Book-to-screen adaptations: A catalyst for reading or a substitute?

A book begins in silence.

No universal faces, voices, sweeping landscapes, or carefully choreographed scenes. Only words wait to be imagined into the world. Sometimes, years or even centuries later, a filmmaker picks it up and gives the literary world a physical representation.

The character gains a body, the house gains a door, the landscape comes to life. A story that once existed entirely in a reader’s imagination suddenly becomes a common sight for millions of viewers.

And occasionally, when the final frame fades, the audience reaches out for the place where it all began: the book.

This year has witnessed plenty of books survive the odyssey from the page to the screen, nurturing the relationship between literature and cinema. While audiences may not necessarily be talking about every book or adaptation released this year, the larger phenomenon is difficult to ignore. From classics to contemporary fiction, novels continue to provide filmmakers with stories, characters, and worlds ready to be reimagined for the screen.

So, what happens to a book after a movie adaptation? Does seeing a story make people curious about the words that created it? Or does the film become a substitute for reading?

For Darshan, a software developer from Bangalore, watching Pride and Prejudice created exactly the kind of curiosity that can send someone from the screen to the page. “I loved the movie, so I figured reading the book might be interesting,” he says.

What draws him towards the novel is not simply the story itself, but the possibility of discovering more of it. “I feel it’s the curiosity to know even more about the characters,” he says. There is possibly no better advertisement for a book than the feeling that a film has left something behind.

A two- or three-hour movie has to make some choices. Characters are condensed, conversations shortened, and entire subplots sometimes disappear. A novel can linger. It can spend pages inside a character’s head, explain an otherwise insignificant gesture, or build an entire world around details that a film may have only seconds to communicate. Darshan hopes reading Pride and Prejudice will allow him to discover some of those details, even as he wonders whether the film has done justice to Austen’s work.

It was Frankenstein that sparked the curiosity in Amirtharemina, an educator, to discover Mary Shelley’s novel. “The movie was aesthetically pleasing and devastating in terms of its themes,” she says. “It made me think about how wonderfully Mary Shelley would have built it in her novel, and that made me want to read the novel at least once.”

However, Apoorva, a teacher, watched Project Hail Mary without having read the book. She enjoyed the film and later discussed it with a friend who had read the novel. He told her the book was much better and recommended that she read it.

“I liked the movie experience, so I decided not to read it now,” she says, although she adds that she may read it in the future because she thinks it is a good story.

Her experience shows that an adaptation can create awareness without immediately creating a reader. Sometimes the urge to discover the source material arrives later. Apoorva has also experienced the reverse. She watched the Harry Potter films before reading the books, eventually finding her way through the entire series.

“I started my love for reading fiction, which has now extended to nonfiction too,” she says.

For Yashaswani, a data journalist, the relationship between the two mediums works slightly differently.

She has always been more drawn to movies than books, describing herself as more of an audio-visual person. After watching Normal People, she tried reading Sally Rooney’s novel, but found that the series had already become deeply embedded in the way she imagined the story. “While reading the book, I could literally imagine the scenes and hear the dialogues from the series in my head,” she says.

The images and sounds of a film can remain stubbornly vivid. Once a character is assigned a face and a voice, it can be difficult to imagine them differently. The screen can follow a reader onto the page, colouring the descriptions.

Yashaswani also experienced this when she watched Apur Sansar and later discussed it with her Bengali roommate. Her roommate told her that some of Apu’s experiences were much more intense in the novels. The conversation made her realise how much additional information or deeper understanding of a character she might miss by watching only the adaptation.

For her, the pull of cinema remains stronger. “I still feel like movies give me a stronger sense of the story, and the world I’m watching, and that audio-visual experience just stays with me in a way books don’t.”

This inertia to read is not uncommon. Charulata, despite being an English literature student, admits that she does not read a lot of books. She prefers movies because she finds them easier to navigate and enjoys analysing them from a film studies perspective. “I agree that a movie adaptation may not be able to move the plot as intricately as a book can,” she says. “I have never found a movie that is as good as the book.”

But she also believes the two mediums can be appreciated separately. When she watches a film, she can spend two or three hours analysing theories and ideas without becoming distracted. Reading, she says, is much harder for her to sustain.

For Kiran Manoharan, a music producer, the equation is simpler. “People who are into reading might go and read it; otherwise, the chances are slim,” he says.

Krishnendu, a UPSC aspirant, offers an example of that attitude. She watched The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the Hunger Games prequel, but did not feel compelled to pick up the novel. She assumed the film would miss details, but he was satisfied with what he saw.

She sees a similar attitude in academic circles. While preparing for UPSC with English Literature as her optional subject, her tutor told students they didn't necessarily have to read every novel on the syllabus because many had film adaptations. “I think that’s the consensus. It does not matter even if we miss a little detail; just watch the movie,” she says.

However, adaptation fatigue can be a real issue. Malini, a writer in Dublin, says she would like to see more original stories on screen, particularly because so many Hollywood films are based on books.

“I want to see more original stories in movies, because a lot of movies, especially in Hollywood, are book adaptations,” she says. Although she acknowledges that many adaptations released this year have been good and that some have encouraged people to read the original books, she still feels there is “an oversaturation”.

Mukil, a student in Bangalore, sees both possibilities. Films can help readers visualise a story, sometimes enriching the experience. But they can also impose an image which the reader might otherwise have made their own.

He points to A Country Doctor, based on Kafka’s short story, as an example where surreal visuals can add another layer to the reading experience. But he also believes some adaptations dilute their source material, as he talked about It and Trainspotting.

He argues that Harry Potter also demonstrates how adaptations can alter characters, pointing to Hermione Granger and the way the films changed or removed some of the imperfections present in the books.

“Reading books is often a better experience rather than watching the diluted version of itself in a film,” he says. “Meanwhile, those films which are on par with or supersede the books they're based on are a rare gem.”

Akash approaches the relationship from the opposite direction. As a cinephile, he generally tries to read books before their adaptations arrive.

For him, a film and its source should not necessarily be treated as competing versions of the same thing. Filmmakers are sometimes forced to omit narratives and characters to make a novel work on screen, meaning some of the book’s essence inevitably changes.

“I want to judge a book’s merits in its own way and a movie’s merits in its own way,” he says, pointing out that the mediums are “vastly different.”

For some, the curiosity that a film sparked becomes a paperback. For others, it becomes a Kindle download months later. For some, it becomes a lifelong love of reading. And for others, the film remains enough.

A story can travel from page to screen and stop there. It can travel back. Or the screen can follow it onto the page, filling the reader’s mind with voices, faces and scenes that already exist.