Best Book to Film Adaptations

It’s often said that books are always better than their film adaptations, but is that true?

To find out, we compared user-submitted ratings from Goodreads and IMDb, factoring in over 411 million votes across both websites. Digging into the data, we found that the numbers did indeed back that sentiment up.

In fact, our study of 948 randomly selected novels, short stories and literary works adapted for the big and small screen revealed that only 1 in 10 book to movie adaptations were rated higher than the source material.

Better than the film?

Yes
86.8%

No
9.71%

Equal
3.48%

Yes

86.8%

9.71%

Equal

3.48%

Method

Using Goodreads and Wikipedia we were able to create a list of 948 texts that had been adapted for the big & small screen. In cases where a text had more than one adaptation, our dataset includes the adaptation that received the most user ratings – i.e. in the case of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone book, which has over six million user votes, the most of any book in our sample. As a rule, any adaptation with less than 1,000 votes has been omitted and where possible, movie-tie-in books have been excluded. Forthcoming movies that are unreleased or in development are excluded by default.

How does your favourite on-screen adaptation rank?

Explore our interactive chart below to see the distribution of books and movies based on their respective Goodreads and IMDB ratings.

Click on the buttons below to switch between the best and the worst adaptations.

The Best Adaptations

The Worst Adaptations

Of our 10 best rated adaptations, a combination of award-winning cinema and topical TV take up the top spots. TV shows Nocturnal Animals and The Haunting of Hill House have seen big success on the small screen, having expanded their source texts into episodic releases that have surpassed the originals. The adaptation of The Man in the High Castle has seen growing success, with its modest 259 pages expanded to cover 30 episodes with ten more currently in development.

Interestingly, director Bo Welch has a film in both the best and worst adaptions. His retelling of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events books sits comfortably in the top 10, while his live action The Cat in the Hat book is second to last in our sample of adaptions.

Other household names in the top ten include: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf on Wall Street and The Graduate directed by Mike Nichols, who won the Oscar for the Best Director category for this adaptation. Another familiar entry is 2011’s Drive by Nicolas Refn, which expanded on the non-linear storytelling of the original story by James Sallis to deliver a critically and commercially successfully adaptation with over 170 award nominations and over 70 award wins.

The highest rated books vs their adaptations

While the highest rated list includes 6 J.K. Rowling books, the famous Harry Potter book series, the remaining top places are a mixture of different authors and standalone stories. Famed writer Stephen King cracks the list twice with The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The movie adaptation of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption sits at the top of IMDB’s top 250 movies list and is the only Stephen King novel where the adaptation’s rating surpassed that of the source text.

The highest rated movies vs their source material

Of the 20 highest rated films in our list, 17 out of 20 adaptations rank ahead of their literary counterparts. There are honorary mentions for the adaptations for Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile, and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and The Two Towers, which marginally fall short of the original works while remaining critically acclaimed pieces of cinema.