Book or Movie, Does reading the book first spoil the movie?

Rosemary's Baby

I have to agree with you..

I think Firm and that other Grisham book.. where thast little dude saw the suicide.. There's Tommy Lee Jones in the movie acting the agent.. Anyway, I think they were good even though I've read the books first!

My favorite example of a Book-Movie pair is The Tin Drum.

The movie was extremely faithful to the book up to a point. And at that point the movie ended and the book went on. Had the movie continued, choices would have been made to keep the length of the movie under four hours that would have ruined the integrity of it all...

I thought A Clockwork Orange the movie was as a very good adaptation of a novel. Frankly, no movie can ever reproduce a novel, but can only interpret it.

Swimpy they left out the final chapter.....thats not good IMO lol, I don't think reading the book before hand spoils the movie it just shows you what they are trying to work with. It also shows you that an original vision is best and in most cases trying to change that vision will only make things worse.

Silence of the Lambs

Blade Runner.
Better, more focused and contrived than "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?".

Now, the typical case of dissapointment is "The Name of the Rose". The movie by itself is not bad, but is sooo much below the book.

Got to agree with Seal Poet on "The Tin Drum" (they would also have to "grow" Oskar). Though I would have enjoyed the other hour and a half

safecracker, I don't have a problem with what a movie leaves out as long as the movie can stand on its own.

I just felt that without the last chapter it wasn't "complete"

Cutter's Way (aka Cutter and Bone), a movie I rarely hear of with John Heard and Jeff Bridges and Lisa Eichorn, was to me more memorable than the book. In this case I read the book after the movie; for all I know it was written after the movie, but probably wasn't. I liked both, but the movie writing and direction, the visuals (such as the horse ride, which I guess can be listed under direction), the movie score, and some of the acting make this one movie I prefer to the book.

Reading the book always wrecks the movie. Because the movie just can't dissect the characters the way a book can.

I'd rather read the book first, as the film spoils the book. Am I the only one here who thinks this way?

I usually see the film first. If I really like it, I will go out and get the book. In most cases, the book is superior to the film, because when you read a book, you add your own interpretation to it.

I read a huge number of books and see few movies recently, though I have probably seen a thousand in my moviegoing past. I appreciate both for different reasons but the ratio of movies I have loved to movies seen vs books loved to books read is much lower. It hasn't happened all that often that I have both read the book and seen the movie, but when it has I have usually enjoyed the book much more - except for my Cutter's Way example.

Another film dissapointment was "Lo straniero" (The Stranger), directed by Visconti and based on the book by Albert Camus.

I read "2001" before I saw the movie, and it was very helpful to me. The movie expects the reader to connect a lot of dots, whereas the book explains everything very clearly. I do agree that in general a book is better than a movie made from it. An exception, though, would be "The Bourne Identity." The recent second film version was much better than the novel.

I have seen many films (I can't think of any off hand) where I probably would have understood and enjoyed the film more had I known of inter-relationships earlier as would have been the case if I had read the book.

No. . . actually I see more people not liking movies that liked the books. . .there are a lot of books out there that are great, but when made into movie form just get the life sucked out of them. Clear and Present Danger comes to mind. . . Loved the book. . . hated the movie. I will never see another Tom Clancy adaptation because of the way they thrashed that book.



Weirdly enough, for me a novelization actually helped me understand the movie better. . . Maybe I should have been paying more attention to the movie, rather than the girl two seats over. . .

I love books. . . . I love movies. . . the two shouldn't go together, yet someone I can't seperate them. A book I loved made into a movie almost guarantees I see the movie. . . .