The Movie was BETTER than the Book
It may be like pulling teeth to get a reader to admit it, but sometimes the movie actually is better than the book.
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The Princess Bride by William Goldman   4.19 avg rating — 204,852 ratings
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The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks   3.84 avg rating — 328,351 ratings
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The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger 3.50 avg rating — 227,728 ratings
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The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 4.38 avg rating — 108,573 ratings
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Stardust by Neil Gaiman (Goodreads Author) 3.97 avg rating — 62,735 ratings
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Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk 4.13 avg rating — 74,818 ratings
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Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding 3.60 avg rating — 237,504 ratings
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Forrest Gump by Winston Groom 3.57 avg rating — 7,931 ratings
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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #2) by C.S. Lewis 4.11 avg rating — 246,496 ratings
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Twilight (Twilight, #1) by Stephenie Meyer 3.67 avg rating — 841,379 ratings
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A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks 3.95 avg rating — 83,033 ratings
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The Princess Diaries (The Princess Diaries, #1) by Meg Cabot 3.66 avg rating — 32,617 ratings
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The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1) by J.R.R. Tolkien 4.19 avg rating — 446,691 ratings
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The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King 4.13 avg rating — 51,847 ratings
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Chocolat (Chocolat, #1) (The Food Trilogy, #1) by Joanne Harris 3.79 avg rating — 20,067 ratings
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The Shining by Stephen King 3.88 avg rating — 244,470 ratings
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum 3.93 avg rating — 52,454 ratings
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The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, #1) by Ann Brashares 3.69 avg rating — 89,175 ratings
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 4.22 avg rating — 558,830 ratings
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The Godfather by Mario Puzo 4.24 avg rating — 37,587 ratings
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Interview with the Vampire (Vampire Chronicles, #1) by Anne Rice 3.83 avg rating — 109,317 ratings
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The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris 3.88 avg rating — 179,910 ratings
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The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2) by J.R.R. Tolkien 4.31 avg rating — 136,085 ratings
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Charlie & Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl 4.02 avg rating — 111,231 ratings
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The Return Of The King (The Lord of the Rings, #3) by J.R.R. Tolkien 4.42 avg rating — 132,211 ratings
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Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay 3.77 avg rating — 25,416 ratings
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Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell 2.85 avg rating — 9,183 ratings
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Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson 3.88 avg rating — 82,302 ratings
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Jaws by Peter Benchley 3.79 avg rating — 10,977 ratings
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Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 3.67 avg rating — 235,572 ratings
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Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx 3.88 avg rating — 6,716 ratings
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Howl's Moving Castle (Castle, #1) by Diana Wynne Jones 4.27 avg rating — 26,410 ratings
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Holes by Louis Sachar 3.91 avg rating — 116,345 ratings
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Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen 3.70 avg rating — 28,116 ratings
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Atonement by Ian McEwan 3.74 avg rating — 100,899 ratings
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Big Fish by Daniel Wallace 3.47 avg rating — 3,633 ratings
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The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper 3.45 avg rating — 15,932 ratings
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The Bourne Identity (Jason Bourne, #1) by Robert Ludlum 3.76 avg rating — 154,684 ratings
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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5) by J.K. Rowling 4.33 avg rating — 517,042 ratings
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Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen 4.02 avg rating — 281,068 ratings
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Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine 3.99 avg rating — 73,989 ratings
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Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman 3.72 avg rating — 11,296 ratings
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Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare 3.73 avg rating — 629,864 ratings
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About a Boy by Nick Hornby 3.75 avg rating — 32,978 ratings
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Dracula by Bram Stoker 3.86 avg rating — 104,756 ratings
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Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg 3.92 avg rating — 5,592 ratings
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V for Vendetta by Alan Moore 4.18 avg rating — 24,947 ratings
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Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 4.16 avg rating — 266,834 ratings
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High Fidelity by Nick Hornby 3.93 avg rating — 49,981 ratings
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Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt 3.78 avg rating — 49,324 ratings
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I am Legend by Richard Matheson 3.86 avg rating — 32,531 ratings
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick 3.97 avg rating — 39,493 ratings
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Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers 4.00 avg rating — 14,038 ratings
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The Children of Men by P.D. James 3.59 avg rating — 8,534 ratings
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The Color Purple by Alice Walker 4.06 avg rating — 86,994 ratings
