I am an avid reader. Always have been.
Growing up, I was always that girl in school who had a book in her backpack, getting in trouble for reading instead of paying attention to the lecture. I loved immersing myself in the pages of a book, my eyes darting across page after page until there was no more to be read in that book. I loved the mystery, the adventure, the excitement, the worry, that books initiated. Books had so much room to flesh out a story idea, and I was there for it.
All throughout my life, I have grown up with movies based on books. My friends and family and I have gone to countless book-to-movie adaptations in order to see if they could compare to the books. I consider myself a purist and almost always stick with the book as my favorite version, but I was always ready to be surprised by a really good movie. It was one of my favorite routines growing up, reading books before their movies came out. Sometimes I’d have to read way past my bedtime in order to beat the race to opening night at the theatre.
Plus, who can easily put down a good book, even if it’s 2 in the morning?
But there has a changing tide in the book-to-movie culture. First, there was the introduction of the 2-part finales, brought on by the Harry Potter franchise. There just didn’t seem to be enough time in a single movie to fit in all the key components of the storyline!
Soon, not even two movies per book were seeming to be enough, and storytellers looked to another form of video for their book adaptations: TV shows!
At first, I felt a little weird about it; there felt like so much more room for error or straying from and muddying the original storyline. However, I have hope! So far, the book to TV show transformations and adaptations have been very exciting and interesting, and I have gotten hooked in quite a few!
There’s even a series that started as a book, became a movie, and then became a TV show, and I enjoy the TV show the most out of all three!
TV shows have a lot of possibility to them, because there is so much room for the characters to move, and there is so much opportunity for detail and sidetracking that just can’t be done in the two-hour window of a single movie.
There are many TV shows coming out in the near future, such as Fahrenheit 451 that I am really intrigued to watch and compare! It’s a new era in storytelling, and I think it will be a strong one!
