There is perhaps no more terrifying sentence to say in a room full of English students than: “I liked the movie better than the book.” You can practically hear the collective gasp. Somewhere, an academic is clutching their copy of Middlemarch in distress.
Book-to-film adaptations are often judged on one question: “Was it true to the book?” If a character is missing, the ending has changed or the protagonist has been given a completely different haircut, suddenly the adaptation is considered a failure. But maybe we are asking the wrong question.
Perhaps the most important thing about adapting a book into a film isn’t whether every detail survives the transition. It’s that the story becomes accessible to people who might never have experienced it otherwise. Reading is not equally easy or accessible for everyone. A 400-page novel requires time, concentration and a particular kind of engagement with language. For some people, reading can be difficult because of dyslexia, visual impairments, attention difficulties or other barriers. For others, the problem is considerably less dramatic: they are a university student with three assignments due and absolutely no desire to spend their evening reading 600 pages of Victorian misery.
Film provides another entry point. Watching a story doesn’t require the same kind of sustained interaction with text. Characters, settings and emotions can be communicated through performance, cinematography, music and sound. A film can make a world immediately visible in a way that hundreds of pages of description cannot. That doesn’t make film inherently better than literature — it makes it different.
And this is why obsessing over whether an adaptation is “true” to the book can miss the point. If someone watches Little Women and then decides to read Louisa May Alcott’s novel, the adaptation has introduced them to literature. If someone watches The Hunger Games and becomes interested in Suzanne Collins, the film has created a pathway towards the book. If someone watches Pride and Prejudice because they would rather look at Keira Knightley than read 279 pages about marriage prospects, frankly, I am not here to judge.
The adaptation can stand as its own work while still functioning as a bridge to the original. And sometimes that bridge works in the opposite direction. A person might struggle to understand a novel until they see its characters and world represented visually. Suddenly, the story clicks. The film becomes a different way of engaging with the same ideas.
This is particularly important in education. We often treat reading the original text as the only legitimate way to engage with a story, as though watching an adaptation is taking the academic equivalent of a shortcut. But visual adaptations can help students understand plot, character relationships, historical settings and themes before — or alongside — reading the original.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean every adaptation is good. Sometimes Hollywood takes a perfectly functioning story and puts it through a machine that spits out two hours of questionable CGI and a romantic subplot nobody asked for. And yes, sometimes changes genuinely weaken what made the book special.
But being different does not automatically mean being worse. A film adaptation isn’t a replacement for a book. It is another interpretation of it. The obsession with faithfulness can also make literature feel unnecessarily exclusive. If the only acceptable way to experience a story is to read the original 800-page novel exactly as the author wrote it, we’re effectively putting a velvet rope around literature and asking people to prove they belong.
The book will always be the book. The film doesn’t erase it. It simply gives more people another way in. And if that means someone discovers their favourite novel because they first watched the “inaccurate” movie adaptation? Maybe we should stop complaining about the differences and be grateful they showed up at all.