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Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer 3.79 avg rating — 200,445 ratings
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Prince Caspian (Chronicles of Narnia, #4) by C.S. Lewis 3.90 avg rating — 67,226 ratings
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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 3.91 avg rating — 83,405 ratings
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3) by J.K. Rowling 4.40 avg rating — 546,973 ratings
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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg 4.11 avg rating — 37,587 ratings
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The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler 2.82 avg rating — 23,354 ratings
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American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis 3.72 avg rating — 34,726 ratings
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A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett 4.17 avg rating — 46,603 ratings
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The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller 3.14 avg rating — 23,719 ratings
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Little Women (Little Women, #1) by Louisa May Alcott 3.93 avg rating — 473,591 ratings
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Harry Potter, #1) by J.K. Rowling 4.29 avg rating — 937,301 ratings
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The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Goodreads Author) 3.91 avg rating — 404,621 ratings
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The Prestige by Christopher Priest 3.80 avg rating — 4,034 ratings
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 4.12 avg rating — 96,654 ratings
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Legally Blonde by Amanda Brown 3.27 avg rating — 733 ratings
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The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje 3.78 avg rating — 26,082 ratings
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The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux 3.86 avg rating — 26,154 ratings
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The Hours by Michael Cunningham 3.79 avg rating — 34,565 ratings
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P.S. I Love You by Cecelia Ahern 3.85 avg rating — 39,199 ratings
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Emma by Jane Austen 3.96 avg rating — 108,403 ratings
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Coraline by Neil Gaiman (Goodreads Author) 3.91 avg rating — 64,757 ratings
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Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell 3.35 avg rating — 31,839 ratings
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No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy 4.00 avg rating — 30,403 ratings
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Misery by Stephen King 3.88 avg rating — 64,178 ratings
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Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier 3.63 avg rating — 48,242 ratings
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The Edge of Reason (Bridget Jones #2) by Helen Fielding 3.31 avg rating — 30,010 ratings
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Casino Royale by Ian Fleming 3.63 avg rating — 7,348 ratings
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Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally 4.26 avg rating — 17,138 ratings
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The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham 3.79 avg rating — 8,270 ratings
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2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke 3.94 avg rating — 27,314 ratings
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Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden 3.95 avg rating — 477,811 ratings
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The Green Mile by Stephen King 4.29 avg rating — 39,835 ratings
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Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables, #1) by L.M. Montgomery 4.21 avg rating — 117,536 ratings
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New Moon (Twilight, #2) by Stephenie Meyer 3.64 avg rating — 462,483 ratings
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The Firm by John Grisham 3.74 avg rating — 89,427 ratings
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Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh 4.00 avg rating — 19,354 ratings
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Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote 3.85 avg rating — 32,216 ratings
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The Cider House Rules by John Irving (Goodreads Author) 3.97 avg rating — 41,330 ratings
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Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein 3.89 avg rating — 26,641 ratings
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The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett 4.08 avg rating — 136,683 ratings
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In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner (Goodreads Author) 3.66 avg rating — 45,296 ratings
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My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult 4.00 avg rating — 213,679 ratings
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Eragon (Inheritance, #1) by Christopher Paolini 3.63 avg rating — 260,544 ratings
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Carrie by Stephen King 3.68 avg rating — 58,334 ratings
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The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan 3.76 avg rating — 240,698 ratings
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593 books ·
5,461 voters ·
list created June 26th, 2008
by JG (The Introverted Reader) (votes).
Tags:
book-to-film, film, movie, and movies
Lists are re-scored approximately every 500 seconds.
Comments (showing 1-50 of 171) (171 new)
The book is a very flat polemic about war with extremely dull characters. Thankfully the movie abandons all the self-serious pretension and replaces it with satire and manages to ask some interesting questions about the nature of war. The best parts of it play like Fox News and the DVD commentary where the director admits he never read the book because it depressed him.
Mansfield Park needs to be #1 on this list. That director achieved miracles! Miracles, I say, to make me care at all about Fanny Price!
This film, starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins outdid the Forster book. I loved the film and then read the book and was sadly disappointed. As A Passage to India was also a great film (as was A room with a view) I must conclude that EMF was better on screen than in print. Do you agree?
I loved both the book and film of Remains so I can't really say that the movie is better. But I must say that the film definitely captured the sense of loss and missed opportunity that the book had. These are painful, English and tortured. It shows the buttoned up English at their best (or worst!)...
