Stop Saying the Original Was Better: A Defense of Imperfect Adaptations

Last week, I was sipping an Americano at my usual cafe in downtown Seattle, scrolling through my phone, when I saw that comment again. "The original was so much better." It's basically a copy-paste reaction that shows up without fail whenever an adaptation comes out. I put my phone down and sighed. I'm so tired of hearing it.

I read the book first, too. When news of a new adaptation drops, I pull out the source material and read or reread it, so by the time I get to the theater, my own version of the scenes is already playing in my head. And yet I believe that adaptations that don't stay faithful to the original actually make bolder, more memorable films. I'm not trying to be contrarian — this is just where I've landed after watching dozens of them.

The Trap of Faithfulness

Ever thought about why faithful adaptations so often end up boring? Novels work through inner monologue and the flexibility of narrative time. Film doesn't. Trying to transfer a novel sentence by sentence doesn't produce a movie — it produces an audiobook with illustrations. That's exactly what I felt watching The Goldfinch. The determination to honor the original's length and detail was so strong that the camera seemed to forget what it was supposed to show. Diligent for the entire runtime, but no heartbeat.

Adaptations that boldly twist the source material are a different story. Think of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Stephen King himself has been vocal about his dissatisfaction. Kubrick took only the skeleton of King's novel and built his own grammar of horror. Some fans of the original were furious, but what endured in film history is Kubrick's version. If the director had been too busy deferring to the source material, would we have gotten that hallway, those twins, that door scene? No chance.

Adaptation Is Not Translation — It's Reinvention

If running a small business has taught me one thing, it's that copying what works in one medium directly into another almost always fails. Take a branding strategy that kills on Instagram and paste it straight into an email newsletter — it feels off. Different mediums demand different languages. Same goes for film and literature.

Arrival is an adaptation of a Ted Chiang short story, and it significantly restructured the original's form and atmosphere. In the short story, linguistic reasoning was central, but the film used visuals and sound to turn that reasoning into a sensory experience. It's different from the original. But it works as a film. Walking out of the theater, I found myself thinking about what I had just seen rather than comparing it to the source material. Isn't that what a successful adaptation actually looks like?

"The Original Was Better" Is Lazy Criticism

The real reason this phrase irritates me is that, most of the time, it's a refusal to evaluate a film as a film. Sure, sometimes the original genuinely is better. But if that judgment begins and ends with "they left out a scene from the book," that's not criticism — it's a checklist. You have to look at what replaced the missing scene and what effect that choice creates within the film.

When I watch an adaptation, I ask myself one question: Can this film stand on its own, independent of the source material? If it can, then it's a good film, even if it strays far from the original. Faithfulness to the source is not a measure of quality. Whether the director had the courage to speak in their own language — that's the measure.

Next time someone says "the book was better," I'm going to ask: So how was the movie? If there's no answer to that, you haven't actually watched the film yet.