1. A lot of fans disagree but I liked Inkheart much better as a movie.
    And I haven’t read Ender’s Game yet but I loved the movie and bought the book because of it.

  2. ionaofavalon says:

    I too, thought that the crying about Superman having to kill was a tad much. Superman will always choose the innocent over the villain. He gave Zod chance after chance to stop, but Zod refused. And besides all that, did nobody see the scene where Superman triumphant is left sobbing in Lois’s arms because of the fact he had to kill? McFly?!

    Hem. Back to the subject, most fairy tales are better than their movies, though both have merits.

  3. EricH says:

    The only good thing about “Dawn Treader” was the actor they got to play Eustace. I thought he gave the best performance in all three movies.

    I personally liked the BBC movies better than the Walden movies (overall stronger performances), but that’s probably because I viewed them more as stage plays that someone recorded on film. That’s probably why I was never bothered by the cheap production values.

    Fun fact: Warwick Davis was in both the BBC adaptations and the Walden adaptations. He was Reepicheep in the former and Nikabrik in the latter.

  4. EricH says:

    Both versions of “Willard” were good (VERY good actually), but when I finally read the source material, “Ratman’s Notebooks,” years later, it was clear that the book was the winner.

    A lot of people say this franchise falls more under psychological thriller than speculative, but certain plot elements (especially how they play out in the book) are so “out there” that I tend to view it as a dark urban fantasy (granted, mixed in with Psychological Thriller elements).

  5. EricH says:

    I’ve never had a movie that I liked better than the source material, but some people have told me they enjoy the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” film more than Baum’s original novel.

  6. Steve says:

    “Blade Runner” was a far, far better film than the original book, “Do Androids Dream Of Electric sheep?”

    Also- and I know this doesn’t fall into fantasy- I thought the Jason Bourne films were amazing, but so were the books. The interesting thing is that they are almost COMPLETELY different from one another. …But I guess when you have a rockin’ core premise (which didn’t change) then the medium in which that story is told doesn’t matter much.

  7. I’ve been struggling to come up with an answer for this. It shouldn’t be hard because generally I think books always win out over movies.

    I guess I’ll go with any of the Lord of the Rings movies. As good as they were, and I did enjoy them all, they left stuff out. I imagine if the makers had known how popular they would be, they would have turned them into five or six movies instead of just three. The Black Riders weren’t as creepy in the movie as they were in the book (but maybe that’s because I knew the story, but I don’t think so). Lots of other things. The books were simply better.

    Becky

  8. dmdutcher says:

    The weird thing was you should dislike Caspian much more than Treader. Caspian was what nearly torpedoed the franchise, with its pointless romance subplot, its excising of Aslan from the film, and its grimdark tone.

    The only movie I’d put above the book is the proto-geek movie Escape to Witch Mountain. The book was good, but the movie is probably the only reason people know it exists, and was very well done. A lot of the geek movies based on books these days aren’t so much better as they are different. X-men days of future past is a good example, as its a good movie but really had the edges sanded off the original GN,

    I thought Watchmen was a decent rendition of the GN. Zac still had his quirks, but it got the style of the book pretty well. Save for the ultraviolence (watchmen was violent but the alley seen was over the top stylistically).

What do you think?