Every book reader’s motto is to say, “The book is always better than the movie.” Though they are not wrong, from the changed plotline to the bad casting, it only takes a single difference to change the mood of the audience. Reading is a vivid imaginative experience, and it’s difficult to create a screen adaptation of such an experience. although there are some masterpieces who outdid themselves in the world of film and literature. The movies listed here may make readers reconsider the saying.
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Mean Girls
If you grew up in the 2000s, you probably know a lot of Tina Fey’s Mean Girls screenplay without thinking about it. It’s something we’ve acquired through cultural osmosis. The movie was inspired by Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 self-help book Queen Bees & Wannabes, which sought to help adolescent girls’ parents better understand the societal pressures that their daughters faced.
Wiseman spent over a decade interviewing young women about the details of their daily lives to create her depiction of the intricate social structure she dubbed “Girl World.” Fey discovered the book while working at Saturday Night Live. She was interested in the dynamics and scenarios that Wiseman portrayed, and soon the cult favorite film was born.
Shrek
William Steig, a former New Yorker cartoonist, created an illustrated children’s book featuring the beloved swampdwelling monster. The topsy-turvy story received a lot of compliments upon its release, but Dreamworks’ CGI adaptation only improved on the original.
The filmmakers enlisted a star-studded voice cast (Mike Myers as the grumpy green guy, Eddie Murphy as his sidekick Donkey, and Cameron Diaz as Fiona, the princess hiding a big secret), added an extensive amount of jokes, and put together a soundtrack that was far superior to that of the average family movie. It was a commercial and critical success, winning the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
The Devil Wears Prada
Lauren Weisberger’s novel, based on the author’s time as a personal assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour, became a publishing sensation when it was released in 2003; its white cover, emblazoned with a large red shoe, was a staple on poolside loungers in the early 2000s. It’s a gossipy nice book with the added zing of real-life analogies, but it’s been topped in collective pop cultural memory by the superb film version from 2006.
That’s largely due to Meryl Streep’s iconic performance as Runway magazine’s cold Wintour-like editor-in-chief Miranda Priestley, a lady who can turn a simple statement like “That’s all!” into the stuff of nightmares. She got solid assistance from Emily Blunt as her top dog assistant and Anne Hathaway as naive newcomer Andie.
Jurassic Park
When Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park was published in 1990, he was already well-known in the science fiction genre. However, three years later, Crichton’s cautionary story of genetic engineering gone wrong became an international phenomenon when it was adapted into a movie.
Spielberg removed a lot of the dense research, simplified the story by eliminating a few subplots, and rewrote the ending to make it much more optimistic and less traumatizing for audiences than Crichton, who delves deeply into genetics and chaos theory and does not hold back on the gore. However, the main highlight of the movie is the visuals; seeing dinosaurs on the screen is an experience on a whole other level, especially in the nineties.
The Notebook
In the 2000s, film directors couldn’t get enough of Nicholas Sparks’ romances; a new adaptation seemed to appear every year or so, promising another tragic love story that would leave dreamers emotionally wrecked. The best of the series by far was 2004’s The Notebook, which charted the decade-spanning romance between Allie and Noah, young lovers from very different backgrounds.
Casting then-rising stars Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams was an amazing move, helping to elevate Sparks’ story (even at the start of their respective careers, they’re both able to give the story more heft than your average cinegenic romantic leads). And as for that tearjerking ending? It was an addition by the screenwriters.
