What happens when a novel becomes a film
The Ninth Draft has no connection to the production, the distributor, the publisher or anyone who made the films discussed here. This domain once hosted a studio promotional page; it does not any more, and nothing on it should be read as official. No poster, still or cover image is reproduced anywhere on the site, and every diagram is drawn.
A novel and the film made from it are two different objects, and the interesting part is the distance between them. This is a reference about that distance: what a book does that a film cannot, what a film does that a book cannot, and how to judge an adaptation by something better than whether it was faithful.
A voice inside a head. Time you control, a page at a time. As long as the story needs, and no longer.
A face in a frame. Time that runs at you whether you are ready or not. A hundred minutes, decided before a word was shot.
Where to start
Why faithfulness is the wrong question
Ask whether a film is faithful to its book and you get an argument that never resolves, because the people having it are measuring different things. One means the plot, one means the characters, one means the feeling of reading it. They can all be right at once, which is how a film ends up called both a betrayal and the best version of the story.
So this reference does not ask it. It asks four narrower questions instead, and answers them separately, because a film can hold one and lose another without either fact cancelling the other out.
| Axis | The question | What usually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Plot | Do the same things happen, in the same order, for the same reasons? | The most protected, and the least interesting. Films keep the events and cut the causes. |
| Character | Is this recognisably the same person, wanting the same thing? | Compressed. Two characters become one, and a motive gets simplified to fit a face. |
| Voice | Does the story reach you the same way? | Rebuilt from nothing. This is where almost all the distance is, on almost every work. |
| Theme | Is the book still arguing what it was arguing? | Survives or does not, and it rarely survives by accident. |
Voice is the one that breaks. A novel can put you inside a head for 300 pages and a camera cannot do it at all: it can only stand outside and watch a face. Everything an adaptation invents to cover that gap, a narrator, a framing device, a confidant who exists so somebody can be told things, is a solution to the same problem. That is why the founding case of this site is a novel narrated by a boy in a coma. It is the problem in its hardest form.
The case files, measured
Each case below is judged on those four axes and summarised as one bar: how far the film travelled from its book. Distance is not failure. Some of the adaptations that travelled furthest are the ones worth watching, and some that stayed closest are the ones that lost the book entirely.
| Work | Book | Film | Distance travelled |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Hobbit | 1937 | 2012-14 | |
| Jaws | 1974 | 1975 | |
| Jurassic Park | 1990 | 1993 | |
| Dune | 1965 | 2021 | |
| It | 1986 | 2017-19 | |
| It Ends With Us | 2016 | 2024 | |
| The Martian | 2014 | 2015 | |
| Coraline | 2002 | 2009 | |
| Frankenstein | 1818 | many |