While nothing can match this great book, the BBC's recent 'soap opera' treatment of Bleak House was epic and marvellous.... I loved every minute. It shows that some classics do translate well and Dickens would have definitely written for TV! Gillian Anderson was a star and shows that Hollywood stars can transfer if they are adaptable enough....
I would also advocate adding Mansfield Park. This is the weakest of Austen's books, but the film's screenplay digs deep into the historical framework of the period to hint at possible dark secrets that might have entered into the family's business dealings, as well as exploring the turbulent emotions of characters dealing with intense social mores. A riveting film made of a rather dull book (and I'm a huge fan of the other Austen books).
Some of these books are considered masterpieces. Why are they here? I agree with Andrea, we need a way to disagree. This is just ridiculous.
Ok, whoever said that The World According to Garp's movie was better than the book is clearly an idiot.
I'm serious, if you thought the movie was better, it was because you get confused easily. And you are a moron.
I cant believe Dune is on here! I for one lOVED the film (most people dont), but the book is still amazingly better (even if I havent read the whole thing yet)
I have to say, I'm really disappointed in this list. There are a very few exceptions to the rule "The Book is Always Better than the Movie" and I was only able to find 5 books on this list of 165 choices that I agreed with. 
Movies are as different from the books they are based on as a song or a painting based on a book would be. What we are talking about is not a comparison of apples and apples. But, when talking about unlike things, we can still make comparisons of a kind: was the movie (as a movie, by movie standards, compared to other movies), more enjoyable than the book (as a book, by book standards compared to other books). And since the choices are inevitably subjective, and the principle democratic, the only "wrong" books on this list would be ones that have not, in fact, been made into movies.
Some amazing choices here -- Prince Caspian? City of Ember? Two of the worst films I've seen this year, both completely undermining and ruining everything about the novels that made them good. Well, I guess we're all looking for something different....not too many examples that I actually agree with here, it's awfully rare that a film, especially a mainstream, modern big-budget Hollywood film, can approach the complexity or depth of even the average decent novel.
I can not figure out why you would think the movie for Gone With The Wind was better then the book. There's just no way that it was!
I protest and am highly disgruntled over Romeo & Juliet and Anne of Green Gables being on this list.
Most of the time I see movies adapted from books as a cliff notes version for people who don't really like to read. On rare occasions the movie manages to capture everything the book gives, but most of the time due to time constraints and the way film works there is just no way to include everything. In my world, on even rarer occasions, the movie manages to be better than the book. I agree with four of this list's choices. I wonder if the people who have propelled "The Princess Bride" to the top of this list have actually read the book? It provides the equivalent of a whole DVD extra with of back story on all the main characters. And has the person who made this list actually read all these books? Are they a movie person in Hollywood? What gives? That being said, I like the idea of this list, if not the majority of the content.
I can't believe tha Mansfield Park is in the list! I know that people may not think the same I do , but I really hated the movie ...it was like it destroy the book! I think the same oh Twilight , I mean , the book was so much better than the movie ! It's not just my opinion , ask and a lot of people will say the same .And with Dracula and Harry Potter 5 ... I think the movie was nice , but I definitly prefer the book.
There are some books about the movies that I didn't even know they exist.Like V of vendetta , Chocolat , Forrest Gump and Devil wears Prada , so then about those I can't say anithing , because don't know them.
Cold Mountain - the book was awesome! One of the best I have ever read. The movie couldn't TOUCH it! Not that the movie was bad, it was just a very long and detailed book - no way to convey all that in a movie.
The Last of the Mohicans!?! Whaaaaaat? Seriously, did you actually read the book? CAN you read?
In my opinion, the movie should not even be graced with the title of the book.
This list is certainly ridiculous. I had to stretch to find six. And the Princess Bride at the top? I doubt most of these voters have read the book. It's clever and charming and utterly different from the movie, and it's certainly wonderful in its own right.
Andrea wrote: "We need a way to disagree, I don't feel some of these belong."
there's a list called the book was better than the movie...
Patricia wrote: "Most of the time I see movies adapted from books as a cliff notes version for people who don't really like to read. On rare occasions the movie manages to capture everything the book gives, but mo..."
actually anyone who visits the list can add things to it, and the reason we're here on this site is because we like to read so assuming that someone didn't read the book and made that judgement is unfair.
