Books vs. Movies

For all the book nerds out there, it is a common belief that the book is always better than the movie. However, to me it isn’t. For any movie I really want to see, I make it a personal mission to read the book before. I do this because not only do I love to read, but I love to see if the movie is similar to the book.

However, I don’t judge the movie based on the book. If it is similar to the book, I find it really interesting to see if the movie is showing what I thought as I read the book. But if it isn’t similar to the book, I find myself enjoying the movie on its own. One example of when I thought the movie was very similar to the book was Me Before You by Thea Sharrock. Me Before You is about a woman without any caretaker experience who suddenly becomes a caretaker to someone who is permanently paralyzed from the neck down. Although the movie missed a key character development, for the most part it was pretty spot on. But in My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, where one daughter has cancer and another daughter is born to give her cells/anything to the sick daughter, the movie was drastically different than the book.

Some of my peers and family members don’t have the same opinion as me. For example: my sister, Chelsea, hates reading the books before the movie. She finds that the movies are often very different from the book, and reading the book before the movie spoils the entire plot. Rachael Stowe, a junior at DRSS said, “I do try to read the book before the movie. I do this because the book is always better than the movie. When I was younger, I used to think that the movies were exactly like the book. Now that I’m older, I realize how different they are.”

So, what do you think? Is the book always better than the movie?