/lit/ - Literature

This, sir, is a lie. Star Wars books are really impressive.

>>1982566
Star Wars books generally are original stories inside the universe that the films setup. I'm talking about novelizations of films.

>>1982574
Why would anyone do such a thing?

The novelization of King Kong is published as a Modern Library edition for a reason.

>>1982577
Because people turn books into films all the time. That was the point of the thread.

>>1982577
maybe for going deeply into the story, but i think it'd be absurd

>>1982554
great films from books? omg

>>1982554

Because they tend to farm them out to shitty writers, paid a pittance to go over an old version of the script. They're usually a cash-in, not a proper adaptation process like the books to film.

Of course there are movies whose novelisations are superior to the shitty movies they spawned from. Case in point: the Star Wars prequels, in particular the Revenge of the Sith novelisation which somehow managese to fix Anakin's shitty characterisation.

Then again the original trilogy's novelisations were pretty awesome as well.

>>1982590
The Godfather, No Country for Old Men, and Lord of the Rings are often regarded as better than the books they are based on.

Apocalypse Now was a great film based on a great book: Heart of Darkness.

Others include All Quiet on the Western Front, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, True Grit, Fight Club, and The Princess Bride.

Predator: South China Seas by Jeff Vandermeer is the greatest movie tie-in ever.

Bit of a stretch, I know.

>>1982675

Book and movie were written concurrently and are two totally different animals.

It's like trying to turned mashed potatoes back into a potato.

/thread

>>1982716
If they were written at the same time why would they be that different?

>>1982725

Because Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick each put completely different touches on the story.

>>1982725
>My face before and after clicking your image.

>>1982554

Because it is 2011 and the artistic talent of the human race has now focused itself on creating films and works in other mediums rather than on writing books.

>>1982607
Agree about no country, the film is superior. But LotR? Wtf are you smoking? The book is far superior. Fleshes out a ton of ton plus has all the internal musings of the characters that can't go in a film. Don't forget the book actually explains how the witch king was able to die(enchanted sword from the barrows) when it clearly says in both book and movie that the nazghul cannot die.

>>1982607
>The Godfather, No Country for Old Men, and Lord of the Rings are often regarded as better than the books they are based on.
>Lord of the Rings are often regarded as better than the books they are based on.
>Lord of the Rings

What?

I've thought about this.
My theory is that you can't go from "compressed" to "expanded". So by this you can't go from a compressed "movie" to making a "expanded" book about it because they the author has to basically recreate the movie and it's almost surely not going to be anywhere near the reader's expectations.

Or it could just be that visual doesn't translate into written that well.

I need better terms.

Books and movies excel at different aspects of artistic expression. Problem is, books are more "tell me" while movies are more "show me".

Its easy to take text, visualize it, and put it on a screen, but to take a visualization and turn it into text is both more difficult and completely pointless. Usually novelizations don't offer any deeper insight than the movie did, so you might as well watch the fucking movie.

>>1982770
Only exception was the revenge of the sith book which was superior to the move. It came out BEFORE the movie though.

It costs a lot more to make a movie than it does to make a book, so movies need much greater revenues than books. A film adaptation of a book will have a lot of effort put into it because it can't rely on the book's existing fanbase to provide the necessary return on investment. Writing a novelisation of a movie is cheap, so if the movie is popular than you're pretty much guaranteed to make a profit even if the book sucks; this allows them to shit out a crappy move tie-in novelisation without thinking about it much.

>>1982747
>>1982740
The books were far too descriptive, which got really old. Tolkien's writing style wasn't very engaging. A lot of people agree.