Angie wrote: "These lists are all really silly, but I think this may be the silliest one :)"
clearly you've never been to the worst books of all time list, i suggest you avoid it at all costs.
I would add Under the Tuscan Sun, one of the few books I have ever abandoned. I simply could not get through it, but the movie was delightful.
I love the movie versions of both The Princess Bride and A Room with a View, but I would not say they are BETTER than the books.
My first connection with Dickens was though old movies of A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, I doubt I would have been as interested if I had met the books first although I enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities which I read about the same time. The books appealed to me later & I'm still reading them & watching all films/tv series. Dickens ould have written screenplays for film & tv, no doubt, he had the talent & the financial need.
Cannot believe someone voted that the Watchmen movie was better than the graphic novel. I want some of the drugs they're on!!
I did not see "Awakenings" by Oliver Sacks on here. I like Sacks, but the movie was so much more inspiring - the music and the happy Leonard during his remission make it much more enjoyable.
I'd most definitely agree also with "A Beautiful Mind", which comes off much more of a love story in the movie and Nash really comes off in the book as he probably truly was - just a jerk.
Is this a joke? This must be a joke, otherwise is just sad. Lord of the rings?! that piece of crap movie is better than the books? Because the films really get all the tiny details in plot, and the characters in the movie are so much developed. I am mean "I am Legend", have you read the book? The plot of the movie is a disaster. I really don't like the Harry Potter books and still think the movies are way worse. Whoever wrote this list doesn't get the meaning of the books listed... ridiculous to say the least
The Princess Bride?? That's my favorite book AND favorite movie, though I appreciate the book more because it goes more in depth and is just generally more intense. The only one I really agree 100% with is Stardust, but even on it's own it's not like it was a BAD book, in fact it was a VERY good book, it's just that the movie had a more exciting climax.
And Fight Club?? Sure, the movie is intense and amazing, but so is THE BOOK, and it has an ending that actually makes sense. We need a 'disagree' option.
I disagree so much with some of these. Especially with A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, V for Vendetta...
I find it very rare to happen, but I have to admit I did enjoy Bella Mafia better as a movie than I did when I read it. But I must admit, this was one of the few times where I saw the movie before reading the book and I really don't like to do that because I find it can influence my imagination regarding what I get from the words rather than the screen.
Really? 281 people voted for The Princess Bride? Did they even read it? Did they misread the title of the list? The book is amazing. The movie is a decent book-to-movie translation, but it still can't touch the book. I'm just floored by that. I voted on both this list (I did find about three books on this entire list I agreed with) and the "The Book was BETTER than the Movie" list, but I would agree that there should be a way to vote against the books on the lists. This isn't the first list I've had that thought about either.
There should be a thumbs up or thumbs down for other users to vote for, like youtube, because a lot of these choices are ridiculous.
i think everyone should know the book is for the most part always better than the movie. especially harry potter. how could you even think the movie was better? and the twilight movie was insanely stupid. i love the book but the movie was terrible and anyone who thinks the movie is better obviously didn't read the book before hand or they suck at reading. i haven't read all of these books but i can tell you that nine times out of ten i like the book better than the movie. just sayin.
I doubt any of the people who voted for "The Lord of the Rings" have actually read the books. If they did they sure didn't pay attention. Even though the movies really are amazing, they still can't measure up.
Tiani wrote: "wow finally someone who agrees with me. Stephanie meyers books are fantastic. "
I agree with you also. I have read the first 3 books 3 times and the last one twice. I can't wait for Midnight Sun.
I agree with you also. I have read the first 3 books 3 times and the last one twice. I can't wait for Midnight Sun.
Meghan wrote: "i think everyone should know the book is for the most part always better than the movie. especially harry potter. how could you even think the movie was better? and the twilight movie was insanely ..."
I agree with you for the most part but there is that rare moment when a movie is better. 9 times out of 10. Read Mary Poppins and let me know if you think the movie or the book is better.
It depends which one you saw first, the book or the movie. Whichever one you saw first gives you expectations for the other, and usually those expectations are disappointed. the exception is when the book is exceptionally good that even if you did see the movie first the book is still better (example: Inkheart), or else not alot of effort was put into the movie and it was totally screwed up (example: Ella Enchanted). And sometimes it's the opposite: you may have read the book first and enjoyed it but the movie was just so amazing you have to like it better (example: Coraline)
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