and the movie added much more sexually prominent moments than the story actually contained. In general the movie itself has not been very well received even when viewed as a standalone production with its confusing pacing, lack of character growth, and a mixture of lopped together themes making the film overall difficult to develop a takeaway from.  

With the clear difference in art forms, even when books present a compelling base story, it’s up to the discretion of people like the directors and screenwriters for how to properly mold it into a dramatic production while balancing it being a truthful adaptation and a well done movie of its own right.