All this, however, is not to say that books have the complete advantage over movies. Movies provide the audience with opportunities that a book never could, and provide unique challenges and benefits to screenwriters that books do not. Movies also require a tighter narrative structure from the writer. Most books are not going to be transformed into massive four part trilogies like The Hunger Games or Divergent. It is up to the screenwriter to take a book that, if produced in its entirety, would take far longer than most studios would probably be willing to make, and make into a two-hour movie. This is especially advantageous for serial books where the author was paid by the word. A case in point is Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Clocking in at over 1400 pages, there are subplots and character arcs that crisscross all over each other, as well as 80 pages on the Paris sewer system and the waste inside it. One advantage of the movie is that because the audience doesn’t really need that information, it gets cut; we, the viewers, are able to stay focused on the beauty of the basic story and not -lose the thread while we read about the sewer system.
One of the major advantages of movies, television, and mini-series based on books, is that they are more universally consumed. The popularity of visual media can attract a wider audience to reading the “real” story associated with it. Books and movies have a wonderful opportunity to generate and perpetuate each other’s success; by writing good books and making good movie versions, the two can flourish together as one intertwined body.
